Surveys and tests: How intelligence affects the perception of one’s own appearance

Beauty is known to be in the eye of the observer, so it is perceived individually and subjectively. Whether and how general intelligence influences the assessment of one’s own physical attractiveness, scientists from Norway research and come to a surprising conclusion.

How you assess your own attractiveness could also depend on intelligence. This was discovered by a research duo of BI Norwegian Bussiness School using two partial studies. Previous studies have focused on the influence of personality traits such as self-confidence on the evaluation of one’s own attractiveness.

A total of 1091 volunteers were recruited for the study. All are working-age professionals and come from different countries. Researchers investigated whether there is a statistical link between self-assessed attractiveness and various personality traits, educational attainment and ideological attitudes. All study participants were given the task of evaluating their own attractiveness on a scale of 0 to 100. A number of questions on personal characteristics were also asked.

The analysis of the data showed that men rated their own attractiveness higher than women. Graduates also reported higher scores on this question than those who did not have a university degree. The researchers found a connection between the importance of self-esteem and the assessment of one’s own attractiveness. Interestingly, age did not play a role in this self-assessment. Study participants who described themselves as optimistic also rated their own attractiveness as high.

In a further step, the intelligence should now be tested, which is not the same as the educational degree. 292 of the subjects therefore completed a computer-aided test on general cognitive performance. Among other things, it captured language comprehension, computing speed and spatial imagination.

When evaluating this data, a surprising result was also found for the researchers: Study participants who performed better in this test rated their own attractiveness rather lower than those who performed on average in the test. However, the researchers themselves emphasize, the finding is rather small after considering age, gender, educational attainment, optimism and personality. He says nothing about the actual appearance of the respondents and the survey on attractiveness comes from a single question, write the scientists-duo on the results, which were published in the journal "Evolutionary Psychology".

Nevertheless, it could be that people with higher general intelligence assess their physical attractiveness more realistically and thus more honestly, the scientists speculate. However, the study results cannot provide any conclusion as to whether and how the measured intelligence influences the self-image. Further research is needed for this.