People understate the importance of physical attractiveness, knowingly or unknowingly. One particularly interesting research procedure illustrates well the need to attend to research technicalities. It revealed people underreport the impact on them of another persons physical attractiveness, and there is a definite tendency “to intentionally underreport the impact of physical attractiveness.” Researchers asked participants, females (womens) in this study, to complete a self-reporting questionnaire concerning dating preferences that included questions about the importance of another persons physical attractiveness.
The design of this research project included a lie detector apparatus while completing questionnaires. While the researchers did not actually operate the lie detector apparatus, when subjects presumed that the researchers had connected them to an operating lie detector machine, these subjects provided significantly different questionnaire answers than when these same individuals presumed they were not connected. The research team concluded their data show people are capable of accurate introspection about the importance of physical attractiveness of another person, even though these people “intentionally underreport the impact of physical attractiveness.” Connecting a lie detector to subjects who assumed it to be functioning properly produced more accurate introspective reports than when not connected to lie detector. These subjects admitted more extreme influence by physical attractiveness of stimulus persons and endorsed more extreme (lower) dating desirability ratings for physically unattractive men. Likewise, when connected to a lie detector they assumed was functioning, gave ratings that consistently preferred physically attractive men to such an extent that researchers found physical attractiveness in this study to be the single most influential variable of preferences by subjects for stimulus persons.
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