Attractive people are prone to act selfishly: Study

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It’s all about perception.

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People who think they are physically attractive are more likely to act selfishly.

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Those who look in the mirror and consider themselves hot stuff were found to act in their own interest and feel more entitled to special treatment.

Researchers out of South China Normal University surveyed more than 1,300 people to evaluate not only how good-looking they believe they are, but their levels of selfishness and entitlement.

“Our research suggests that instead of showing reciprocity by treating others nicely, attractive people tend to take those treatments for granted and believe that they are entitled to more,” said authors of the study, which was published in Evolution and Human Behavior.

“Avoiding these biases could be a fundamental solution to reducing self-interested behaviour among attractive individuals.”

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For the aptly named study, “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, I Deserve More Than All: Perceived Attractiveness and Self-Interested Behavior,” researchers wanted to find out whether being attractive can influence an individual’s behaviour.

“According to the self-fulfilling nature of ‘what is beautiful is good’ from social psychology, attractive individuals should internalize the positive stereotypes from perceivers and eventually develop positive behaviour as others expected, acting in a nice and selfless manner,” they noted.

“In contrast, the evolutionary perspective of attractiveness predicts that attractive individuals would act selfishly because of a sense of entitlement derived from their evolutionary advantage and bargaining power,” they added.

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The respondents – 1,174 Americans from the Amazon Mechanical Turk work-distribution website and 129 Chinese undergraduates – took part in five separate studies.

The studies were designed to manipulate participants into admitting how attractive they saw themselves and suss out any selfish actions.

The researchers analyzed the data and determined those who consider themselves more attractive had a higher sense of entitlement than those who don’t.