[MUSIC] Hi, welcome back. We are still talking about why it is that some people are more popular than others. And we've spent a lot of time talking about the types of social behaviors that people engage in that might make them more or less popular. What we're going to talk about now is another area and it's specifically the area of physical attractiveness. And probably you didn't need to take this course to know that in fact, more attractive people tend to do better when it comes to popularity. Here's a slide that shows you for youth how boys' and girls' level of physical attractiveness Is related to their social preference, which remember is likeability. And the way this is done, researching this way is done in two ways. One is, by taking photos of kids and having objective raters look at how attractive each child is. The other is simply asking kids, who they think is the best looking and seeing whether that relates to their likeability. And what you can see here, is that those who are very well liked, popular, and those who are equally liked and disliked, but very visible, controversials, they tend to be much more physically attractive in terms of their faces than those who are rejected, neglected, or average. Of course, when it comes to adolescent popularity, the type that refers to dominance and status, that we're calling social reputation, that of course is very strongly related to attractiveness. In fact, attractiveness may be the strongest predictor of this type of popularity. And you can see here that those who are high in social reputation, are much much more attractive than those who are average or low. So maybe the bigger question is why? How come that even with young children, we would see this effect? Well, the first question that many people often wonder is whether this has a lot to do with socialization. And sure enough, you can look at the cover of any magazine, any popular magazine out there, and see that our culture puts a tremendous emphasis on who's sexy, and who's attractive, and who looks good. And there's a lot of ways in which people are getting the message that somehow, people who are physically attractive are better, are different, have better skills, have the need for more attention. And we should all be admiring them more. That is a very clear message that everyone is getting. So it suggests that maybe there is some way in which this is due to socialization. But how about kids? Well, even kids' magazines, those directed towards adolescents, or those directed towards preteens, tend to be very similar in emphasizing attractiveness and beauty, and even sexiness. So, the idea of socialization is pretty relevant. But, it turns out, that might not be it at all. It seems to be the case that we see that even infants, those who are probably not reading a whole lot of magazines and not socialized very much, just a few months after they're born, are already showing a tendency to prefer those that are attractive. And one of the reasons why, maybe due to the symmetry and averageness that we see that defines attractiveness. Now a lot of this research has been done by Judith Langlois who has done fantastic work demonstrating that there's something about facial symmetry and composite average faces. In other words, the most prototypical faces that might define who's average. What you see here are computer generated images of faces that have been combined and morphed together, and as you can see here, Judith's research has demonstrated that the more faces you combine, the more attractive the image is. So you can see that the face all the way on the left would be judged objectively as being less attractive than the face all the way on the right which was made by using more faces averaged together. The idea here is that the faces that are the most typical, that are representing what's most common across all faces, tend to be those that are most average. And interestingly, when you combine faces, no matter which faces you combine, they end up all looking like the prototypical attractive face. So here you see, five different face morph composites, but each one is made up of a completely different set of faces. But even when you put a completely different set of faces together and morph it five different times, the result you get are five faces that look really really similar to each other, and they tend to be attractive faces. The idea here is that there might be a way in which what we deem as attractive and in particular, what infants deem as attractive, are those that represent their template, their model, for what a human face looks like. And because infants are in a world where everything is new and different, and they're trying to make sense of it, and they're trying to understand how things are similar and different from one another, there's a way in which, even in infancy, they're looking for something prototypical. Something average. Something even symmetrical. That suggests that there's a classic perfect, almost model template that they can base their understanding of humans on. And that way is how the average faces end up playing a big role, and become an example of attractiveness for us. And what Judith Langlois has done, is she's demonstrated this in a variety of experiments that are really interesting, and she's done a really well controlled, designed studies. For instance, In one of her studies, she has little infants sitting on their parents' lap, and the parents wear big glasses so the child can't look up and see what the parents are looking at so they can't in any way be influenced by their parent's behavior. And they put this baby on their parent's lap in front of two screens, and on one screen they show attractive faces, and on the other screen they show unattractive faces, although it switches around a lot from screen to screen. And they pay attention to where is that infant looking from one screen to the other. And what they find is that even young young babies just old enough to hold their heads up are already showing a big preference demonstrated by how long and how frequently they look at the attractive faces on screen. Infants show this preference for attractive faces. Another really interesting study that was done, supports some of the reason why this might play a role for popularity over time. What Judith did was, she had the little babies interact with a person who was attractive or unattractive. But it was really hard to do that study because the person who was attractive or unattractive might have already had a lifetime of experiences that made them now have different personalities. So what she did is she asked one woman, an actress, to wear two different masks. One mask, was basically her exact face, and she was an attractive woman. And that mask was put on so she wouldn't be able to tell if she was in the attractive or unattractive condition herself. But it was a mask that felt, it was a mask that was of her own face. And in the other arm of the experiment, she wore another mask that felt exactly the same to her on the inside while she was wearing it. But, they made the eyebrows come just a little bit lower, the eyes come a little bit closer together, and the nose just came out a tiny bit. So she didn't look like a Halloween costume or anything, but it was just slight differences to make her look a little bit less attractive, a little bit less average and typical. What they did was they wanted to make sure that this woman, this actress, had no idea which mask she was wearing. So no adults. She didn't see any adults for the entire day when she was running the experiment. So no one, she couldn't judge whether people were reacting to her one way or another. They covered all the shiny surfaces in the laboratory so she couldn't see which mask she was wearing. And again, the masks felt the same on the inside. And what they did was they had her come into a room with a 12 month old baby who was with their parent, usually their mom, playing. And this woman would come in wearing the attractive or the unattractive mask to play. What they found was that babies responded really differently based on which mask the woman was wearing. In other words, babies were much more friendly and happy and willing to play with the woman when she was wearing an attractive mask. When that same woman was engaged in the exact same behaviors, but she was wearing the mask that was just a little bit less attractive, they found significant differences in how much the little tiny babies were wanting to interact. They were more fussy. They were less friendly. They weren't as interested in interacting. The research overall has suggested that there may be ways in which we actually are biologically primed to think about attractiveness and respond to attractiveness in ways that might affect our popularity. One of the ways it suggests is that we might learn soon after we're born that attractive people tend to possess different types of traits, and attributes, and behaviors than unattractive people. And the reason why is for two possibilities. One is, there may be ways in which people are socialized. So attractive people are always met with all kinds of friendly responses, more opportunities to interact with others, and because of that, they have an opportunity to develop more social skills. So what happens is over time, attractive people aren't just assumed to be more socially skilled, they actually are more socially skilled. And what happens is that over many, many generations of evolution, these attractive, more socially skilled people have had more of an opportunity to mate with others. In fact, they often are able to mate with others that have other good attributes, like maybe they have wealth or power or access to resources, and their children therefore, have both. Wealth and access to resources with attractiveness, and together they go on and mate generation after generation. And you end up with this super species that has high levels of attractiveness, but also lots of access to all kinds of high socioeconomic status, social skills, and that group of people, over time, maybe is something that we've all come to understand is a group that we should feel more oriented towards, more friendly towards. More interested in interacting with, and maybe that's why we see these differences even among babies. A second theory to suggest why it is that even young babies show more of a interest in attractive folks is because we may be biologically primed to understand that if someone has a symmetrical face, that probably says something about their genetic fitness. In other words, this is someone who is going to be more successful in propagating our gene pool. Symmetry suggests health, and it suggests that we're going to be able to more reproduce and produce good healthy offspring. We are biologically primed to do whatever we can, to try and produce healthy offspring. And that signal of the average and symmetrical face, might in some way tell us, without us even realizing it, that this is someone who would be a good mating partner. Even though infants aren't looking to mate, they still might be interested in understanding who they should be gravitating towards, which is why they might make those kids so popular. And last, there is some research to suggest that parents treat their children differently based on how attractive their children are. Now of course among humans, we reject this idea completely. We see in an animal species that you're more likely to pay attention to the most fit of your litter than the runt of the litter. But believe it or not, there's actually also some evidence to suggest that among humans, we tend to treat our attractive children differently than we treat our less attractive children. And because of that, those children grow up with slightly different opportunities that again has given us all a way of thinking that attractiveness means something good, means something we should pay attention to, and means that it's someone we should think is more popular. So overall, the research suggests that we might be biologically and evolutionarily primed to care most about attractiveness, and even young children are more likely to pick others who are attractive, as those they want to be friends with, they want to play with, of those that they consider to be really popular. We see those kids are much less likely to be unpopular, and they tend to even have much more influence over others. The question of course for us that I think we all know the answer to, is how much are we using these same metrics even as adults? Not because as adults we're also looking for sexual partners, but how much do we regard attractiveness as something that signals good, value, and influence in our work lives and even in our friendships. And are we over valuing the importance of physical attractiveness now that we understand how we really got to this point?
