Second-Order Beliefs Lower the Performance of Attractive People on Intelligence Tests

It has been argued that attractive people should be more intelligent because attractiveness signals good genes. However, cultural stereotypes of attractive people depicted in the mass media propagate the notion that they are less intelligent. The present research suggests that these stereotypical representations of this social category have shaped attractive people’s beliefs about how their intelligence is judged based on their appearance, which has a self-fulfilling effect on their intelligence test performance. We demonstrate that the more closely people identity with the social category of attractive people the worse they perform on intelligence tests because they conform to a second-order belief that others expect them to be less intelligent. This effect also emerges when tests are merely framed as intelligence tests, but measure another construct. Reducing people’s focus on this belief diminishes its negative impact on test performance. An analysis of field data suggests that the self-fulfilling effect of this second-order belief may explain why the positive correlation between attractiveness and intelligence declines in early adulthood. Attractive people are shown to perform worse on an IQ test when they are sensitive to how their appearance is judged by others, but perform better when they are insensitive to others’ judgment. This suggests that second-order beliefs may override any intellectual advantages of attractiveness implied by the good genes theory. Introduction Evolutionary theorists have long maintained that attractiveness is a signal of “good genes” (1, 2). Humans are thought to have evolved to prefer attractive people for their reproductive fitness (3). Previous research investigating the evolutionary benefit of attractiveness has primarily focused on its relationship to good health (4, 5). However, it has also been argued that attractive faces indicate greater intelligence because intelligent mates confer survival benefits to offspring through their ability to acquire resources (6). Yet, empirical support for the good genes theory has offered mixed findings regarding the relationship between attractiveness and intelligence. Although several early studies found a significant positive correlation between attractiveness and intelligence (7, 8), subsequent metaanalyses found that while attractive children, as judged by others, perform significantly better on intelligence tests, this relationship declines as people enter adulthood (9, 10). Consequently, studies conducted on both students and adults have found that attractiveness and IQ score are not significantly correlated (11, 12). We posit that one reason why this relationship declines is that attractive people develop beliefs about the social expectancies applied to them based on their appearance. As individuals identify with different social categories (e.g., attractive people), they begin to monitor the stereotypes that apply to those groups (13). Furthermore, individuals who identify with stereotyped groups tend to internalize social expectancies and conform their behavior to these stereotypes (14, 15). Although it is well documented that others expect attractive people to be more intelligent than unattractive people (16, 17), this does not necessarily mean that the person being judged believes this to be the case. This is because people’s beliefs about the social expectancies that apply to them reflect second-order beliefs (i.e., what one believes others believe) (19). As second-order beliefs are largely derived from sociocultural influences (20), cultural depictions of attractiveness should exert a strong influence on these beliefs. Perhaps the most prominent depictions of attractiveness in modern culture are the ones that propagate the notion that attractive people are less intelligent than unattractive people. Whether it be through characters representing the “dumb blonde” or “dumb jock”, attractive people are often portrayed as unintelligent in the mass media (21, 22). Also, highly intelligent people are frequently represented as unattractive in cultural productions (23, 24). Given how often people are exposed to these depictions, their second-order beliefs about how their intelligence is judged based on their appearance should reflect these representations. Thus, the more closely individuals identify with the social category of attractive people, the less intelligent they should expect to be judged by others, which will lower their performance on intelligence tests. We tested this prediction using two complementary approaches. The first approach is a series of controlled experiments examining the relationship between self-perceived attractiveness and intelligence test performance. We initially focus on self-perceived attractiveness because it measures the extent to which individuals identify with the social category of attractive people. The second approach is an analysis of field data examining the relationship between otherperceived attractiveness and performance on an IQ test. Consistent with previous findings (9-12), we did not expect a significant correlation between other-perceived attractiveness and IQ score. However, given that people can internalize social expectancies, we hypothesized this relationship would be moderated by people’s sensitivity to other’s evaluation (i.e., self-monitoring). Selfmonitoring is a psychological trait that captures the degree to which people monitor and adjust their behavior in social situations (25). Compared to low self-monitors, high self-monitors are more sensitive to how they are evaluated by others (26), particularly with regards to their physical appearance (27). Thus, we hypothesized that high self-monitors – but not low selfmonitors – who are judge by others to be an attractive person would be more likely to identify with this social category and conform their behavior to the belief that others expect attractive people to be less intelligent. This finding would suggest that one reason why the relationship between attractiveness and intelligence attenuates in early adulthood is that attractive individuals conform to a culturally acquired second-order belief. Table 1 provides an overview of the study designs, samples and measures. Methods and Results Overview. A pilot study and three preregistered replications of earlier studies were conducted on unique U.S. Amazon Mechanical Turk (Mturk) workers with a minimum HIT approval rate of 95%. The sample encompasses a diverse set of ages, education levels and incomes, with the median of Bachelor’s level education and a lower bound of elementary school diploma, and the median household income at $50-99k with the lower bound of $0-9k. On average, the age across samples was 36.7 years, and 52.6% of participants reported to be female. We report the results of preregistered replications of original studies and the combined data (i.e., original and preregistered replications) below. Exact procedures and analyses on original studies, replications and combined data are available in the Supporting Information. Our studies received ethical approval from the Institutional Review Board at Columbia University. Informed consent was obtained and participants were told that they could opt out of the study at any time. Pilot Study. The pilot study confirmed that people who perceive themselves to be attractive expect others to judge them to be less intelligent. Participants (n = 195, 41.5% female, Mage= 38.4) were asked to rank-order 10 personal traits according to what they expected other people would judge to be their strongest to weakest trait (second-order beliefs). They also rank-ordered the same traits according to what they personally believed were their strongest to weakest traits (first-order beliefs). The 10 traits, which were presented in a random order, were: attractive, extroverted, intelligent, popular, friendly, likable, positive, competent, assertive, and confident. The presentation order of the two sets of rankings was counterbalanced. There was a significant negative correlation between attractiveness and intelligence for second-order beliefs (rs (195) = 0.15, P = 0.034), but not for first-order beliefs (rs(195) = -0.09, P = 0.217). This indicates that the more attractive respondents believed they were, the less intelligent they expected to be judged by others. Study 1. Method. The first study (n = 209; 54.5% female, Mage=35.9; osf.io/sq3ex) was designed to show that people who perceive themselves to be attractive perform worse on intelligence tests. We also tested an alternative explanation for any observed negative association between attractiveness and intelligence. Specifically, we tested whether attractive people perform worse because they are less motivated to do well on intelligence tests. This alternative explanation is based on findings that attractive people get more easily hired for jobs, earn higher incomes and find partners more easily (28, 29, 30). Such rewards of physical attractiveness do not require onerous investments in intellectual training. Consequently, attractive people may consider the benefits they receive as a result of their physical attractiveness sufficient, and be less motivated to signal their intelligence. We measured participants’ performance motivation (e.g., how much effort they put into the test). To ensure that any observed negative effect of attractive on test performance was not contingent on making attractiveness salient before the test, half the participants rated their attractiveness before performing the test, while the remaining half rated their attractiveness after the test (randomly assigned). For those in the “attractiveness measurement before test” condition, participants first rated themselves in the following10 traits from 1 (not at all descriptive of me) to 7 (very much descriptive of me): intelligent, loyal, attractive, athletic, resourceful, critical, passive, stubborn, good looking and agree