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The What-Is-Beautiful-Is-Good effect (WIBIG) (cf. Eagly et al., 1991) posits that attractive people are frequently ascribed positive qualities simply by virtue of their looks. For example, good-looking people might be perceived as more honest or intelligent than their less attractive counterparts. In today's post, I'd like to discuss a recent study that was conducted by Doris Bazzini and her colleagues wherein they explored whether the WIBIG effect manifests itself with animated Disney characters.
The researchers content analyzed 163 human and human-like characters in twenty-one Disney movies along these variables: Physical attractiveness, aggressiveness, friendliness, goodness (moral virtue), intelligence, character's outcome (extremely negative to extremely positive) at the end of the movie, romantic involvement, and socioeconomic status. Four independent raters performed the content analyses. Inter-rater agreement varied from 0.69 to 0.93 across the dimensions (i.e., raters generated roughly consistent evaluations of the characters across the dimensions).
Attractiveness (beauty) and aggressiveness were negatively correlated whereas attractiveness was positively correlated with friendliness, goodness (moral virtue), intelligence, character outcome, romantic involvement, and socieconomic status (all correlations were highly statistically significant; see Table 3, p. 2694). In other words, when it comes to Disney characters, the WIBIG effect is highly operative. Physically attractive characters are ascribed positive traits and are disassociated from negative ones.
On a related note, in both my 2007 academic book (The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption) as well as in my forthcoming trade book (The Consuming Instinct: What Juicy Burgers, Ferraris, Pornography, and Gift Giving Reveal About Human Nature), I offer content analyses of a wide range of cultural products (literary themes, movies, television themes, song lyrics, religious narratives to name a few). In so doing, I argue that cultural products can be construed as fossils of the human mind, namely we can understand quite a bit about the evolution of our human nature but studying the invariant and universal themes found in such forms of expressions.
Source for Image:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/c3/Princesss_jazmine.jpg
