Fact Check: Dion, K., Berscheid, E., & Walster, E. 1972 Beauty is Good Study Validated

In their 1972 seminal article, Dion, Berscheid, and Walster, showed that attractive people are preferred over, and believed to possess more positive traits and characteristics than, unattractive people. Dion et al. labeled these positive beliefs and attitudes about attractive people, the ...

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Walster, 1974; Dion, Berscheid, & Walster, 1972).

“Simply stating that something is false or providing a brief explanation is largely ineffective.” · The lead author, Man-pui Sally Chan, a research assistant professor in psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said the study found that “the more detailed the debunking message, the higher the debunking effect.

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ers, with attractive individuals receiving more fa- · vorable evaluations. Our findings drew attention to

The concepts of a "beauty premium" (Hamermesh & Biddle, 1994) and "beautiful is good" (Dion, Berscheid, & Walster, 1972) highlight the privilege and social advantage of being beautiful.

We found a marginally significant ... credibility ratings of post-treatment videos, indicating that debunking had a marginal effect on increased people’s ability to distinguish between subsequent true and false videos on the same topic. Critically, belief in the misinformation ...

In one experiment, for example, researchers gave people newspaper corrections that contradicted their views and politics, on topics ranging from tax reform to the existence of weapons of mass destruction. The corrections were not only ignored – they entrenched people’s pre-existing positions. ... Backfire effects pick up strength when you have no particular reason to trust the person you are talking to. This perhaps explains why climate sceptics with more scientific education tend to be the most sceptical that humans are causing global warming. The irony is that understanding backfire effects requires that we debunk a false understanding of our own.