A preview of this full-text is provided by American Psychological Association.
Content available from Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
This content is subject to copyright. Terms and conditions apply.
Journal
of
Personality
and
Social
Psychology
1979, Vol.
37, No. 8,
1387-1397
Communicator
Physical
Attractiveness
and
Persuasion
Shelly Chaiken
University
of
Toronto,
Toronto,
Canada
In a field
setting, physically
attractive
or
unattractive male
and
female com-
municator-subjects delivered
a
persuasive
message
to
target-subjects
of
each
sex. Results indicated
that
attractive
(vs. unattractive) communicators induced
significantly
greater
persuasion
on
both
a
verbal
and
behavioral measure
of
target agreement.
In
addition, female
targets
indicated
greater
agreement than
did
male
targets.
Data
gathered
from communicator-subjects during
an
earlier
laboratory session indicated
that
physically
attractive
and
unattractive com-
municators
differed
with respect
to
several
communication skills
and
other
attributes relevant
to
communicator persuasiveness, including grade point
av-
erage, Scholastic Aptitude
Test
scores,
and
several
measures
of
self-evaluation.
These
findings
suggest
that
attractive
individuals
may be
more persuasive than
unattractive persons
partly
because
they
possess characteristics
that
dispose
them
to be
more
effective
communicators.
Experimental
evidence regarding
the
effect
of
communicator physical attractiveness
on
persuasion
is
equivocal. Although
two
studies
have
demonstrated that attractiveness
can
significantly
enhance
a
male communicator's
persuasiveness with both male
and
female
message
recipients (Horai, Naccari,
&
Fatoul-
lah,
1974;
Snyder
&
Rothbart, 1971),
the
majority
of
published experiments have
failed
to
obtain
significant
attractiveness
effects
or
have obtained interactions between attractive-
ness
and
other variables (Chaiken,
Eagly,
Sejwacz,
Gregory,
&
Christensen, 1978; Mills
&
Aronson,
1965;
Blass,
Alperstein,
&
Block,
Note
1). For
example, Mills
and
Aronson
(196S),
using
a
female communicator
and
male
recipients,
found
no
overall
effect
of
communicator
attractiveness
on
persuasion.
The
author
is
grateful
to
Alice
H.
Eagly,
Jonathan
L.
Freedman,
and an
anonymous reviewer
for
their
comments
on an
earlier draft
of
this manuscript,
and
to
John
W. Fee
III, Herschl Forman, Gerry
Johnson, John Keenan,
and
Aaron Moscoe
for
their
assistance during various phases
of the
research.
A
preliminary
version
of
this
article
was
presented
at
the
meeting
of the
Eastern
Psychological Association,
Washington, D.C., 1978.
Requests
for
reprints should
be
sent
to
Shelly
Chaiken, Department
of
Psychology, University
of
Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
MSS
1A1.
However,
on a
marginally
significant
basis,
they
did find
that
the
communicator's expres-
sion
of a
desire
to
influence
recipients
en-
hanced
her
persuasiveness when
she was at-
tractive
but not
when
she
was
unattractive.
Blass, Alperstein,
and
Block (Note
1), who
also studied
a
female
communicating
to
male
recipients,
found
that communicator attrac-
tiveness
and
race interacted
to
affect
opinions.
A
white communicator
was
more persuasive
if
attractive than
if
unattractive, whereas
a
black
communicator
was
more persuasive
if
unattractive.
Finally,
one
experiment reported
by
Chaiken, Eagly, Sejwacz, Gregory,
and
Christensen
(1978) indicated that
the
persua-
sive
impact
of
attractive communicators
de-
pended both
on the
sexual composition
of the
communicator-recipient dyad
and on
whether
recipients anticipated interacting with
the
communicator.
Their second experiment,
which
employed
the
identical stimulus mate-
rials
but
utilized
a
somewhat
different
cover
story, yielded
no
significant
persuasion
find-
ings
involving
the
attractiveness variable,
however.
All
of
these experiments were conducted
in
laboratory settings
and all
employed experi-
mental manipulations
of
communicator
at-
tractiveness.
The
majority
of
studies have
Copyright 1979
by
the
American
Psychological
Association,
Inc. 0022-3514/79/3708-1387$00.7S
1387
