When beauty may fail.

Abstract
Describes a study in which the person perception study by K. K. Dion et al (see record 1973-09160-001) was quasi-replicated in order to assess the generality of the "what is beautiful is good" stereotype. In Exp I, 40 female participants who were either unattractive, average, or physically attractive made a variety of attributions about female target persons of varying attractiveness levels. Attribution favorability was found to be contingent upon the physical attractiveness of the participant as well as the dimensions along which the attributions were made. While many of the attributions were congruent with the postulated stereotype, others were not. Socially undesirable attributions regarding vanity, egotism, likelihood of marital disaster (requesting a divorce/having an extramarital affair), and likelihood of being bourgeois (materialistic/snobbish/unsympathetic to oppressed peoples) were reliably increasing monotonic functions of target persons' attractiveness levels. Plausible explanations for these divergencies were explored in Exp II with 354 randomly sampled university students. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)