Alice Eagly

Who they are

Eagly's affiliation is given here as it appears on the 1991 paper, which 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 good, but... (1991), with Ashmore, Makhijani and Longo. A meta-analysis is a study that pools the results of earlier studies to estimate an overall effect. This one gathered research on how people perceive attractive and unattractive strangers. It found that people in these studies did ascribe more favourable personality traits and more successful life outcomes to attractive people, but that the average size of the effect was moderate and varied considerably from study to study.

Much of that variation depended on what people were asked to judge. Differences between attractive and unattractive targets were largest for social competence, intermediate for potency, adjustment and intellectual competence, and near zero for integrity and concern for others. The strength of the stereotype also varied with other features of the studies, including whether people were given other information about the person.

Key ideas

The paper's title carries its argument. The slogan "what is beautiful is good", taken from the 1972 study led by Karen Dion, overstates a stereotype that is real but selective. Good looks lead people to assume social ease and some competence. They lead people to assume almost nothing about honesty or kindness.

For anyone thinking about the halo effect in daily life, that boundary is the most practical part of the finding: appearance colours some judgements much more than others.

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