Attractive and unattractive people

A limitation of this study along with all investigating the presence of the halo effect is that personal differences are evident throughout as each individual perceives attractiveness differently, as one persons idea of attractive might be another persons idea of unattractiveness. Also one persons idea of being happy and successful may be different to another persons making the studies highly subjective based on each individuals perceptions on the character traits and stimuli provided.

The halo effect has been explored in many contexts, one of them being the effect that attractiveness has on the defendants at a jury.

In research done by Baron and Byrne (1997) the most consistent finding was that attractive defendants are at an advantage with respects to being acquitted, receiving a lighter punishment and gaining the sympathy of the jurors whereas physical unattractiveness has been found to have the adverse effect on legal decision-making. Sigall and Ostrove (1975) experimented with the length of prison sentence and the facial attractiveness of 'mock' offenders.

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Participants in 12 different experimental conditions read a crime description with a picture of the 'mock' offender above, these pictures varied in attractiveness from very attractive to 'ugly'. The participants were then asked to decide upon a suitable punishment for these offenders. Results showed that the more unattractive the person the longer the crime sentence for example, the less attractive offenders were more likely to be recommended psychiatric care than the more attractive offenders.

This study shows that the halo effect is evident in many aspects of life and that attractive people are perceived as being less in the wrong when it comes to crimes as unattractive people, the only variation in this is that of fraud as individuals perceive more attractive people as being more deceitful in this crime as they are perceived to have used their looks to accomplish their crime.

A criticism of this study is that participants were only shown a picture and asked to come up with a suitable punishment whereas the halo effect is evident in face to face subjective perceptions of individuals.

In the presence of 'mock' offenders where a line-up situation was made, the results of participants may have drawn up different conclusions into the parallels between attractiveness and length of punishment. Further research into the attractiveness of a person and the length of the punishment for a crime commited has been carried out by Pfeifer and Ogloff (1991) who found that white university students were more likely to rate black defendants as more guilty than white defendants. This shows that the race of the defendants is important as matters such as discrimination and prejudice can affect the sentence of time given by participants.

Most of these studies were carried out in the West meaning that cultural and political differences limit the strength of the conclusions. In the West it is perceived that more attractive individuals form a more socially acceptable stereotype than in other cultures where it isn't as important to be attractive as there isn't such an image conscious atmosphere. Aim- The aim of the investigation was to see whether the halo effect is present when rating personality traits of 'attractive' and 'unattractive' people in 2 separate pictures.

Null Hypothesis- There will not be a significant difference in the rating of personality traits of 'attractive' and 'unattractive' people in a photo and any difference is due to chance. Experimental Hypothesis- There will be a higher rating of personality traits of an 'attractive' person in a picture than of an 'unattractive' person in a picute. This is a one tailed hypothesis as it is devised from the background research material that suggests that more attractive people will be seen to have more positive personality traits than unattractive people.