Children's Judgments of Others Across Time: The Role of Attractiveness and Gender

Research has shown that there is a preference for attractive faces as early as infancy (Langlois, Ritter, Roggman & Vaughn, 1991). The current study built on those findings to determine whether children’s judgments of others would be influenced by attractiveness. This study not only looked at judgments of present characteristics, but also asked children to look forward to the future in making their judgments as well. Fifty-four children with a mean age of 9.2 yrs. participated in this study. They were presented with four faces (two male and two female, one of each rated high and low for attractiveness). With each face, the children were presented with statements describing various character traits and future outcomes of the person in the picture (such as "This person is popular" or, in the future "This person will be married"). Children indicated whether they agreed or disagreed with each statement, and how strongly. They were also provided with six occupations that they were asked to rank from most to least likely to be the occupation of each face in the future. In addition, parents rated their children on a sociability scale adopted from Buss and Plomin’s theory of temperament. As hypothesized, children made more positive judgments about the attractive faces compared to unattractive faces on nearly all items, both present and future. Additionally, as expected, results showed that the gender of the faces determined children’s judgments of possible future occupations, leading them to make decisions based on gender stereotypes. Children’s sociability, however, was not related to their judgments about faces. The results from this study suggest that even in childhood, people make judgments of others based on attractiveness. Further, these judgments carry into the future, suggesting that the impressions we form of other people are stable across time.