Of course you think good looking people are nicer. You also think they are more intelligent, more trustworthy and more interesting. You’re more likely to believe that they are innocent of a crime, if you find yourself on a jury.
And you may be right. It’s self-reinforcing. Good-looking people are better paid, more successful and happier than their ugly counterparts, because people have been treating them better and given them an easier time throughout their whole lives. They have more friends and suffer less anxiety. I’d imagine this would cause some bitterness and mean-spiritedness to develop in the less fortunate.
Just as an aside to the OP
IMO Ted Bundy and Jodi Arias are not attractive. They don’t need to put a paper bag over their head before they go out in public, but neither is what I would call attractive.
I suppose there are too many factors to make a correlation. There are plenty of ugly people who are so friendly, outgoing and comfortable with themselves that you don’t notice that they are “ugly”. And there are plenty of attractive people who seem like total jerks or bitches for no reason.
Indeed, I think we assume that someone who is attractive is supposed to be outgoing and friendly. If they don’t speak to you, people often assume they are stuck up and standoffish when they actually might just be shy.
Someone from a modest or poor background might be friendly and unassuming, or they might be angry and bitter. And I’ve seen plenty of wealthy people who are relaxed and confident and friendly while others seem like they are angry at the world.
But, in general, I think there is a self-reinforcing correlation. Attractiveness, friendliness, participation in activities and connections with other people tend to make people seem more attractive, friendly and helps build more connections, join more activities and so on and so forth.
People who are well-groomed also tend to be superficially more outgoing and gregarious, for the same reason. So, “good-looking” people “seem nicer”. It is good for their career.
I think that a point could be made that extroverts tend to put much more importance in their personal interactions, making them more likely to take better care of their appearance.
In promoting his new book, How Not to Be Wrong, Jordan Ellenberg recently wrote an article on Slate about Why Handsome Men are Such Jerks.
His basic point is that we don’t really evaluate people at random - they have meet a certain threshold of attractiveness and niceness to be acceptable. A really nice guy might get away with being a little less attractive and still be acceptable; a really hot guy might get away with being a little meaner and still be acceptable. Within the triangle you form with your own standards, there really is a correlation, but only because you excluded so many mean ugly men.
I wasn’t very impressed with Ellenberg’s analysis, because it seemed to rest pretty heavily on applying only to the sex you’re attracted to. It’s probably true that my mind filters out some ugly nasty women, but I’m not convinced I do the same with men I encounter.
Then there’s the fact that Ellenberg’s article addresses the opposite thesis - that attractive people are meaner - than protoboard’s - that attractive people are nicer. Personally if there’s any correlation at all, I’d agree with **protoboard ** that us really good looking people are nicer.
That’s pretty much me, but it goes the other way too.
I used to think I was nice. I’m a bit wiser now. I think I’m kinda OK, but not super nice. Anyway, I am hairy, big and burly. And by a quirk of fate, I’ve lived and worked in deep immersion in Vietnamese culture for the last twenty-five years. Now, Vietnamese folk tend to be slight of build, unlike me.
So, it usually goes like this:
On first meeting, they kinda don’t like me. However after a while, they think I’m a great guy. Thing is, I’m NOT a great guy. I’ve just been an average guy to them, but they seem to be expecting the worst, so anything less than the worst is a positive.
Of course, a few years later, they do indeed find out I’m not a great guy.
As for the OP, according to this article the opposite assumption is common (but equally mistaken). I do not actually think very much of the article, which seems to me to greatly oversimplify the psychological factors that are probably in play, but it is relevant that it takes it as a given that many people tend to assume that handsome men are likely to be jerks (the article seems to assume that it is only women who feel that way, but I would guess that lots of less handsome men do too); I would not be surprised if, for similar (mostly bad) reasons, many people also tend to assume that beautiful women are more likely to be bitches than their plainer sisters.
On a related note, I’ve noticed that a higher-than-normal amount of workers at businesses where rough-and-gruff customer service is acceptable or tolerated, such as fast good restaurants, convenience stores, gas stations, and the like are not conventionally attractive. Those businesses are going to have a higher percentage of less friendly uggos because those folks just can’t get jobs anywhere else. Go to a nice mall with upscale businesses, though, and you’ll increasingly see friendly and well-groomed, but overweight or otherwise not conventionally attractive folks in visible sales positions.
What kinds of businesses do you visit more, though - a c-store or an upscale mall merchant? Most are going to have more exposure to the grizzled country girl behind the register at the Stop-and-Rob.
I would offer an alternative to the “can’t get jobs elsewhere” hypothesis. No one chooses a fast food restaurant or gas station because of the friendly cashiers. Employee-customer interactions last less than a minute in these kind of establishments. People just want their orders filled. They aren’t looking for a BFF.
But if I’m about to drop fifty dollars on a pair of pants, I want the sales staff to at least smile at me and ask if I need help.
I not-uncommonly get standoffishness from women I’ve never met, and I’m always thinking “What the hell, lady?” It bothered me so much one day that I asked a friend (female) about it. She brushed it off with a “Oh. You’re hot, so she assumes you’re an asshole.” I was like, “Well I AM an asshole, but she doesn’t know that yet!” Life is so unfair.
I always want to discover that attractive people are nice. It seems like more of a disappointment when they’re not. Like, dude what the hell, you have it easy and you’re still a total prick. Use your powers for good and not for evil!
An astute observation.
I treat everyone the same. And I have noticed (long before finding SD) that attractive people are arrogant when they realize I’m not being nicer to them, even though I am being nice and respectful regardless.
If no-one has mentioned it yet, this is called “confirmation bias”. If you’re interested in improving the reality quotient of your outlook on other people, you could look it up.
There’s also the issue that good looking people are attractive, and we hoo-mans like to be around attractive people. So, we probably cut attractive people more slack, and if they treat us the same as unattractive people do, we may feel as if the attractive people treated us better.
If Halle Berry smiles at me, I’m going to remember that a lot more than if the disheveled checkout lady at Walgreens smiles at me.
