of Employment Suitability: Tracking Down the “Beauty is Beastly ” Effect

ABSTRACT. The “what is beautiful is good ” heuristic suggests that physically attractive persons benefit from their attractiveness in a large range of situations, including percep-tions of employment suitability. Conversely, the “beauty is beastly ” effect suggests that attractiveness can be detrimental to women in certain employment contexts, although these findings have been less consistent than those for the “what is beautiful is good” effect. The current research seeks to uncover situations in which beauty might be detri-mental for female applicants. In two studies, we found that attractiveness can be detrimen-tal for women applying for masculine sex-typed jobs for which physical appearance is perceived as unimportant. THE “WHAT IS BEAUTIFUL IS GOOD ” heuristic suggests that physically attractive individuals are attributed other unrelated, positive characteristics as a result of their attractiveness (Dion, Berscheid, & Walster, 1972; Hatfield & Sprecher, 1986). Support for this hypothesis has been found in meta-analyses of both social psychological research (Eagly, Ashmore, Makhijani, & Longo, 1991) and indus-trial/organizational psychological research (Hosoda, Stone-Romero, & Coats, 2003). Physically attractive individuals are seen as more likely to achieve succes