Switch on your TV and stay a few
minutes in front of it watching the different ads that are display on it. Is
there any unattractive person on them? Most probably the answer will be no. Different studies have been made
related to attractiveness and persuasion.
Mills and Aronson (1965). Found
that the communicator of a persuasive message’s expression of a desire to
influence others improved her persuasiveness when she was attractive.
Furthermore, Chaiken. Eagly, Sejwacz, Gregory and Christensen (1978) said that
the persuasive impact of attractive people depende on the sexual composition of
the communicator-recipient dyad and on the recepients anticipation of
interacting with the communicator.
The present study hypothesized
that attractive communicators will be more persuasive than unattractive ones. They also suggested that attractive subjects
will be more persuasive than unattractive ones because they have communication
skills or other attributes that makes them effective communicators. They based
this on the idea that attractiveness covaries naturally with other factors.
In this study they participate 68
communicators-subjects (17 per sex/attractiveness level) and 272
target-subjects (2 female and 2 male targets per communicator). The
communicators should deliver a persuasive message to students that they will approach
and these ones will complete an opinion survey. They indicated their agreement
with the message’s overall position and they also rated the communicator’s
friendliness, knowledgeability and attractiveness. Moreover, communicators had
to fill in a questionnaire indicating different personal characteristic, in
order to address individual differences measures.
This table displayed in the result
section shows the main effect of the communicator´s attractiveness and target
sex. We can see that attractive communicators elicited more agreement from
targets than did the unattractive individuals. Also sex difference can be found,
as female targets expressed greater agreement than male targets and female
communicators were rated as more attractive.
They also found that attractive
and unattractive people differ on other dimension than only physical
appearance. Attractive individuals were more faster and fluent speakers than
unattractive ones. Moreover, attractive communicators tended to have higher marks
on two educational accomplishment index, and also they describe themselves more
favourably along several dimensions that may shape certain aspects of self-concept.
As a conclusion, they obtained the
attractiveness effect on persuasion on verbal and behavioural measure and
attractiveness didn’t interact with the communicator or target sex to affect
the agreement number. Finally,
communicators differed in several communication skills and attributes related
to persuasiveness. This is, attractive people will be more persuasive because they
have characteristic that makes them more effective as communicators.
References
Mills, J., & Aronson, E.
Opinion change as a function of the communicator's attractiveness and desire to
influence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1965,1, 173-177.
Chaiken, S., Eagly, A. H.,
Sejwacz, D., Gregory, W. L., & Christensen, D. Communicator physical
attractiveness as a determinant of opinion change. JSAS Catalog oj Selected
Documents in Psychology, 1978, S. (Ms. No. 1639)
Horai, J., Naccari, N., &
Fatoullah, E. The effects of expertise and physical attractiveness upon opinion
agreement and liking. Sociometry, 1974, 37, 601-606.
Great choice of research, just watch the writing to ensure clarity!
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