Beauty often can be a beast

DALLAS – People are more likely to trust a pretty face, but when that trust is betrayed, the backlash can be ugly, according to a study published recently by Rice University.

Numerous studies have shown that attractive people generally make more money, get better reviews from their supervisors and are viewed as being more intelligent and trustworthy. What surprised researchers in this study was that subjects deemed attractive also were penalized more harshly for failing to live up to expectations.

“There’s a lot of work in experimental economics and in other aspects of economics like labor economics where they find that attractive people have a beauty premium,” said Catherine Eckel, a professor of economics at the University of Texas at Dallas who co-authored the study with Rice professor Rick Wilson.

“It’s kind of a pervasive thing, but the twist that we have in our paper that you don’t see in the others is this ‘beauty penalty,’ ” she said. “What we see in our data is that people have very high expectations of attractive people, and when they’re disappointed, they react.”

In the study called “Judging a Book by Its Cover: Beauty and Expectations in the Trust Game,” 206 university students were asked to participate in a series of “trust games.”

Each student was given 10 “lab dollars.” Then they were told they could send any amount of the money to other students, making their choices based on photographs. The study moderators then tripled the amount sent to the recipients, who were allowed to decide how much to refund to the sender, also based only on photographs.

A separate group of students evaluated the pictures for a number of traits, including attractiveness.

The researchers found that, on average, the students deemed attractive received more money and also tended to reciprocate more generously.

However, initial recipients also expected more cash from the attractive students, and when they received less, punished them more harshly by skimping on the returned money.

Eckel said her research has also shown that the only way to change stereotypes is to be aware of them. And, as it turns out, our mothers may have been right when they told us that “pretty is as pretty does.”

“The takeaway message here is that people have the wrong idea about attractiveness,” she said. “Attractive people, well, they’re not less trustworthy than other people, but they’re not more trustworthy either. So if we’re aware of our biases, we can do a little better job of making decisions.”