Psychological Bulletin
1991, Vol. L10, No. 1,109-128
Copyright 1991 by the American Psychological Association, Inc.
0033-2909/91/i3.00
What Is Beautiful Is Good, But. . .: A Meta-Anatytic Review of Research
on the Physical Attractiveness Stereotype
Alice H. Eagjy
Purdue University
Richard D. Ashmore
Rutgers The State University of New Jersey
Mona G. Makhijani
Purdue University
Laura C. Longo
Rutgers The State University of New Jersey
This review demonstrates that the physical attractiveness stereotype established by studies of per-
son perception is not as strong or general as suggested by the often-used summary phrase what is
beautiful is good. Although subjects in these studies ascribed more favorable personality traits and
more successful life outcomes to attractive than unattractive targets, the average magnitude of this
beauty-is-good effect was moderate, and the strength of the effect varied considerably from study to
study Consistent with our implicit personality theory framework, a substantial portion of this
variation was explained by the specific content of the inferences that subjects were asked to make:
The differences in subjects* perception of attractive and unattractive targets were largest for indexes
of social competence; intermediate for potency, adjustment, and intellectual competence; and near
zero for integrity and concern for others. The strength of the physical attractiveness stereotype also
varied as a function of other attributes of the studies, including the presence of individuating
information.
One of the most widely cited conclusions from research on
physical attractiveness is summarized by Dion, Berscheid, and
Walster’s (1972) claim that, in people’s perceptions of others,
"what is beautiful is good" (p. 285). This statement linking
beauty and goodness suggests the existence of a stereotype
whereby physically attractive individuals are believed to possess
a wide variety of positive personal qualities. In this article, we
integrate the available research on the physical attractiveness
stereotype to determine the extent to which the statement that
what is beautiful is good provides an accurate summary of peo-
ple’s inferences from cues that convey physical attractiveness.
In the classic study on the physical attractiveness stereotype,
Dion and her associates (1972) had subjects rate facial photo-
graphs that had been selected on the basis of judges’ agreement
that the pictured individuals were low, medium, or high in phys-
ical attractiveness. Subjects’ ratings pertained to various person-
This research was supported by National Science Foundation
Grants BNS-8616149 to Richard EX Ashmore and Frances K. Del
Boca, Co-Principal Investigators, and BNS-S605256 to Alice H. Eagl>;
Principal Investigator. A preliminary report of this research was re-
ported at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Society,
June 1989. A table showing the effect sizes and study characteristics for
each study included in the meta-analysis is available from Alice H.
Eagly or Richard EX Ashmore.
We thank Thomas Alley, Ellen Berscheid, Linda Jackson, and three
anonymous reviewers for their comments on a draft of the article.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to
Alice H. Eagly, Department of Psychological Sciences, Purdue Univer-
sity, West Lafayette, Indiana 47907-1364, or Richard D. Ashmore, De-
partment of Psychology, Tillett Hall, Kilmer Campus, Rutgers Univer-
sity, New Brunswick, New Jersey 08903.
ality traits as well as to life outcomes such as marital happiness
and career success. Indeed, subjects ascribed more favorable
personality traits and more successful life outcomes to the pic-
tured individuals to the extent that they were physically attrac-
tive.
The experimental paradigm introduced by Dion and her col-
leagues (1972) has guided many subsequent investigators, and
there is, thus, a relatively large body of research on the attractive-
ness stereotype. Most narrative reviewers of this literature have
agreed that the beauty-is-good stereotype is a strong and gen-
eral phenomenon (Adams, 1982; Alley & Hildebrandt, 1988;
Berscheid, 1981; Berscheid & Walster, 1974; Dion, 1981,1986;
Hatfield &Sprecher, 1986; Patzer, 1985). For example, Hatfield
and Sprecher wrote that "people believe good-looking people
possess almost all the virtues known to humankind" (p. xix).
Most secondary sources, especially introductory social psychol-
ogy textbooks, have likewise treated the beauty-is-good stereo-
type as a homogeneous, potent, and firmly established phenom-
enon (e.g, see Baron & Byrne, 1987, p. 197; Deaux & Wrights-
man, 1988, p. 250). In this article, we report the first use of
meta-analytic procedures to combine quantitatively the exist-
ing studies to examine the strength and generality of the attrac-
tiveness stereotype.
Although the general consensus in social psychology is that
an attractive target leads perceivers to make strong inferences of
personality goodness, reviewers have noted exceptions to this
phenomenon. Dion (1981,1986) suggested that the beauty-is-
good effect is strongest for measures of social competence and
interpersonal ease, and Bassili (1981) reached a similar conclu-
sion, arguing that the core of the physical attractiveness stereo-
type is social vitality or extroversion. Also, beginning with
Dermer and Thiel (1975), reviewers noted a dark side to the
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110 EAGLY, ASHMORE, MAKHIJANI, AND LONGO
stereotype. Cash and Janda (1984, p. 52) labeled this aspect the
"what is beautiful is self-centered" stereotype on the basis of
their observation that attractive people may be thought to be
vain and egotistical. What is needed at this point is a formal and
general scheme for understanding these qualifications and ex-
ceptions. As a step in this direction, we conceptualize the pro-
cess underlying the attractiveness stereotype in terms of the
person-perception construct of implicit personality theory (see
also Adams, 1982; McArthur, 1982). We then frame predictions
about variation in the beauty-is-good effect in terms of this
conceptual approach. These hypotheses are tested by means of
a quantitative review of the accumulated research. Before pre-
senting the details of this review, we situate our discussion of the
beauty-is-good stereotype within the total body of research and
theory on physical attractiveness.
Social Psychology of Beauty
A large amount of research has accumulated on physical at-
tractiveness (see Cash’s, 1981, bibliography of almost 500 nonre-
dundant entries). Because this research area is multidisciplin-
ary, the studies are methodologically diverse and pertain to a
variety of specific hypotheses. However, among studies formu-
lated at a social psychological level of analysis, most research
has addressed three broad questions: (a) Are attractive people
perceived differently than unattractive people? (b) Are attractive
people treated differently than unattractive people? (c) Do at-
tractive people have different characteristics (i£., personality
traits, skills, behavioral tendencies) than unattractive people?
The first research area, the perception of beautiful people,
concerns stereotyping on the basis of physical appearance. The
second area, which concerns differential treatment as a func-
tion of physical attractiveness, examines looks-based discrimi-
nation, a phenomenon that depends on factors in addition to
stereotypes about physical attractiveness (e.g., the social roles
governing interaction). The third type of research focuses not
on people’s reactions to targets, but on the characteristics of
attractive and unattractive individuals, as measured by various
methods of psychological assessment (e.g., personality tests,
self-reports of behavior, observations of behavior). The findings
of this third type of research have often been interpreted in
terms of self-fulfilling prophecies (e.g, Snyder, Tanke, & Ber-
scheid, 1977) or a kernel of truth that underlies the attractiveness
stereotype (e.g., Alley & Hildebrandt, 1988).
Our review concerns only the first area of social psychologi-
cal research on attractiveness: the perception of attractive and
unattractive individuals. There are several reasons for this
focus. One reason is practical: A thorough review of all three
aspects of physical attractiveness research would require many
years to complete and would produce an outcome too large for
presentation in an article format. A second reason is strategic:
Meta-analyses are best targeted to research literatures that are
not defined extremely broadly and that have at least a moderate
amount of methodological coherence (see Mullen, 1989). A
third reason is analytic: The beauty-is-good stereotype is gener-
ally regarded as providing the major mechanism underlying
differential treatment based on attractiveness and the develop-
ment of differential assessed characteristics, at least insofar as
these characteristics are mediated by self-fulfilling prophecies.
Therefore, the stereotype question can be regarded as more
basic to social psychological analysis than the questions of
treatment and assessed characteristics. If the physical attractive-
ness stereotype is not at least moderately strong and robust, it is
unlikely to underlie the effects of physical attractiveness on
treatment and people’s characteristics.
Our decision to focus on the physical attractiveness stereo-
type has two important implications one methodological and
one theoretical. Methodologically, we targeted our meta-analy-
sis to include only studies that assess the physical attractiveness
stereotype in a relatively pure form, without the constraints of
particular role relationships such as those that regulate social
interaction between teachers and students or therapists and
patients. To examine stereotyping in a relatively role-free envi-
ronment, we included in our review only those studies in which
subjects inferred the attributes of people to whom they were not
linked by particular social roles. Subjects’ inferences from phys-
ical appearance in role-regulated environments should be con-
sidered in future reviews that are conceptualized to take the
specifics of role relationships into account. In terms of theoreti-
cal implications, our focus on the physical attractiveness stereo-
type led us to formulate our review in terms of existing psycho-
logical research on impression formation and stereotyping. We
now turn to this formulation.
Physical Attractiveness Stereotype and Implicit
Personality Theory
Ashmore and Del Boca (1979; see also Ashmore, 1981; Ash-
more, Del Boca, & Wohlers, 1986) argued that stereotypes can
be fruitfully conceptualized in terms of the concept of implicit
personality theory (D. J. Schneider, 1973). By treating stereo-
types as part of ordinary social cognition (see also Hamilton,
1981), Ashmore and his co-workers placed stereotypes within
the larger set of knowledge structures that individuals use to
make sense of other people’s behavior. More specifically, im-
plicit personality theories are hypothetical cognitive structures
whose primary components are personal attributes (e.g., person-
ality traits) and inferential relations that specify the degree to
which these attributes covary. The link between such implicit
theories and stereotypes about group members becomes appar-
ent when we regard group membership as one of the personal
attributes inferentially associated with other attributes in such
an implicit theory (Ashmore, 1981). In fact, the inferential rela-
tions between group membership and other personal attributes
can be regarded as synonymous with the stereotype itself. Thus,
translating the usual definition of stereotype as a set of beliefs
about the characteristics of group members into the language of
implicit personality theory, Ashmore and Del Boca (1979) de-
fined stereotype as "a structured set of inferential relations that
link a social category with personal attributes" (p. 225).
The utility of this conceptualization has been demonstrated
for gender stereotypes. Using the implicit personality theory
approach, Ashmore and his colleagues identified the inferential
relations linking the social categories of male and female to
various dimensions of personality perception (see Ashmore,
1981). Specifically, the distinction between male and female
was closely associated with the personality dimension of
strong-weak (or potency). Also men were thought to possess