Several gender effects were noted in the experiment. Women tended to be ranked as significantly more attractive than men. Men appeared to be more reactive to the presence of attractive people in their cooperativeness. Men also increased their contribution when contributions were known.
"When performance is unknown, people tend to reward beauty and females. And, when performance is known, the beauty premium disappears and the female premium switches to a male premium. These results appear to be rooted in beauty and sex stereotypes and have three main components. . . . First, relative beauty is rewarded. . . . Second, women benefit for being stereotyped as helpful. . . . Third, when performance is known, the gender premium switches from a female premium to a male premium. That is, while women gain the benefits of beauty, men gain the benefits of information." -- Andreoni & Petrie, 2007, p 89-90
This consistently bugs me. Even when (probably heterosexual) women are doing the rating, women are rated as more attractive than men. In the experimental group, 15 of the 18 "most attractive" people were women, and 13 of the 18 "least attractive" were men. This makes me wonder what the basis is for the ratings. I find myself doing it, as well. I'm far more likely to find a woman than a man attractive. But historically, I'm more likely to get physically or emotionally involved with a man. In short, I'm baffled by the concept of attractiveness. The economic game part of this experiment is somewhat interesting to me, but the assumptions wrapped up in the ratings really grabbed my attention.
edit: See also Marcus and Miller, 2003 -- "the highest levels of consensus [in attractiveness ratings] occurred when men judged the attractiveness of women and the highest levels of idiosyncrasy occurred when men rated other men"
Posts
4 comments:
I think there's something to be said for info bias: in this case, female standards of beauty and expectations about female beauty are all over the media; those for male beauty are a little more understated and subtextual (although without a doubt also quite present).
True. I wonder how you would control for that? Do advertisements in countries where women are covered in public feature uncovered women? That is: are media examples of female beauty equally ubiquitous?
Actually, I just took a look at my own archives, and I realized that I'd never gotten around to posting an article I looked at this spring : Reuters: May 2008 "Raters were most likely to agree about the attractiveness of another person if all raters were male, and the person being rated was female, Marcus and Miller note. The least agreement among raters occurred when men rated other men."
In other words, interrater reliability varies by rater gender.
I'm pretty sure that I'm more likely to find a man attractive than a woman...though I'm most likely to find a masculine woman attractive because that's my proclivity.
I think that I'm more critical of women's appearances and more likely to think that men are, by definition, attractive, even if they aren't traditionally "attractive".
This is all perhaps ironic, because I only sleep with women. It may have something to do with identifying in a masculine way, though, and thus kind of holding the masculine as the ideal and the feminine as lessor.
Post a Comment