Addtionally, assessments of physical attractiveness are also influenced by assessments of other traits. Suppose you meet someone you think is a 10, but you discover that you cringe every time they open their mouth (to disambiguate, this a reference to the content of their speech, not their dentistry). Not only are you probably not going to want to be with that person, but your physical assessment is going to change. I don’t mean they will suddenly seem ugly, but probably they’ll be a 7 or 8, and you won’t be able to understand how you ever thought they were a 10 in the first place.
Another rating bias: people probably don’t use the rating scale uniformly.
I remember reading somewhere that when women rate men online, instead of “nice, medium, ugly” their rating is more like “nice, ugly, ugly” (the median guy is rated disproportionally low).
If this is true, then this bias could be partially corrected if the web would not display “your rating is 4.3 of 10”, but rather “your rating is higher than 70% of people in the same category”. Or if the site displays global statistics, you can locate yourself in the distribution curve.
You can find that on okCupid’s post about attractiveness. Women rate 80% of guys as worse-looking than medium, whereas male ratings are symmetric and fairly normalized.
Addtionally, assessments of physical attractiveness are also influenced by assessments of other traits. Suppose you meet someone you think is a 10, but you discover that you cringe every time they open their mouth (to disambiguate, this a reference to the content of their speech, not their dentistry). Not only are you probably not going to want to be with that person, but your physical assessment is going to change. I don’t mean they will suddenly seem ugly, but probably they’ll be a 7 or 8, and you won’t be able to understand how you ever thought they were a 10 in the first place.
Another rating bias: people probably don’t use the rating scale uniformly.
I remember reading somewhere that when women rate men online, instead of “nice, medium, ugly” their rating is more like “nice, ugly, ugly” (the median guy is rated disproportionally low).
If this is true, then this bias could be partially corrected if the web would not display “your rating is 4.3 of 10”, but rather “your rating is higher than 70% of people in the same category”. Or if the site displays global statistics, you can locate yourself in the distribution curve.
You can find that on okCupid’s post about attractiveness. Women rate 80% of guys as worse-looking than medium, whereas male ratings are symmetric and fairly normalized.