ABSTRACT
The Measure: "Participants posed for a photograph, for which they would receive $3.00 .... facial photographs were taken of each participant from a distance of 3 feet ... Participants were not warned in advance about being photographed so that they would not go out of their way to dress up or primp, thereby yielding a different look from their usual appearance. Physical attractiveness was rated by 57 students (27 men and 30 women) at a different university in the same part of the country. Because there were too many slides to be judged in a single session, the slides were randomly split into two sets. Each slide was rated by approximately half of the judges in sessions lasting approximately 50 minutes. To familiarize raters with the range of photographs, judges were first shown the entire set of slides to be rated. Actual ratings followed, with raters having 25 seconds to rate each slide. No communication was permitted during the session. Slides were grouped by sex, with half the judges seeing the male slides first and the other half seeing the female slides first. Two different random orders were used within each set. Judges were instructed to use their own standards of attractiveness and to rate slides of each target participant on a 1 (very unattractive) to 15 (very attractive) scale. In the analyses reported later in this article, the average rating of each slide was used. These averages were normally distributed and ranged from 2.09 to 12.16, with a mean of6.96 (SD = 2.05)."
