How beautiful people see the world: Cooperativeness judgments of and by beautiful people

Adam Zylbersztejn, Zakaria Babutsidze, Nobuyuki Hanaki and Astrid Hopfensitz

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2024, vol. 218, issue C, 296-308

Abstract: Perceived beauty is one of the strongest predictors of perceived cooperativeness, causing the “beauty bias”. Through a large three-stage incentivized behavioral and rating experiment (N=357), we study (1) the beauty bias in incentivized predictions of cooperativeness and (2) the ex-post relevance of beauty ratings for predicting cooperativeness in an incentivized game. We additionally (3) investigate if one's beauty influences the beauty bias in predictions of cooperativeness of others. Our findings demonstrate the robustness of the beauty bias and its irrelevance for making accurate predictions. We further observe that individuals are affected by the beauty bias irrespective of their beauty. Overall, the results highlight the importance of strong institutions that protect individuals from falling prey to the beauty bias.

Keywords: Cooperation; Beauty; Perception; Hidden action game; Experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 D83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268123004584
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: How beautiful people see the world: Cooperativeness judgments of and by beautiful people (2024)
Working Paper: How beautiful people see the world: Cooperativeness judgments of and by beautiful people (2023)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jeborg:v:218:y:2024:i:c:p:296-308

DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2023.12.020

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization is currently edited by Houser, D. and Puzzello, D.

More articles in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().