Beyond Aesthetic Judgment: Beauty Increases Moral Standing Through Perceptions of Purity

First impressions: Do faces with scars and palsies influence warmth, competence and humanization?

A glance is enough to assign psychological attributes to others. Attractiveness is associated with positive attributes ('beauty-is-good' stereotype). Here, we raise the question of a similar but negative bias. Are people with facial anomalies associated with negative personal characteristics? We hypothesized that biases against faces with anomalies arise because of negative stereotypes (less warmth and competence) and forms of dehumanization (animalistic and mechanistic). We enrolled 1493 mTurk participants (N = 1306 after exclusion) to assess 31 traits of photographed people using 60 pairs of photographs of the same person before and after plastic surgery. Half anomalous faces had a scar and the other half had a palsy. To calculate warmth and competence, we conducted a principal components analysis of the 31 attributes. Animalistic dehumanization was assessed by averaging reverse-scored ratings corresponding to moral sensibility and rationality/logic, and mechanistic dehumanization by averaging across reverse-scored ratings corresponding to emotional responsiveness and interpersonal warmth. We found that both kinds of anomalous faces were seen as less warm, competent and were dehumanized. Our findings suggest that an 'anomalous-is-bad' stereotype generalizes regardless of the aetiology of the anomaly. This effect may be related to a reverse halo effect, that is, the horn effect.

Physical Attractiveness Biases Judgments Pertaining to the Moral Domain of Purity

Research on the Beauty-is-Good stereotype shows that unattractive people are perceived to have worse moral character than attractive individuals. Yet research has not explored what kinds of moral character judgments are particularly biased by attractiveness. In this work, we tested whether attractiveness particularly biases moral character judgments pertaining to the moral domain of purity, beyond a more general halo effect. Across four preregistered studies (N = 1,778), we found that unattractive (vs. attractive) individuals were judged to be more likely to engage in purity violations compared with harm violations and that this was not due to differences in perceived moral wrongness, weirdness, or sociality between purity and harm violations. The findings shed light on how physical attractiveness influences moral character attributions, suggesting that physical attractiveness particularly biases character judgments pertaining to the moral domain of purity.

Speciesism in everyday language

Speciesism, like other forms of prejudice, is thought to be underpinned by biased patterns of language use. Thus far, however, psychological science has primarily focused on how speciesism is reflected in individuals' thoughts as opposed to wider collective systems of meaning such as language. We present a large-scale quantitative test of speciesism by applying machine-learning methods (word embeddings) to billions of English words derived from conversation, film, books, and the Internet. We found evidence of anthropocentric speciesism: words denoting concern (vs. indifference) and value (vs. valueless) were more closely associated with words denoting humans compared to many other animals. We also found evidence of companion animal speciesism: the same words were more closely associated with words denoting companion animals compared to most other animals. The work describes speciesism as a pervasive collective phenomenon that is evident in a naturally occurring expression of human psychology - everyday language.

The Moral Significance of Aesthetics in Nature Imagery

To solicit support for nature and wildlife conservation, mission-driven organizations rely on professional nature and wildlife imagery in their media outlets and campaigns. We investigated whether-and if so, why-the aesthetics of images increase social media engagement (e.g., number of likes) and the extent to which images elicit moral concern for nature and wildlife. In Study 1 (N = 782 U.S. adults), we trained a neural network to predict image aesthetics in National Geographic's Instagram data and identified image-specific attributes that influence aesthetics. We found that image aesthetics predicted engagement with the Instagram posts. In Study 2 (N = 775 U.S. adults), we established the causal effect of aesthetics on engagement and moral concern, which is explained by self-transcendent emotions (awe and inspiration) and purity associated with an image. Study 3 (N = 406 U.S. adults) replicated the results, showing that our key effects were stronger for individuals who place higher importance on beauty. By demonstrating the moral significance of image aesthetics, we highlight the potential of the beauty of nature to invigorate global conservation efforts.