Beautiful people make better first impressions

A new University of British Columbia study has found that people identify the personality traits of people who are physically attractive more accurately than others during short encounters.

The study, published in the December edition of Psychological Science, suggests people pay closer attention to people they find attractive, and is the latest scientific evidence of the advantages of perceived beauty. Previous research has shown that individuals tend to find attractive people more intelligent, friendly and competent than others.

The goal of the study was to determine whether a person's attractiveness impacts others' ability to discern their personality traits, says prof Jeremy Biesanz, UBC Dept. of Psychology, who co-authored the study with PhD student Lauren Human and undergraduate student Genevieve Lorenzo.

For the study, researchers placed more than 75 male and female participants into groups of five to 11 people for three-minute, one-on-one conversations. After each interaction, study participants rated partners on physical attractiveness and five major personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. Each person also rated their own personality.

Researchers were able to determine the accuracy of people's perceptions by comparing participants' ratings of others' personality traits with how individuals rated their own traits, says Biesanz, adding that steps were taken to control for the positive bias that can occur in self-reporting.

Despite an overall positive bias towards people they found attractive (as expected from previous research), study participants identified the ''relative ordering'' of personality traits of attractive participants more accurately than others, researchers found.