Presenter(s): Kylie Davis
Faculty Mentor(s): Sanjay Srivastava & Cory Costello
Poster 100
Session: Social Sciences & Humanities
People share information about others’ personalities via gossip, but little is known about what affects these impressions formed via gossip (i.e., hearsay reputations). We investigated the effect of targets’ physical attractiveness on hearsay reputations, assessing whether attractiveness’ effects on direct (face-to-face) impressions (e.g., Lorenzo et al., 2010) carry over through gossip. Across 2 studies, 629 undergraduates participated in groups of 3 or 4. Two participants got to know one another (target/P1), each told a new participant (P2) about the person they had just met, and then they rated each other. Physically attractive people were seen as more conscientious, less neurotic, and more extraverted by P1s (|β’s| from .13 to .18; p’s < .01), replicating the link between attractiveness and more positive impressions. This tendency was only partly carried over to P2s, who rated physically attractive targets as only more Extraverted (β = .09, p < .05; other |β’s| ≤ .05). Finally, targets’ attractiveness did not influence consensus between P1 and P2 (|β’s| ≤ .05). Attractiveness thus appears to more greatly impact direct face-to-face impressions than hearsay reputations.