Social psychology - Page 2 of 31

The Amount Of Makeup That Is Most Attractive — Evidence Of A Weird Bias

Both sexes agree on the ideal amount of makeup to enhance attractiveness, but completely misread what others want.

The amount of makeup that looks most attractive is about 40 percent less than many women use.

Whether judged by other men or women, less is more.

In other words, many women apply makeup past the point they need to in order to increase their attractiveness.

For the research, a group of students were photographed with and without their makeup.

From these, psychologists created a series of images including varying degrees of makeup.

People were then asked to look at the photos and choose the one that looked most attractive.

People also judged what might look most attractive to other people.

Makeup mistakes

The first finding was simply that people judged the pictures with about 40 percent less makeup than women typically wore to be most attractive.

However, when people tried to imagine what others would say was most attractive, an interesting bias appeared.

Both men and women thought that other people would find more makeup more attractive.

The bias was particularly strong for men.

Men thought other men were attracted to a lot of makeup, but none of them were attracted to women wearing heavy makeup themselves.

The study’s authors think that by wearing too much makeup women are trying to conform to stereotypical ideals:

“Our female observers indicated the amount of cosmetics for optimal attractiveness was lower than the amount worn by the models, who were a sample of similarly aged peers.

This suggests that while there is a sense of what is optimally attractive, it may be overlooked in order to conform to stereotyped ideals, and mistaken notions of what others will find attractive.

The study was published in the The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology (Jones et al., 2014).

Why People With Autism Might Be The Ultimate Social Psychologists

Study debunks a popular myth about autism and social insight.

People with autistic traits make good social psychologists.

Social psychology is the study of how people behave in groups.

It seeks insights into how people influence each other, interact together and more.

When given tests of social psychological knowledge, people with autistic tendencies do as well, or slightly better, than those without autistic traits.

The finding might come as a surprise, since people with autism typically find it harder to judge the mental states of others.

However, people who have autistic traits may do better on the test by relying on analytical skills.

Their improved analytical skills may result from paying closer attention to patterns in people’s behaviour.

Autistic insight

For the study, 6,595 people in 104 countries were given a quiz of standard social psychological findings.

The questions included things like:

Do people feel more responsible for their behavior in groups than as individuals?
Does catharsis/venting work: If I am angry, will taking out my hostilities on a stuffed doll make me feel better?
On average, do people work harder in groups or as individuals?

(Answers at the bottom.)

Mr Anton Gollwitzer, the study’s first author, explained the results:

“People with ASD traits seem to be able to analyze how people in general will react in a social situation, even if they have difficulties judging the mental states of individuals.”

People with autistic traits may develop stronger analytical social psychological skills because of their difficulties determining the mental and cognitive states of other people’s minds, the authors think.

Answers

The answers are:

People feel more responsible as individuals than in groups (see: deindividuation).
Catharsis does not work (see: venting).
People work harder as individuals than in groups (see: social loafing).

The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Gollwitzer et al., 2019).