Women in Focus

The literature on the subject of attractiveness is extensive: “As early as the 1970s and 1980s, researchers were looking at the question of what people find attractive,” explains Alida. Patterns can be seen: “Small noses are very attractive in women, along with full lips and prominent cheekbones.” Of course, everyone has individual preferences, but on average, aesthetic preferences are obvious.

However, researchers are often not only interested in what we find attractive, but also, and in particular, how attractive people come across to other people: “Starting in the 70s, people were looking into this and found a halo effect of attractiveness on the perception of competence.” The halo effect describes the phenomenon whereby a known characteristic of a person is used to draw conclusions about an unknown one.

Many Profiles, one Similarity

For her research, Alida chose a predominantly visual social media platform: Instagram. Her sister was the guinea pig: “For our studies, we took photos of her and manipulated her face to increase or decrease her attractiveness. This gave us images with a high and low model attractiveness, with everything else being the same. We then examined the effects of attractiveness on expertise and credibility in three areas: health influencers, beauty/skin care influencers, and tech influencers.” Most of the profiles – six in all – were created in the health sector with three levels of expertise and one high and one low level of attractiveness. In the other two sectors, Alida worked with two levels of expertise.

Here, for example, are the biographies of the health influencers: a fashion student with little expertise, a health coach with feigned high expertise, and a registered, highly qualified nutritionist. After participants had seen the profiles and posts of the influencer, they were asked to assess the influencer’s expertise and credibility using questionnaires. They were also asked how they perceived an advertising post from the influencer.

The result: “It always helps to look good,” says Alida. In all product categories, higher perceived attractiveness consistently improves trust in the influencer’s expertise. High attractiveness could have a negative effect on credibility in technical areas, but this effect can be offset by the advantages of attractiveness. For example, high attractiveness can lead to higher aesthetic appeal of the profile, which in turn contributes to persuasion success.

Competence versus Superficiality

So, caution is advised: “We are easily deceived. Just because a skin care influencer looks good doesn’t make her an expert, even if we often believe she is,” warns Alida. It is also important to be critical of the media. “Even if we think we are experts at using social media, we are not immune to manipulation. Not even if we think we take the attractiveness halo effect into account in our judgements. After all, we are all human.” Therefore, it helps to keep an open mind.