Does the beauty premium effect always exist? — an ERP study of the facial attractiveness stereotype in public’s attitudes toward in-Service Chinese civil servant

Abstract

Objectives: Civil servants image is one of the most important representatives of government image. Therefore, it is of great significance to study the factors affecting the public’s attitudes toward in-service civil servants. The current study aims to learn whether female facial attractiveness would affect the male public’s attitudes toward in-service civil servants using event-related potentials.

Methods: Participants were recruited to view attractive/unattractive faces followed by positive/negative adjectives. We observed that positive adjectives after unattractive faces elicited smaller N400 amplitudes than negative adjectives, and the N400 amplitude elicited by attractive faces after negative adjectives was significantly smaller than that elicited by unattractive faces. What’s more, we found that the voltage of N400 was negative correlated with reaction time.

Results: It showed that the incongruity of physically appearance and in-service civil servant positions lead to longer reaction time. The unattractive civil servant is more congruent with positive adjectives than the attractive one in the public’s mind.

Conclusion: We explain these findings from two aspects. First, the public is more rational for in-service civil servants, and factors that are unrelated to governing capacity, such as physical attractiveness, do not influence their attitudes. Second, civil servants are the position that requires technical ability to serve the public rather than communication ability, which was represented by physically attractive.

Keywords:

• Facial attractiveness
• N400
• in-service civil servant
• ERPs

Disclosure statement

There are no conflicts of interest.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Science Association of Zhejiang Province under Grant number [17NDJC013Z], National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant number [71673239 and 71603139] and the K.C. Wong Magna Fund at Ningbo University.