Judging physical attractiveness: Effects of judges’ own attractiveness

Judges rated the physical attractiveness of others from pho-tographs and were themselves photographed and rated on phy-sical attractiveness. Male and female judges gave similar ratings to attractive targets, but when rating unattractive targets, male judges showed assimilation effects and female judges showed contrast effects. Assimilation produces a pos-itive correlation between judge’s own attractiveness and at-tractiveness ratings assigned to others; contrast produces a negative correlation between judges ’ own attractiveness and attractiveness ratings assigned to others. Sex of the per-sons being rated had no effect. Data were graphically pre-sented as 3-dimensional surfaces generated by a computer mapping program. Physical attractiveness has recently come into its own as an inde-pendent variable in social psychological research (Berscheid & Walster