The Idiographic Approach to Physical Attractiveness Research

Summary

This paper suggests that the typical attractiveness manipulation check (subjective attractiveness ratings) in physical attractiveness research is providing important information that is being discarded in the factorial, analysis-of-variance approach. For an American population of 200 males and 242 females, “objective” attractiveness levels are shown to account for less than 50% of the variance in subjective attractiveness ratings. Further, variability in the subjective attractiveness ratings of individual targets is shown to be significantly correlated with personality judgments made about those targets. Finally, subjective attractiveness is shown to account for significantly more variance than objectively rated attractiveness in 11 of the 26 personality judgments sampled.