Physical attractiveness including matching hypothesis

• Eastwick (2011)

  research also suggests that attraction is more important for men than women who placed less emphasis on this for long-term mate choices.
• McNulty (2008)

  found evidence demonstrating that the initial attraction that brought people together continued to be an important feature of their relationship for several proceeding years after demonstrating it as a key factor in relationship formation.
• halo effect

  Individuals seen as attractive are also seen to possess more desirable personality traits such as being trustworthy, optimistic and sociable; a favourable impression is formed of someone based on one characteristic which in this case is physical attractiveness.
• support for halo effect: Dion et al

  found that physically attractive people were consistently rated as kind, strong and sociable compared to unattractive people suggesting physical attraction can disproportionately influence peoples judgement towards them favourably.
• matching hypothesis: Walster (1969)

  • theory proposes that people who were similar in levels of attraction, intelligence and social standing were more inclined to form relationships with each other.
  • people pair themselves with others based on their own sense of value and they look for partners with similar qualities. 
• Walster et al: Realistic Choices

  Those looking for a partner are influenced by what they want and what they think they can actually get, because individuals are influenced by the chances of having their feelings reciprocated back.
• research support for halo efect : Palmer and Peterson (2017)

  • found that physically attractive people were rated as more knowledgeable and competent than unattractive people and this persisted even when participants knew these “knowledgeable” people had no particular expertise.
  • This raises implications particularly when applied to politics as it endangers democracy if politicians are deemed suitable based on their physical attractiveness.
• research support for the matching hypothesis: Walster (1969)

  paired students up for an upcoming dance telling them they had been paired dependent on their ideal partner when in truth it was assigned randomly. Students met up before the dance and those who had been paired with partners of similar levels of attraction to themselves reported to like their partner more than those paired at dissimilar levels of physical attraction
• subjective nature

  how attraction is rated is likely to be based on western ideals of what someone attractive looks like. Therefore this study could be argued to be culturally biased and the results invalid because of the subjective nature of deciding which two people are “similar in attraction”.
• Physical attractiveness

  refers to how appealing we find someone and one explanation based on a evolutionary theory by Shackleford and Larsen (1997) suggests we find symmetrical faces more attractive.