One important question concerns the possible effects of physical attractiveness on judgments about the work of others.
Landy and Sigall (1974) had male college students evaluate an essay that was supposedly written by a female college student. They varied the quality of the essay. Participants read either an essay that was was poor or good in quality. They also manipulated the physical attractivessness of the essay writer by mounting a photo on a card. The card was attached to the essay with a paper clip. The participants in this study viewed either a card with no photo, a card with a picture of an attractive female, or a card with a photo of an unattractive female. The card had the same description of the essay writer in each condition. For the poor quality essay, the mean rating of general quality was higher in the attractive condition than in the unattractive condition. For the good quality essay, there was no statistically significant difference between the attractive condition and unattractive condition with respect to perceived general quality of the essay. (1) One limitation of this study is that only male participants were used. Thus, we do not know whether the findings would be different with female participants.
Bull and Stevens (1979) also investigated the influence of the attractiveness of a writer on the evaluation of an essay. They did not find any significant main (overall) effect of the attractiveness of the writer on evaluations of the essay (e.g., general quality) for either a male writer or a female writer. (2) However, they did not investigate the influence of the quality of the essay, and it is possible that the lack of an effect of attractiveness might reflect that the quality of the essay was sufficiently high.
The findings of the two studies may suggest that the attractiveness of the writer may influence the evaluation of essays in only some situations.
Notes
1. See their article for information on other findings.
2. See their article for information on other findings.
References
Bull, R., & Stevens, J. (1979). The effects of attractiveness of writer and
penmanship on essay grades. Journal of Occupational Psychology,
52, 53-59.
Landy, D., & Sigall, H. (1974). Beauty is talent: Task evaluation as a
function of the performer's physical attractiveness. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 29, 299-304.