100 Humans

Given that quarantine has limited my face to face social interactions, I have filled that void with plenty of Netflix. I stumbled upon this show, 100 Humans, that basically conducts a series of social psych experiments on 100 random humans. While many of their experiments would not be IRB approved as they often fail to minimize harm or have large enough sample sizes to be statistically significant, some of their findings are still very interesting. One of the episodes focused on attraction. One of their research questions was “will someone who is good looking receive lighter jail sentences?” As it turns out, the participants in their study did, on average, recommend lighter jail sentences for more attractive people in the same made up scenario. While this is a made-up scenario, I can definitely think of times in my life that I gave someone who I found attractive a benefit of the doubt that I probably wouldn’t have given someone I didn’t find attractive. Furthermore, even knowing that they were guilty of something, I am more likely to attribute their behavior to their situation than them just being a bad person. For example, one of my roommates had a girlfriend who treated him very poorly, but found her very attractive. While he couldn’t deny that she was often mean to him, he would often justify her behavior by saying something like she’s just under a lot of stress, rather than attributing her behavior to her own disposition.

Another interesting study that the show conducted found that people are more likely to find someone attractive when you look at them longer. While I understand that this is a finding that has been replicated, I wonder if there is more at play than just finding a familiar face more attractive. I remember earlier in the semester discussing that faces that are more familiar we view as more normal. Given this I suspect it’s possible that people we are initially unattracted to, we become more attracted to with familiarity, I think it’s at least possible that very attractive people we will see as slightly less attractive overtime. This could explain the feeling of looking back on a crush that we had in high school and wonder “what were we thinking?”