Pretty Smart? Why We Equate Beauty With Truth

Pretty Smart? Why We Equate Beauty With Truth





With some regularity we hear about the latest beauty-pageant contestant who has responded to a softball of a question with an epic fail of a mistake, a bizarre opinion or an incoherent ramble. There's the Panamanian contestant who believed that Confucius invented
the philosophy of 'Confusion, ' the Miss Hawaii who described the U.S. only in terms of the 'rocky shores' and 'sandy beaches' of Hawaii, and the Miss South Carolina Teen USA who explained that Americans don't know enough geography because too many people
can't afford maps.





Ridiculous. But what's even more ridiculous is that our brains bias us toward believing such people -- just because they're good-looking.





The German poet Friedrich Schiller wrote, 'Physical beauty is the sign of an interior beauty, a spiritual and moral beauty.' His belief seems odd if you've ever seen a portrait of Schiller: His prominent schnozzola would have knocked him out of the 1788 edition
of People Magazine's 'Sexiest Man Alive.'





In the years since, research has shown that from an early age -- in both sexes and across numerous cultures -- attractive people are judged to be smarter, kinder, more honest and trustworthy. Obviously, our bias toward thinking that 'what is beautiful is good'
makes for some bad mating decisions.





In politics, we are also more likely to believe and vote for people who are attractive. Ditto for hiring them. And when it comes to ostensibly blind justice, numerous studies from the 1970s through '90s found that more-attractive individuals are less likely
to be convicted of crimes and, if convicted, receive shorter-than-average sentences for the crime.





Why should this be? Some have suggested that since it is pleasurable to meet someone attractive and someone good and honest, we unconsciously conflate the two. But this convergence of rewarding experiences seems dubious. After all, few of us intermix the pleasure
of, say, reading about the triumph of the abolitionist movement with the pleasure of taking a bubble bath and eating a box of Twinkies.





Instead, it seems that the brain confuses the metaphorical and the literal -- a fairly common sort of error, because brain regions often multitask. The same region, for instance, is involved in processing physical and emotional pain and in 'feeling' someone
else's pain. Another brain region is central to both gustatory disgust (responding to the taste of rotten food with reflexes that make you feel sick to your stomach) and moral disgust (responding to some appalling act by making you feel sick to your stomach).





Work by Takashi Tsukiura and Roberto Cabeza of Duke University shows something similar with looks: The medial orbitofrontal cortex of the brain is involved in rating both the beauty of a face and the goodness of a behavior, and the level of activity in that
region during one of those tasks predicts the level during the other. In other words, the brain does similar things when contemplating beautiful minds, hearts or cheekbones. And it assumes that cheekbones tell you something about minds and hearts.





It's a discouraging finding. But there's also some good news in this story: The brain can get confused in both directions. In other words, the same neural wiring that gives rise to 'What is beautiful is good' also generates 'What is good is beautiful.'





In studies by Sampo Paunonen of the University of Western Ontario, heterosexual subjects of both genders viewed pictures of people of the opposite sex, described as having varying degrees of intelligence, independence and honesty. Degrees of independence and
intelligence had no effect on their ratings of attractiveness. But people who were described as being more honest were rated as more likable, and the more likable, the more physically attractive.

It seems that things even out in the end. On the one hand, we're more likely to believe that the earth is flat just because a beauty queen says so. But on the other hand, people are more likely to see that the goodness of Mother Teresa or Gandhi is beautiful.

I don't know whether will i believe or not......recently,there are many things  happened around me confirm it looks like ...true~   H.C