Lisa,+Caila


 * Big Picture Question: Would college students be more willing to help an attractive woman than a less attractive woman? **


 * Specific Question: Would college students be more willing to help a woman with her hands full get inside a building based on her appearance of attractiveness? **


 * Lit Reviews **


 * (by Lisa) **

Attractive women expect date pay dinner; they’re worth it.

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In this article, the researcher claims that attractive women expect their date dinners to be paid, simply cause they are attractive. This much have stemmed from the fact that their previous dates have paid their dinners, because men, innately, are more prone to want the attention of the attractive woman. Hence, as this trend continued, women that are considered to be more attractive take paid dinners for granted, and hence were more expecting their dinner to be always paid. Although this is an interesting study, there are some fallacies. For instance, there is no operational definitions for the word “attractive.” What is the indicator, or definition, of being attractive? Who is considered attractive and who is not? The measures get quite hazy around these borders. The researcher should have more clearly defined who is considered to be attractive, so that this study could be replicated by other researchers. Additionally, it has the added faults of assuming a cause and effect relationship from simple correlation. It is important to acknowledge that correlation does not mean causation.

What do people infer from facial attractiveness?

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According to this interesting study, it is stated that people assume, or infer, that people who are facially attractive are more naturally inclined to be nicer and more sociable, when in fact, they know nothing else about that person. This leads to a social bias, that people who are more physically attractive are more prone to be accepted in job interviews, and other social gatherings. This study also has the fallacy of not clearly defining the word “attractive,” just like the previous study. Overall, this study is a more rigidly structured study, when compared with the previous study, and so it has better definitions of variables and conclusions. Since the r value is 0.78, it suggests a strong linear relationship between attractiveness and the mean social ratings given by people. This would be a good study to base our research off of.

Attractiveness bonus in the workplace

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This article specifies that there is a certain level of bonus, or prevalence, for the people who are considered to be physically attractive. It is interesting to consider that physical beauty has such far reaching implications, even in the workplace. After reading all three of these articles and studies, it became clear that people do have a certain level of bias towards physical beauty, and that people who are considered to be physically attractive area allotted much more slack when compared with people who are not considered to be as physically attractive. One of the major faults of this study is that it tried to generalize the results of attractive men and women. People have respond differently depending on whether the attractive individual is a woman or a man. This creates more confounding variables for this study, and thus, it would have been much more concise and simpler if the researcher just focused on one group, either male or female, to conduct this study upon.

Works Cited

"Attractive women expect their date to pay for dinner because they're worth it | Mail Online." //Home | Mail Online//. N.p., n.d. Web. 4 Mar. 2012. . "Facial beauty-more sociable?." //Uclan ac//. N.p., n.d. Web. 4 Mar. 2012. . "The "Attractiveness Bonus" in the Workplace | | AlterNet." //Home | AlterNet//. N.p., n.d. Web. 4 Mar. 2012. .

**Lit Review** Our general topic for our experiment is whether or not the physical appearance of a person who needs help affects whether or not they are helped. The essence of the experiment is to try to see how physical beauty affects our judgment and view of others reflected in how we act and treat others. One of the problems with our experiment that inspired a lot of this research is the question of what constitutes beauty. Especially when our experiment will probably not chose two different people, but try to manipulate one person to appear more beautiful or more ugly, we need to find what we can do to appear more beautiful. We also wanted to see what kind of studies we could find concerning research and experiments already done with respect to beautiful people being treated differently. We are told as children that what truly matters in life is what is inside of us, not our physical appearance. However, there are many studies that have come out that reflect the notion that people who are more attractive are treated better in society than those who are normal or unattractive. In one study, people were introduced and were able to talk for three minutes. Afterwards, they filled out personality analysis of the people they met and the people who were more beautiful were described with more desirable adjectives (Lorenzo, Biesanz, and Human). This is in alignment with numerous studies and findings from scholarly sources. In many studies, such as performed by Alan E. Gross and Christine Crofton of the University of Missouri-St. Louis, a picture of a beautiful, normal, or unattractive woman is given and people are supposed to project adjectives based on how they think that person would be like. Beautiful girls are given more positive adjectives than unattractive women (Gross and Crofton). But the effect that physical beauty can influence our judgment has grand implications and is much more critical in our discernment than we know. There is evidence that jurors focus on the attorney’s physical attractiveness and personality characteristics when determining the death sentence (Trahan and Stewart). Since we’ve already established that physical attractiveness affects our perception of personal characteristics, these findings mean a large part of the jury’s decision is based on physical appearances. Thus the physical attractiveness of an individual has been proven to affect the way they are perceived and treated in a positive way. This finding begs the question of what actually constitutes a woman as beautiful. We especially wanted to focus on areas we could manipulate, so examples such as type of face structure and wait-to-hip ratio was not useful to us because we cannot change those things over a short period of time. However there was some interesting data attributing beauty to other things besides thinness and high cheek bones. There was also a lot of information that wasn’t credible or couldn’t give a thorough description of their experiments, but alas there were a few good sources. One idea is that a woman is more attractive if she is wearing the color red. Across the animal kingdom red is a common color used for display in mating rituals that attracts a reproductive partner of the opposite sex. And it has proven to be similar in humans as well. Men chose to sit closer to women wearing red as opposed to blue and asked women in red shirts more intimate questions than those wearing green. These results remained consistent regardless of the participants’ sense of self-attractiveness and mood (Niesta Kayser, Elliot, and Feltman). In a study conducted by the University of Leeds, women who revealed 40% of their skin were produced by twice as many men as those who revealed more or less. In fact, those who revealed far more than 40% were approached by a significantly smaller number of men (“Women ‘Should Bear 40 per cent of their Bodies to Attract Men’”). There was also a study done that gave men a very brief exposure to faces with less makeup and faces with varying degrees of makeup and found those with makeup were regarded more attractive than those who weren’t. When given more exposure, women with more professional makeup were regarded more beautiful than those with less makeup (Etcloff et al.). Thus based on this research, wearing red, revealing around 40% of skin, and wearing makeup increases perceived beauty. This research is extremely relevant to our topic. It gives us evidence to support a hypothesis that people will be more willing to help beautiful woman than an ugly woman. We can manipulate how people perceive our beauty by wearing red, wearing professional makeup, and revealing the right amount of skin to appear more beautiful. We can also try to downplay traditional stereotypes about beauty related to our body size by wearing clothes that make us look like we weigh more than we actually do. We can also make sure we don’t wear red or makeup when we are trying to be more unattractive. This information will help us to create a better experiment that truly tests how people react differently based on physical attractiveness rather than any other factors.
 * by Caila **

Works Cited Etcoff, Nancy L., et al. “Cosmetics as a Feature of the Extended Human Phenotype: Modulation of the Perception of Biologically Important Facial Signals.” //PLoS ONE//: n. pag. //PLoS ONE//. Web. 27 Feb. 2012. . Gross, Alan E., and Christine Crofton. “What is Good is Beautiful.” //American Sociological Association// 40.1 (1977): 85-90. //JSTOR//. Web. 27 Feb. 2012. . Lorenzo, Genevieve L., Jeremy C. Biesanz, and Lauren J. Human. “What Is Beautiful Is Good and More Accurately Understood Physical Attractiveness and Accuracy in First Impressions of Personality.” //Psychological Science// 12.21 (2010): 1777-1782. //SAGE Journals Online//. Web. 27 Feb. 2012. . Niesta Kayser, Daniela, Andrew J. Elliot, and Roger Feltman. “Red and Romantic Behavior in Men Viewing Women.” //European Journal of Social Psychology// 40.6 (2010): 901-908. //Milner Library//. Web. 27 Feb. 2012. . Trahan, Adam, and Daniel M. Stewart. “Examining Capital Jurors’ Impressions of Attorneys’ Personal Characteristics and Their Impact on Sentencing Outcomes.” //Applied Psychology in Criminal Justice// 7.2 (2011): 93-105. //Milner Library//. Web. 27 Feb. 2012. . “Women ‘Should Bare 40 per cent of Their Bodies to Attract Men.’” //The Telegraph// 17 Nov. 2009: n. pag. //The Telegraph//. Web. 27 Feb. 2012. .


 * Hypothesis **

We hypothesize that people will be more willing to help a woman who is considered to be attractive, with her hands full get inside a building than a woman who is not considered attractive. This is based on the social idea that physically attractive people are generally treated better than others. Physical attractiveness tends to change how people behave towards others in many situations, as shown through our lit reviews.


 * Objective **

Our main objective is to research whether or not people treat others differently according to how attractive that other person is. Also, we are doing a cross-cultural study to find out whether the results of the study, when the methods are replicated exactly, differ in the United States or in South Korea. This may give us a cultural glimpse of the role physical beauty plays on Western and Eastern societies.


 * Method**

Based on what we found in our lit review, we can change our appearance to be more attractive or unattractive. Then we will go to different locations with a big box or other type of large item and try to get in the door. Clearly struggling, we will see how long it will take for people to help us when we're dressed attractively and when we appear unattractive. We will have to go to locations where college students are, probably places on campus.


 * Potential Error**

One potential error is the fact that since we are not going to have two different people, an attractive and an unattractive girl, we have to only manipulate ourselves to be attractive and unattractive. The potential error is that there are only so many factors we can manipulate, so the results may not be as decisive as we want them to be. Another potential error is making sure we get only college students because we want to target this age group. However, if we are careful about where we conduct our experiment it shouldn't be as big of a problem.


 * Results:**

People sampled: 25 Number of people who helped: 21 Percentage of people who helped: 84% People sampled: 25 People who helped: 12 Percentage of people who helped: 48%
 * USA-**
 * Attractive Woman
 * Unattractive Woman:

Korea- People sampled: 30 Number of people who helped: 24 Percentage of people who helped: 80% People sampled: 30 People who helped: 13 Percentage of people who helped: 43.33%
 * Attractive Woman
 * Unattractive Woman:

Presentation