Early physical attractiveness predicts a more socially effective personality in adulthood

A recent study published in Personality and Individual Differences provides evidence that physical attractiveness during childhood and adolescence is linked to the development of a highly socially effective personality in adulthood. The findings suggest that early physical appearance may serve as a slight but consistent predictor of how well a person navigates social situations later in life.

Psychologists often measure human character using the Big Five personality traits. These traits include openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. People often score highly across several positive traits at once, displaying a pattern that reflects an overarching psychological quality.

Scientists refer to this overarching quality as the general factor of personality. This broad factor represents an individual’s overall social effectiveness, which includes their ability to cooperate and display emotional intelligence. People with a high general factor of personality tend to be skilled at interacting with others in a socially desirable manner.

Past research has linked this general personality factor to physical attractiveness. In a previous study, scientists found that adults rated as physically attractive by others also tended to score higher on this general personality measure. This early finding suggested that attractiveness might be an observable marker of a highly functional personality.

The researchers conducted the new study to see if they could replicate these earlier findings. They specifically wanted to test the idea that physical attractiveness early in life might predict the presence of a strong general factor of personality decades later. They also aimed to see if this link was tied specifically to the broad general factor rather than individual traits alone.

“We conducted a previous study on the same topic. We wanted to test the same relationship again using longitudinal data,” said study author Curtis S. Dunkel, an independent researcher.

The scientists analyzed data from two large, long-term research projects. The first project was the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, which began in the late nineteen fifties. This project initially tracked a random sample of 10,317 high school students in Wisconsin.

For the current analysis, the researchers focused on 6,248 participants, which included 3,328 women and 2,920 men. This group was overwhelmingly White, reflecting the state’s demographics at the time of the initial data collection. To measure physical attractiveness, independent raters evaluated each participant’s high school yearbook photo.

Twelve raters, consisting of six men and six women, scored the photos on an eleven-point scale. The scale ranged from not at all attractive to extremely attractive. The scientists averaged the scores from all twelve raters to create a single physical attractiveness score for each participant.

Personality was measured much later, when the participants were in their mid-thirties. The researchers used a combination of mail-in questionnaires and telephone interviews to assess the Big Five traits. They then used statistical techniques to extract the overarching general factor of personality from these combined test scores.

The data showed a positive link between teenage attractiveness and adult personality. Higher physical attractiveness in high school correlated with higher scores in openness and extraversion in adulthood. More importantly, early attractiveness was positively correlated with the broad general factor of personality.

To understand this relationship better, the researchers mathematically removed the influence of the broad general factor from their analysis. Once they did this, the connection between attractiveness and most individual personality traits disappeared. Attractiveness only remained linked to openness, which provides evidence that the relationship between looks and character largely operates at the level of overall social effectiveness.

The second part of the research relied on the National Child Development Study. This project tracked individuals born during a single week in Great Britain in 1958. The initial tracking project included an impressive 17,419 children.

The current study focused on 6,789 of these British participants, comprising 3,578 men and 3,211 women. As with the first sample, the participants in this group were almost entirely White. In this dataset, physical attractiveness was evaluated by the children’s teachers when the participants were seven and eleven years old.

Teachers classified the children using various descriptive categories. Because most children were placed in the attractive category, the researchers simplified the measure for their analysis. Participants were labeled as attractive if their teachers rated them as such at both age seven and age eleven, while the rest were classified as unattractive.

When the participants reached fifty or fifty-one years of age, they completed a fifty-item personality survey. This lengthy survey successfully measured their Big Five traits. The scientists once again extracted the broad general factor of personality from these adult responses.

The data from this second group yielded similar patterns. Childhood attractiveness positively correlated with intellect, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and the general factor of personality in middle age. This reinforced the idea that early physical appearance predicts later social effectiveness across different populations.

The researchers again adjusted their analysis to account for the broad general personality factor. After controlling for this overarching factor, only conscientiousness remained positively linked to childhood attractiveness. The association between extraversion and physical attractiveness actually turned negative, meaning the primary link mostly existed at the broad level of general social effectiveness.

“More physically attractive children have a slight tendency to have a more socially effective personality in middle adulthood,” Dunkel told PsyPost.

While the data consistently point to a connection between early appearance and adult personality, the actual effect size is quite small. Readers should avoid interpreting the findings to mean that attractive people always have better personalities. Physical attractiveness provides only a slight statistical advantage in predicting adult social effectiveness.

The scientists also noted that the exact reasons behind this relationship remain unclear. They initially suspected that genetics might completely explain the link, but subsequent data checks did not support this specific expectation. The shared genetic effects between human appearance and personality remain a complex puzzle for biologists and psychologists alike.

One possible explanation for the findings is a psychological phenomenon known as the halo effect. The halo effect occurs when people assume that someone who is physically attractive also possesses other positive qualities. Because attractive children are often treated better by teachers and peers, this favorable treatment might help them develop better social skills over time.

Future research will need to explore exactly how this dynamic unfolds as people grow up. Scientists hope to measure both physical attractiveness and personality at multiple points throughout a person’s life. Tracking these changes over time could help tease apart the complicated interplay between how people look and how their personalities mature.

The study, “Physical Attractiveness and the General Factor of Personality: Replication and Extension,” was authored by Curtis S. Dunkel, Dimitri van der Linden, and Satoshi Kanazawa.