It’s been proven that there’s a halo effect surrounding beautiful people — we hold doors open for them, laugh at their jokes when they’re not even funny, and assume they’re intelligent as long as they’re not actively drooling all over their chin.
It’s no surprise, then, that new research finds good-looking people tend to believe that life is fundamentally fair. The study, published in the journal "Psychological Report," indicates that physical attractiveness gives people confidence in a “just world.”
The Just World hypothesis is the assumption that there’s a universal force that restores moral balance. Good things happen to good people. Bad things happen to bad people. If something awful happens to you — your cat abandons you or you fall off the ski lift — you must have done something to deserve it. It’s an outlook that many believe makes you a terrible person.
“Previous work has consistently found that belief in a just world is strongly correlated with societal privilege,” the study reads. Its researchers are experts in the attractiveness stereotype — also known as the halo effect — which leads us to assume beautiful people are also smart, ambitious or interesting, and ugly people are stupid, stinky, and probably never get invited back home for Christmas.
Knowing that pretty faces receive favorable treatment throughout their lives led the researchers to hypothesize that attractive folks are more likely to believe that our “just world” gives people what they deserve. And they were right.
However, their results come with some caveats — mainly that the participants in the study were mostly college-aged Americans. When you’re in college, appearance seems the most important thing in the world. You’ll starve yourself to look good for Spring Break, take millions of selfies and delete the 99.9 percent that are too unflattering.
As they get older, college students might come to re-evaluate their perspectives on the importance of looking like a Kardashian. Until a new study expands on the age range of its participants, it’s impossible to know if the findings stay true as we age, or as the world continues to beat the shit out of all those who inhabit it.
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