Social Psychology

• Halo Effect


  Attractiveness leads to greater overall liking, being rating as having more desirable traits, higher work performance evaluation
• Attractiveness leads to more positive life outcomes - higher income, better mental health, and more social influence
• Matching Hypothesis


  Length of relationship predicted by the similarity of attractiveness
• Focus on attractiveness


  • Pre-1980s focus on actual characteristics that deems someone to be attractive
  • Post-1980s focuses on cognitive theories, how people perceive faces and bodies, and evolutionary theories
• Beauty is objective?


  High level of agreement across cultures, certain features of faces, babies prefer attractive faces
• Beauty is subjective?


  Improvements vary across cultures, different body types deemed attractive, body type standards change
• Culture and Physical Attraction

  • Tovee et al. (2006) - Zulus who remained in South Africa saw obese women as more attractive, whereas Zulus who migrated preferred women with a lower BMI, similar to the British sample's preference
  • Boothroyd et al. (2016) - access and consumption of television changed the views of an attractive body type in Nicaragua
  • Thornborrow et al. (2017) - ideal woman and exposure to media, Nicaraguans with exposure to media chose a slightly larger woman with more weight on their thighs, but those without media chose a significantly heavier woman
  • Thornborrow et al. (2020) - ideal muscular body type of men, those in Nicaragua who wanted more muscular bodies explicitly mentioned celebrities
• Cognitive, Attraction


  Attraction is pointed towards a more "average looking face". Rhodes (2003), when people are exposed to exaggerated features for longer, they choose the face with the same exaggerations
• Cognitive, Attraction, Infants


  • Aversion to an unattractive face (Rubenstein, 1999), preferring distinctive faces (Rhodes, 2002, Giffrey, 2013)
• Intersexual selection


  Opposite sex prefers certain traits, increasing the frequency of those genes in the next generation
• Facial averageness and health - Rhodes, those with more average faces had genes for protection against distinct pathogens
• Humans have had a history of mild polygyny
• Anisogamy


  Women are much more impacted by reproduction, their reproductive cell is much larger
• Minimum acceptable criterion


  Men demand more as relationship goes on and women demand 10-15% more
• Men, short term


  • Someone who is interested in them
  • Someone who won't have off spring
• Women, short term


  • Good genes incase they have a child
  • Absent father
• Men, long term


  • Healthy genes
  • Faithfullness
  • Youth
• Women, long term


  • Protection
  • Resources
  • Status
• Singh (1992) - waist-hip ratio potentially being a fertility cue, 0.7 was the most attractive ratio globally
• Law Smith (2006) - no consistent preferences in differing faces during menstrual cycle/levels of estrogen
• Good genes


  Handicap principle (Zahavi, 1975), parasite infestation (Hamilton and Zuk, 1982, red nose of mandril indicative of health), immunocompetence (Folstad and Karter, 1996, testosterone suppresses immune system)
• Preference for symmetry - Jones (2001) - symmetry predicted apparent health
• Market value


  Effort in a partner depending on how you rate yourself compared to them
• Market value in humans

  • More red sicklebacks were more likely to approach larger females (Kraak and Bakker, 1998), zebra finches with a red leg band were less likely to nest with a female but were likely to be reproductively successful (Burley, 1996), more attractive females prefer more symmetric men (Little, 2001)
• Ornaments


  Scarification in sexually dimorphic areas had high pathogen prevalence (Singh and Bronstand, 1997), tattoos do not influence attractiveness but impacts level of dominance (Wohlraub, 2009)
• Women rated younger male faces as more attractive if their parents were under 30 when they had then, and vice versa
• Sex


  Biological components
• Gender


  Socially defined and psychological identity
• Sex is not dichotomous - sex atypicalities (XO, XXX, XXY, XYY), hormone exposure in utero (CAH, excess testosterone, AIS, XY not processing testosterone)
• Males better than females

  • Physical aggression (.4)
  • Balloon task (.36)
  • Contribution as an individual (.38)
  • Task orientation (.38)
  • Emergence as task leader (.49)
  • Task leadership (.41)
  • Time on active task behaviour (.58)
• Females better than males

  • Positive social behaviour (-.58)
  • Social task performance (-.58)
  • Influenced by group pressure (-.32)
  • Decoding visual and auditory emotions (-1.02)
• Women more likely to have

  • Liberal sex roles attitudes (-.52)
  • Closeness to others (-.45)
  • Agreeableness and tendermindedness (-1.07)
• Measuring masculinity and femininity


  BSRI, Expressivity vs Instrumentally (Spence, 1974), Nurturance vs Dominance (Wiggins, 1989), Communion vs Agency (Bakan, 1966) - sex and gender exists on a continuum
• Social Role Theory (Eagly, 1987)


  Culturally imposed gendered division of labour leads to conformity to gender role expectations and sex-typed skills and beliefs, leading to sex differences in behaviour
• Standard Social Science Model - sex is irrelecant and gender is learnt and socially imposed (strawman theory)
• Division of labour


  Some tasks exclusively/predominantly genered in all cultures, Standard Cross Cultural Sample (Ember, 1981)
• 'Biosocial' regulation (Wood and Eagly, 2002)


  Biological differences drive the division of labour, but there is no direct link from biology to sex differences in behaviour
• Learning Theory (Mischel, 1966)


  Children encouraged and rewarded for gendered behaviours, however they are not explicitly reward or punished
• Social learning theory (Bandura, 1973)


  Model and learning 'appropriate' behaviour
• Gender Schema Theory


  Perceiving self as more sex typed predicted gender stereotyping in children (Liben, 2002)