You Only Think He's Hot Because Your Friends Do
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What is more troubling, the fact that your idea of hot is actually just based on what other people think, or the fact that the site Hot or Not? still exists and has furthermore been moderately useful to academic research? Either way, hotness remains eternally up for debate, and this is probably the most troubling fact of all.
A new study in Advances and Consumer Research suggests that perceptions of hotness are contagious, and though you may think you are a singular judge of beauty drawing on your own wild, original standards for aesthetically pleasing features, you’re really just a lemming who knows what other people like. So, unable to carve your own path, you thumbs-up the same hotness as everyone else, keeping your place in the assembly line of approval. You probably answered pizza as your favorite food on every yearbook quiz until you were 17. Probably so you’ll fit in. Probably because you care too much what people think! I’m making up these last parts, but really, what else could it be? We want to be liked; we want the people we like to be liked. If we like a garbage non-hot person, what will our friends think? How will others gauge our success in the world if we don’t present a validly hot specimen on our arms?
Back to the study: Jesse Singal over at Science of Us writes that, using photos from hotornot.com, attractiveness ratings, and new, lab-generated ratings of photos from the site, researchers gauged how participants rated the hotness of people in pictures depending on whether they were exposed to other people’s ratings. Singal writes:
The researchers found that when people saw ratings after making their own judgment, in subsequent judgments they got closer and closer to other people’s overall average rating of that photo. In other words — and I’m making up the specific numbers — if on the first photo they ranked they were off by 2 points on a 10-point scale as compared to the average, by the 20th photo they were off by, on average, 1.25 points.
In other words, the participants got up to speed pretty quickly on how hotness was being measured, and they eventually complied.