Beyond personality impressions: effects of physical and vocal attractiveness on false consensus, social comparison,...

We examined the effects of target persons' physical and vocal attractiveness on judges' responses to five measures: false consensus (the belief that the target shares one's behavior), choice of targets as comparison others, affiliation with targets, assumed similarity (similarity between self-ratings and ratings assigned to targets), and perceived similarity (direct questions about similarity). Higher physical attractiveness and higher vocal attractiveness were both related to higher scores on all variables. The effect of one type of attractiveness was more pronounced for higher levels of the other type of attractiveness. The joint effect of the two types of attractiveness was best described as synergistic, i.e., only targets high on both types of attractiveness elicited higher scores on the dependent variables. The effect of physical attractiveness on most dependent variables was more pronounced for subjects who were themselves physically attractive. The synergistic effect (the advantage of targets high on both types of attractiveness) was more pronounced for judges high in self-monitoring. The contribution of the study to the literature on attractiveness stereotypes is discussed.