Aditya Gulati

Who they are

Gulati's affiliations are given here as they appear on the 2024 paper. The study is the work this site draws on.

This page records only what the paper and its published record state. Biography beyond the cited work is not given here.

Key papers

What is beautiful is still good (2024), with Martínez-Garcia, Fernández, Lozano, Lepri and Oliver. The team ran a large online study in which 2,748 participants, recruited through Prolific, rated faces of 462 people. Each face existed in two versions, the original and one processed with a beauty filter, and each participant rated ten images. Raters judged attractiveness, intelligence, trustworthiness, sociability, happiness and other traits.

The filter raised attractiveness for almost every face. The average attractiveness rating rose from 3.57 to 5.01 on a seven-point scale, it increased for 96.1 per cent of individuals, and it fell for none. The same individuals were also rated higher on intelligence, trustworthiness, sociability and happiness once filtered. Faces that began as less attractive gained more from the filter.

The authors also reported that the filter weakened the link between attractiveness and ratings of intelligence and trustworthiness, which they suggest may reflect a saturation effect once most faces look attractive. The sample was mostly white and from the United States and the United Kingdom, and the study measured only socially desirable traits.

Key ideas

The study updates a finding from the 1970s for a world of edited images. Because the same person appears in both versions, any change in ratings comes from the image alone, which is the cleanest kind of evidence that the halo effect is a spillover rather than a reflection of real differences between people.

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