Teammate Attractiveness and Perceived Performance
From the moment a person is old enough to develop personal preferences, the saying “don’t judge a book by its cover” becomes commonplace. Even with this reminder, humans’ ability to overlook superficial, surface qualities may be limited by our own psychological inner workings. Research suggests that appearance is important in many, if not nearly all, aspects of life. It has been discovered that being psychically attractive influences people to judge the person in a positive light. Some researchers believe that external appearances act as an indicator about the quality of a person’s genes; unattractive people must have bad or unfavorable genes compared to an attractive person (Talamas, Mavor, …show more content…
The effect of viewing attractive people as better is referred to in this study as the halo effect. The authors examined how essays were graded when the papers were accompanied with what was said to be the author’s photograph. In reality, the photos used were either of an attractive woman or an unattractive woman and the essay being graded was either a good or bad sample. Despite reading the same essays, scores for the attractive author were higher than the unattractive author for both the well-written and poorly written essay. While this study provides a clear and significant demonstration of the halo effect, the evaluation of writing is subjective. The proposed study would examine the perceived performance compared to a concrete, quantifiable score of performance, by means of keeping score in the …show more content…
The other online player would actually be a confederate or even just a computer program that was designed to play the game either extremely well or poorly. The participant would be led to believe that their partner is either an attractive woman, an unattractive woman, or be given no information about their appearance for a control condition. The goal of the experiment would be to examine how a teammate’s performance is judged if the teammate is believed to be either attractive or unattractive. The two-person team would play a cooperative game of virtual whack-a-mole. The goal of the game would be for the team to eliminate a specific number of moles within a time limit. The online team member would either play extremely well (high accuracy and speed) or poorly (inaccurate and slow speed). After the game the participant would be asked to rate their teammate’s performance. The proposed experiment would involve a 2 X 3 factorial between-subject design with two levels of performance quality (highly skilled and poorly skilled) and three levels of attractiveness (attractive, unattractive, and
From the moment a person is old enough to develop personal preferences, the saying “don’t judge a book by its cover” becomes commonplace. Even with this reminder, humans’ ability to overlook superficial, surface qualities may be limited by our own psychological inner workings. Research suggests that appearance is important in many, if not nearly all, aspects of life. It has been discovered that being psychically attractive influences people to judge the person in a positive light. Some researchers believe that external appearances act as an indicator about the quality of a person’s genes; unattractive people must have bad or unfavorable genes compared to an attractive person (Talamas, Mavor, …show more content…
The effect of viewing attractive people as better is referred to in this study as the halo effect. The authors examined how essays were graded when the papers were accompanied with what was said to be the author’s photograph. In reality, the photos used were either of an attractive woman or an unattractive woman and the essay being graded was either a good or bad sample. Despite reading the same essays, scores for the attractive author were higher than the unattractive author for both the well-written and poorly written essay. While this study provides a clear and significant demonstration of the halo effect, the evaluation of writing is subjective. The proposed study would examine the perceived performance compared to a concrete, quantifiable score of performance, by means of keeping score in the …show more content…
The other online player would actually be a confederate or even just a computer program that was designed to play the game either extremely well or poorly. The participant would be led to believe that their partner is either an attractive woman, an unattractive woman, or be given no information about their appearance for a control condition. The goal of the experiment would be to examine how a teammate’s performance is judged if the teammate is believed to be either attractive or unattractive. The two-person team would play a cooperative game of virtual whack-a-mole. The goal of the game would be for the team to eliminate a specific number of moles within a time limit. The online team member would either play extremely well (high accuracy and speed) or poorly (inaccurate and slow speed). After the game the participant would be asked to rate their teammate’s performance. The proposed experiment would involve a 2 X 3 factorial between-subject design with two levels of performance quality (highly skilled and poorly skilled) and three levels of attractiveness (attractive, unattractive, and