Sunday, April 13, 2014

Free for All; Initial Attraction

http://psypress.co.uk/smithandmackie/resources/topic.asp?topic=ch11-tp-01

 This article summarizes a chapter on Physical attractiveness and initial attraction, and how they coincide with each other. It talks about the reasons that we often gravitate towards and/or like physically attractive people more than average people. It goes on to say that interactions with attractive people are often more positive and overall more pleasant. I strongly disagree with this, in my personal experience I have often found that physically attractive people may be harder to approach/ less pleasant to interact with. Many people have been treated differently their entire life purely because of the way they look, and that has dramatic effects on what they think is normal social behavior.
I have also found that people who are considered unattractive or average looking are very often some of the nicest, positive people I have ever met. This is not to say that attractive people are mean and ugly people are nice, because nothing is as black and white as that. But to say that interacting with attractive people is more pleasant is a very misleading/ misinformed opinion.
It also raises an interesting point about attractive people being more successful in general, which I think is unfortunately true in todays society. I wonder if it has always been this way, were attractive people always at an advantage for employment/ social gain? Or has this mindset slowly permeated our society over the years due to the unrealistic glorification of people in our media?

No comments:

Post a Comment