Psychological Development and Education ›› 2021, Vol. 37 ›› Issue (3): 363-370.doi: 10.16187/j.cnki.issn1001-4918.2021.03.07

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Self-esteem Influences Personality Trait Judgments Based on Physical Attractiveness

LI Huixiang1,2, PENG Maoying1,2, YANG Juan1,2   

  1. 1. Department of Psychology, Southwest University, Chongqing 400715;
    2. Key Laboratory of Cognition and Personality, Ministry of Education, Southwest University, Chongqing 400715
  • Published:2021-05-18

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Abstract: Physical attractiveness stereotype implies that individuals who are physically attractive will be attributed positive personality traits. Specifically, the more attractive a person, the more likely that person to be perceived as possessing more socially acclaimed personality attributes. Previous research has suggested a moderating effect of self-esteem on physical attractiveness stereotype, in which compared with high self-esteem, people with low self-esteem had a more negative attitude to attractive others and a more positive attitude to less attractive individuals. In addition, studies also showed a positive correlation between self-esteem and agentic trait self-assessments, which suggested self-esteem is dominated by agentic rather than communal trait self-assessments. Despite research has shown the influence of self-esteem on physical attractiveness stereotype, no studies so far have examined how self-esteem affects the performance of physical attractiveness stereotype on agency and communion dimensions. In this current study, we conducted a 2 (self-esteem level:high, low)×2 (targets attractiveness level:high, low) mixed experimental design to investigated this impact of self-esteem. Twelve female targets photos with high or low attractiveness (6 photos of attractive and unattractive targets respectively) was collected and be randomly matched with different agentic or communal trait adjectives in advance. Sixty healthy female college students (mean age=20.18±1.58) were recruited in the experiment and were divided into either high or low self-esteem group according to their total scores of Rosenberg self-esteem scale (Rosenberg, 1965). Participants were asked to evaluate the compliance level between the photos and the trait adjectives on a 4 Likert scale (1=no at all, 4=very well). Results indicated that (1) on agentic traits judgments, high self-esteem subjects had a significantly higher evaluations to attractive targets compared with low self-esteem (p=0.019); low self-esteem subjects had a significantly higher evaluations to unattractive targets compared with high self-esteem (p=0.036);(2) on communal traits judgments, consistent with hypothesis, there is no salient evaluation difference between high and low self-esteem subjects to high attractive targets, that is, both high and low self-esteem participants were agreed that attractive targets are more communal than unattractive (p=0.202). As a whole,the results of this current study replicated the findings of most publications showing that there was a robust stabilizing physical attractiveness stereotype on communal trait judgments. Moreover, we found that there was a moderating effect of self-esteem on physical attractiveness stereotype's performance on agentic trait judgement.

Key words: self-esteem, physical attractiveness stereotype, agency, communion

CLC Number: 

  • B844
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