Are people who are highly physically attractive truly happy?
Are people who are highly physically attractive truly happy?
It is sometimes said that appearance makes up 90% of the person. In psychology this is known as the halo effect, where people who excel in a particular area tend to be thought of as excelling in other areas as well.
I think that when we see a good-looking person and feel jealous of them, it is because we start presuming that their wonderful looks must mean that they lead a happier life, as they have lots of friends, are successful in romantic exploits, are smart, have excellent social skills, and so on. But do these people really have a happy life?
Good-looking people are not as happy as we think?
The paper I discuss today summarizes a selection of research about the relationship between physical attractiveness and personality characteristics and investigates whether attractive people have it great in terms of their personality and their daily life, as a matter of fact.
The results show that it is true that people who are objectively physically attractive excel intellectually, socially, and mentally, but the difference is only slight. Interestingly, the correlation coefficient between objective and subject physical attraction was only about 0.2, showing a weak correlation, which demonstrates that attractive people are not as aware of their own beauty as other people think.
More interesting is that this shows that people who subjectively think that they are physically attractive are significantly more sociable and more popular.
In other words, good-looking people are not as happy as people think, and rather, it is people who think they are good-looking who are happy, so perhaps happiness comes from misunderstanding.
