Most beautiful people lead charmed lives (John McCann)
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People tend to have strong moral feelings about matters such as premarital sex, gay marriage or abortion.
Religion, media portrayals, parents and peers are powerful social forces that shape attitudes about sex.
But could something as innocuous as the way we look spark our different outlooks?
Most beautiful people lead charmed lives. Studies show that they tend to get favourable treatment. They secure better jobs and earn higher salaries. Others are friendlier toward them. With more money and social support, they’re better equipped to fend off any consequences for their actions. For instance, the better-looking often get more benefit of the doubt from juries.
Their lives are most charmed in matters of sex and romance. Although many of the benefits of beauty are small — a slightly higher salary offer, a better performance evaluation — the romantic benefits are larger and more consistent. Good-looking people on average have more sexual opportunities and partners.
Could this create a sense among attractive people that anything goes when it comes to sex? Could it make them less inclined to value sexual purity? And might sexually experienced people belittle the moral costs of sex to feel better about their own past conduct? If so, we would expect attractive people to be the most tolerant on issues such as premarital sex, gay marriage or abortion.
But you could also argue the opposite.
Higher salaries and greater success in the job market might pull good-looking people toward more conservative views about taxes or economic justice.
Because conservatives, on average, dislike sexual freedom more than liberals do, identifying with conservatives for economic reasons — or simply moving in conservative social circles — might make the beautiful less tolerant about sex-related issues. Along these lines, studies have found that good looks are associated with conservatism among politicians.
Attractiveness could then plausibly be associated with higher or lower standards for which sexual activities are morally acceptable. Or the two arguments could cancel each other out, as one study of college students suggested.
To explore this issue further, I turned to two surveys of Americans’ views: the General Social Survey from 2016 and the American National Election Studies from 1972.
Both surveys, carried out more than 40 years apart, were administered face to face. And, unusually, both studies asked the person administering the survey to evaluate the respondent’s looks on a one-to-five scale. (The respondent didn’t see the score. The study’s designers weren’t that cruel or heedless of social awkwardness.)
This measure of beauty isn’t rigorous, but it does resemble quick personal judgments made in everyday life. Moreover, the decades-long gap between the studies provided some sense of whether effects persisted across a generation’s worth of cultural change.
The surveys also asked about legal and moral standards relevant to sex, such as how restrictive abortion laws should be, whether gay marriage should be legal and about the acceptability of premarital, extramarital and gay sex.
In both studies, the better-looking seem more relaxed about sexual morality. For instance, in the data from 2016, 51% of those whose looks were rated above average said a woman who wants an abortion for any reason should legally be allowed to have one. Only 42% of those with below-average looks said the same. This nine-point difference increased to 15 points when accounting for factors such as age, education, political ideology and religiosity were taken into account.
This pattern repeated for almost all questions. The one exception was a question about when adultery was morally acceptable. Almost all respondents said “never” to that; there were no differences between the more and the less attractive.
If past experience is what makes beautiful people more tolerant toward issues such as abortion and gay marriage, we would not expect them to be notably more tolerant about matters in which looks don’t apply. This proves to be true. Good-looking respondents in these surveys aren’t noticably more open, for example, to the legal right to die or to accepting civil disobedience.
These results are consistent with other findings, showing that getting away with violating norms can make you more casual about those norms in the future. Whether in white-collar crime, police violence or international human-rights violations, those who pull off one questionable action often become more willing to justify doing the same, or perhaps even a little more, in the future.
The same could be said for sex. If you’ve have a lot of sexual experiences in the past, it may colour your attitudes toward the vast range of sexual possibilities — even those that don’t directly apply to your own sexuality or personal experience.
Robert Urbatsch is an associate professor of political science at Iowa State University. This edited article was first published in The Conversation
