Psychologica~lReports, 1975, 36, 579-586. @ Psychological Reports 1975
SELF-DISCLOSURE CORRELATES OF PHYSICAL ATTRACTIVENESS: AM EXPLORATORY STUDY1 THOMAS F. CASH2
Old Dominion University
AND
DEBORAH SOLOWAY
George Pedbody College
Summary.-24 male and 24 female college students .were paired randomly to form stranger dyads and were asked to prepare and exchange topic-guided self-descriptions. Self-descriptive protocols were scored for breadth and content of self-disclosures, and relationships were assessed lxcween subjects' disclosure indices and their self-rated and partner-rated levels of physical attractiveness. As expected, the two attractiveness ratings were weakly though significantly related. The more attractive their self-perceptions, the more men disclosed and the more favorable their disclosures were apt to be. In contrast, the more attractive t h e women regarded themselves, the less self-information they revealed. Disclosure was positively associated with partner-rated attractiveness, particularly for the men. Results were discussed in the context of possible developmental consequences of physical attractiveness on intra- and interpersonal processes.
Recent social psychological research has demonstrated that the physical attractiveness of an individual exerts substantial influence on a variety of interpersonal processes (Berscheid & Walster, 1974). Far from residing in the idiosyncratic eyes of the beholder, judgments of attractiveness typically yield reliability indices of approximately .70, depending on the method and conditions of the judgmental task (Berscheid & Walster, 1974). Physical attractiveness is clearly a significant linear predictor of heterosexual liking (Berscheid, Dion, Walster, & Walster, 1971; Walster, Aronson, Abrahams, & Rotunan, 1966). Furthermore, manipulating attractiveness via photographs validated on their physical stimulus values, several researchers have demonstrated the existence of a stereotype of physical attractiveness for both sexes. Socially desirable traits, e.g., modesty, strengrh, sociability, sensitivity, and achievements, e.g., occupational prestige, marital success, are more likely to be attributed to attractive than to unattractive men and women (Dion, Berscheid, & Walster, 1972; Miller, 1770). The more favorable evaluations elicited by attractive individuals extend to judgments of actual performances as well. Landy and Sigall (1974) demonstrated that the physical attractiveness of the presumed authors of essays significantly influenced ratings of essay quality; attractive authors received the most favorable ratings, unattractive authors the least favorable, and ratings were inter'This study represents the post boc analyses portion of the first author's dissertation s u b mimed in ~ a r t i a lfulfillment of the requirements for the Ph.D. at Georae Peabodv College. ~ k h v i l l e , ' ~ e n n e s s e e . Appreciation i; expressed to Paul R. Dokedci fzr his valiable cgn: tributions as the first author's major professor. 'Reprint requescs should be sent to Thomas F. Cash, Department of Psychology, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia 23508.
580
T. F. CASH
&
D. SOLOWAY
mediate when the author's appearance was unknown. Cash, Begley, McCown, and Weise3 showed that the physical attractiveness of professional counselors may serve to elicit differential perceptions of clients and expectancies of therapeutic gain in accordance with the stereotype of physical attractiveness. Physical attractiveness is an important source of social influence on actual behavioral responsiveness. Sigall, Page, and Brown ( 1971) found that males expend greater physical effort to please or impress a good-looking female than they do a less attractive woman. Varying attractiveness cosmetically, Barocas and Karoly (1972) determined that, in simulated interaction with carefully constructed videotapes, men delivered more social reinforcement to a woman in an attractive as opposed to an unattractive condition. Examining the correlation between self-disclosure and the recipient's physical attractiveness, Cash (1974) found greater disclosure to more attractive strangers in same-sex peer dyads and more favorable self-presentations were given to more attractive opposire-sexed strangers. Few investigators have assessed the developmental consequences of such systematic differential responsiveness to levels of attractiveness. Research of this nature is reasonable particularly in view of evidence that the influence of physical attractiveness may begin sufficiently early to affect the popularity and socialization of young children (see Berscheid & Walster, 1974). Berscheid, Walster, and Campbell4 did find attractive women to express greater satisfaction with their degree of self-consciousness but less satisfaction with their degree of self-understanding. Moreover, relative to women of low or medium attractiveness, attractive college women have been shown to respond more favorably on some aspects of self-description to an experimenter (Kaats & Davis, 1970), to report more frequent romantic and sexual experience (Kaats & Davis, 1970), and to express less happiness as middle-aged women.4 Singer (1964) reported a moderate positive association between attractiveness and academic grades for first-born college females. Recently, Barocas and Vance (1974) found that counselors' judgments of the personal adjustment and prognosis of clients were significantly correlated with the clients' physical artractiveness. At issue in the latter two studies, however, is whether such differences between attractive and unattractive persons are veridical or simply reflect the application of an invalid physical attractiveness stereotype. Clearly needed, therefore, are additional investigations of behavioral differences among persons who differ in physical attractiveness. The present invesrigarion represents the post hoc examinarion of data col-
T F. Cash, P. J. Begley, D. A. McCown,
& B. C. Weise. When counselors are heard but not seen: initial impacr of physical artractiveness. (Unpublished manuscript, mimeo, 1974) 'E. Berscheid, E. Walster, & R. Campbell. Grow old along with me. (Unpublished manuscript, mimeo, 1972)
SELF-DlSUOSURE AND ATTRACTIVENESS
581
lected as a portion of the first author's aforementioned study of self-disclosure in the acquaintance process (Cash, 1974). While more attractive persons were found to receive greater disclosure, the coin's remaining- side is the current focus: namely, is an individual's physical attractiveness related to the amount and type of information which he reveals about himself to others?
METHOD Subjects Volunteers were recruited from a variety of undergraduate classes at two southern universities. The required sample consisted of 24 males and 24 females who were single, white, and between the ages of 1 8 and 25 yr. Subjects were paired randomly beyond the necessity that partners be unacquainted, i.e., recruited from different classes, and that their available times coincide for at least one 2-hr. period. Same-sex pairs (n = 24) always had an experimenter of their sex; for the opposite-sex pairs ( n = 2 4 ) , half had a male and half had a female experimenter. Materids and Procedure
On arrival the pair were introduced briefly and told they would be seeing more of each other shortly but would fill out some materials first. Escorted to separate rooms, the subjects received a written description of the research as a study of persons becoming acquainted and had an opportunity to decline further participation. All subjects agreed to continue. Each subject received a packet of "Acquaintance Questions" which constitute the Confidential Information QuestionnaireLa 31-item. open-ended questionnaire concerning the respondent's personal belnviors, feelings, attitudes, characteristics, and preferences. As an individual-difference mensure of self-disclosure the questionnaire possesses satisfactory internal consistenq, as indexed by a Cronbach's alpha of .73. In the present study this questionnaire was used as a technique for generating self-descriptions. Each subjea was asked to construct a self-description for his partner using only those questions which he wished to answer and simply throwing away those which, for whatever reason, he preferred not to answer. Subjects were told their answers could be as brief or extensive as they wished to communicate to their partner. Each question was written on a half sheet of paper which had carbon backing and was attached to a second sheet such that a copy of each question and answer was provided. The necessity for copies was explained generally in terms of "research purposes." Following completion, subjects were administered a questionnaire consisting of several 7-point, rating scales-including one to elicit the subject's rating of the partner's physical attractiveness and another to elicit the subject's assessment of his own physical attractiveness. Subjects were assured that these ratings were not to be communicated to their partners. Subsequent to the receipt of explicit instructions concerning the verbal exchange of self-descriptions, the partners were brought together and, in a predetermined random order, they read their self-descriprions to one another. The experimenter monitored this exchange from an adjacent observation room and used the copy to record any additions and deletions which occurred as partners read their self-descriptions from the original sheets. This procedure yielded two sets of self-disclosure dataanticipated disclosures and actual disclosures. While numerous ocher data were collected as a part of the larger scale project, they
6T.F. Cash. The Confidential Information Questionnaire: manual of administration and scoring.
(Unpublished manual, George Peabody College, 1972)
582
T. F. CASH
s: D.
SOLOWAY
fall outside the scope of the present report and the reader is referred to the dissermtion (Cash, 1974) for details.
Self-disclosure Indices The questionnaire was scored in terms of self-references produced. Self-references include descriptive statements which communicate information about the person and his overt and covert experiences. As outlined by Cash' and by Rogers (19601, three classes of self-referential statements (beginning with or including I, We, Me, or My) were scored in analyzing each subject's self-descriptive protocol: ( 1 ) Positive Self-references were those reflecting favorably on the subject, e.g., "I am a friendly person"; "I seldom feel anxious"; "I make good grades." ( 2 ) Negative Self-references were those reflecting unfavorably on the subject, e.g., "I have a terrible temper"; "I feel pretty insecure"; "I have cheated on exams." ( 3 ) Neutral or Ambiguous Self-references were neutral or not classifiable as either favorable or unfavorable, e.g.. "I like to read about history"; "Red is my favorite color"; "I am a sophomore"; "We went to Memphis." The sum of these three indices represents the Total Self-references. Three composite scores which represent the relative or ipsative indices of self-presentation were derived by dividing each self-reference score by the total. An additional index of the extent of "nondisclosure" was the number of items deleted. An assessment of the interjudge reliability of this scoring scheme was made. Cohen's Kappa ( 1 9 6 0 ) , a chance-corrected index of agreement for nominal classification. was .91, indicating a highly acceptable level of agreement ( p < ,001).
RESULTS~ Since modifications from anticipated to actual self-disclosure were negligible (Cash, 1974), comparable results for these two sets of data were obtained; therefore the Pearson correlations with physical attractiveness are reported for actual disclosure indices only. As expected based upon previous research findings (Berscheid, et al., 1971; Murstein, 1972; Stroebe, Insko, Thompson, & Layton, 1971), the self-ratings of physical attractiveness were weakly albeit significantly associated with the external ratings of physical attractiveness provided by the partner ( r = 31, df = 46, p < .05 ). The correlations of atuacciveness and disclosure were computed separately for the two ratings of attractiveness. As shown in the first column of Table 1, no significant rs were found across all subjects between the self-rating of attractiveness and the eight disclosure indices. Columns 2 and 3 present these correlations for males and females separately, showing clearly that the subjects' sex operated as a moderator variable in these attractiveness-disclosure relationships. The more attractive the males' self-perceptions, the more these subjects generally revealed about themselves ( r = .43, df = 22, p < .05). In particular, they were more apt to be positive about themselves-both in absolute amount of .01) and also in relation to their positive self-reference ( r = .65, df = 22, p total disclosuure (r = SO, df = 22, p < .O5). In addition, the more attractive
SELF-DISCLOSURE CORRELATES OF PHYSICAL ATTRACTIVENESS: AM EXPLORATORY STUDY1 THOMAS F. CASH2
Old Dominion University
AND
DEBORAH SOLOWAY
George Pedbody College
Summary.-24 male and 24 female college students .were paired randomly to form stranger dyads and were asked to prepare and exchange topic-guided self-descriptions. Self-descriptive protocols were scored for breadth and content of self-disclosures, and relationships were assessed lxcween subjects' disclosure indices and their self-rated and partner-rated levels of physical attractiveness. As expected, the two attractiveness ratings were weakly though significantly related. The more attractive their self-perceptions, the more men disclosed and the more favorable their disclosures were apt to be. In contrast, the more attractive t h e women regarded themselves, the less self-information they revealed. Disclosure was positively associated with partner-rated attractiveness, particularly for the men. Results were discussed in the context of possible developmental consequences of physical attractiveness on intra- and interpersonal processes.
Recent social psychological research has demonstrated that the physical attractiveness of an individual exerts substantial influence on a variety of interpersonal processes (Berscheid & Walster, 1974). Far from residing in the idiosyncratic eyes of the beholder, judgments of attractiveness typically yield reliability indices of approximately .70, depending on the method and conditions of the judgmental task (Berscheid & Walster, 1974). Physical attractiveness is clearly a significant linear predictor of heterosexual liking (Berscheid, Dion, Walster, & Walster, 1971; Walster, Aronson, Abrahams, & Rotunan, 1966). Furthermore, manipulating attractiveness via photographs validated on their physical stimulus values, several researchers have demonstrated the existence of a stereotype of physical attractiveness for both sexes. Socially desirable traits, e.g., modesty, strengrh, sociability, sensitivity, and achievements, e.g., occupational prestige, marital success, are more likely to be attributed to attractive than to unattractive men and women (Dion, Berscheid, & Walster, 1972; Miller, 1770). The more favorable evaluations elicited by attractive individuals extend to judgments of actual performances as well. Landy and Sigall (1974) demonstrated that the physical attractiveness of the presumed authors of essays significantly influenced ratings of essay quality; attractive authors received the most favorable ratings, unattractive authors the least favorable, and ratings were inter'This study represents the post boc analyses portion of the first author's dissertation s u b mimed in ~ a r t i a lfulfillment of the requirements for the Ph.D. at Georae Peabodv College. ~ k h v i l l e , ' ~ e n n e s s e e . Appreciation i; expressed to Paul R. Dokedci fzr his valiable cgn: tributions as the first author's major professor. 'Reprint requescs should be sent to Thomas F. Cash, Department of Psychology, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia 23508.
580
T. F. CASH
&
D. SOLOWAY
mediate when the author's appearance was unknown. Cash, Begley, McCown, and Weise3 showed that the physical attractiveness of professional counselors may serve to elicit differential perceptions of clients and expectancies of therapeutic gain in accordance with the stereotype of physical attractiveness. Physical attractiveness is an important source of social influence on actual behavioral responsiveness. Sigall, Page, and Brown ( 1971) found that males expend greater physical effort to please or impress a good-looking female than they do a less attractive woman. Varying attractiveness cosmetically, Barocas and Karoly (1972) determined that, in simulated interaction with carefully constructed videotapes, men delivered more social reinforcement to a woman in an attractive as opposed to an unattractive condition. Examining the correlation between self-disclosure and the recipient's physical attractiveness, Cash (1974) found greater disclosure to more attractive strangers in same-sex peer dyads and more favorable self-presentations were given to more attractive opposire-sexed strangers. Few investigators have assessed the developmental consequences of such systematic differential responsiveness to levels of attractiveness. Research of this nature is reasonable particularly in view of evidence that the influence of physical attractiveness may begin sufficiently early to affect the popularity and socialization of young children (see Berscheid & Walster, 1974). Berscheid, Walster, and Campbell4 did find attractive women to express greater satisfaction with their degree of self-consciousness but less satisfaction with their degree of self-understanding. Moreover, relative to women of low or medium attractiveness, attractive college women have been shown to respond more favorably on some aspects of self-description to an experimenter (Kaats & Davis, 1970), to report more frequent romantic and sexual experience (Kaats & Davis, 1970), and to express less happiness as middle-aged women.4 Singer (1964) reported a moderate positive association between attractiveness and academic grades for first-born college females. Recently, Barocas and Vance (1974) found that counselors' judgments of the personal adjustment and prognosis of clients were significantly correlated with the clients' physical artractiveness. At issue in the latter two studies, however, is whether such differences between attractive and unattractive persons are veridical or simply reflect the application of an invalid physical attractiveness stereotype. Clearly needed, therefore, are additional investigations of behavioral differences among persons who differ in physical attractiveness. The present invesrigarion represents the post hoc examinarion of data col-
T F. Cash, P. J. Begley, D. A. McCown,
& B. C. Weise. When counselors are heard but not seen: initial impacr of physical artractiveness. (Unpublished manuscript, mimeo, 1974) 'E. Berscheid, E. Walster, & R. Campbell. Grow old along with me. (Unpublished manuscript, mimeo, 1972)
SELF-DlSUOSURE AND ATTRACTIVENESS
581
lected as a portion of the first author's aforementioned study of self-disclosure in the acquaintance process (Cash, 1974). While more attractive persons were found to receive greater disclosure, the coin's remaining- side is the current focus: namely, is an individual's physical attractiveness related to the amount and type of information which he reveals about himself to others?
METHOD Subjects Volunteers were recruited from a variety of undergraduate classes at two southern universities. The required sample consisted of 24 males and 24 females who were single, white, and between the ages of 1 8 and 25 yr. Subjects were paired randomly beyond the necessity that partners be unacquainted, i.e., recruited from different classes, and that their available times coincide for at least one 2-hr. period. Same-sex pairs (n = 24) always had an experimenter of their sex; for the opposite-sex pairs ( n = 2 4 ) , half had a male and half had a female experimenter. Materids and Procedure
On arrival the pair were introduced briefly and told they would be seeing more of each other shortly but would fill out some materials first. Escorted to separate rooms, the subjects received a written description of the research as a study of persons becoming acquainted and had an opportunity to decline further participation. All subjects agreed to continue. Each subject received a packet of "Acquaintance Questions" which constitute the Confidential Information QuestionnaireLa 31-item. open-ended questionnaire concerning the respondent's personal belnviors, feelings, attitudes, characteristics, and preferences. As an individual-difference mensure of self-disclosure the questionnaire possesses satisfactory internal consistenq, as indexed by a Cronbach's alpha of .73. In the present study this questionnaire was used as a technique for generating self-descriptions. Each subjea was asked to construct a self-description for his partner using only those questions which he wished to answer and simply throwing away those which, for whatever reason, he preferred not to answer. Subjects were told their answers could be as brief or extensive as they wished to communicate to their partner. Each question was written on a half sheet of paper which had carbon backing and was attached to a second sheet such that a copy of each question and answer was provided. The necessity for copies was explained generally in terms of "research purposes." Following completion, subjects were administered a questionnaire consisting of several 7-point, rating scales-including one to elicit the subject's rating of the partner's physical attractiveness and another to elicit the subject's assessment of his own physical attractiveness. Subjects were assured that these ratings were not to be communicated to their partners. Subsequent to the receipt of explicit instructions concerning the verbal exchange of self-descriptions, the partners were brought together and, in a predetermined random order, they read their self-descriprions to one another. The experimenter monitored this exchange from an adjacent observation room and used the copy to record any additions and deletions which occurred as partners read their self-descriptions from the original sheets. This procedure yielded two sets of self-disclosure dataanticipated disclosures and actual disclosures. While numerous ocher data were collected as a part of the larger scale project, they
6T.F. Cash. The Confidential Information Questionnaire: manual of administration and scoring.
(Unpublished manual, George Peabody College, 1972)
582
T. F. CASH
s: D.
SOLOWAY
fall outside the scope of the present report and the reader is referred to the dissermtion (Cash, 1974) for details.
Self-disclosure Indices The questionnaire was scored in terms of self-references produced. Self-references include descriptive statements which communicate information about the person and his overt and covert experiences. As outlined by Cash' and by Rogers (19601, three classes of self-referential statements (beginning with or including I, We, Me, or My) were scored in analyzing each subject's self-descriptive protocol: ( 1 ) Positive Self-references were those reflecting favorably on the subject, e.g., "I am a friendly person"; "I seldom feel anxious"; "I make good grades." ( 2 ) Negative Self-references were those reflecting unfavorably on the subject, e.g., "I have a terrible temper"; "I feel pretty insecure"; "I have cheated on exams." ( 3 ) Neutral or Ambiguous Self-references were neutral or not classifiable as either favorable or unfavorable, e.g.. "I like to read about history"; "Red is my favorite color"; "I am a sophomore"; "We went to Memphis." The sum of these three indices represents the Total Self-references. Three composite scores which represent the relative or ipsative indices of self-presentation were derived by dividing each self-reference score by the total. An additional index of the extent of "nondisclosure" was the number of items deleted. An assessment of the interjudge reliability of this scoring scheme was made. Cohen's Kappa ( 1 9 6 0 ) , a chance-corrected index of agreement for nominal classification. was .91, indicating a highly acceptable level of agreement ( p < ,001).
RESULTS~ Since modifications from anticipated to actual self-disclosure were negligible (Cash, 1974), comparable results for these two sets of data were obtained; therefore the Pearson correlations with physical attractiveness are reported for actual disclosure indices only. As expected based upon previous research findings (Berscheid, et al., 1971; Murstein, 1972; Stroebe, Insko, Thompson, & Layton, 1971), the self-ratings of physical attractiveness were weakly albeit significantly associated with the external ratings of physical attractiveness provided by the partner ( r = 31, df = 46, p < .05 ). The correlations of atuacciveness and disclosure were computed separately for the two ratings of attractiveness. As shown in the first column of Table 1, no significant rs were found across all subjects between the self-rating of attractiveness and the eight disclosure indices. Columns 2 and 3 present these correlations for males and females separately, showing clearly that the subjects' sex operated as a moderator variable in these attractiveness-disclosure relationships. The more attractive the males' self-perceptions, the more these subjects generally revealed about themselves ( r = .43, df = 22, p < .05). In particular, they were more apt to be positive about themselves-both in absolute amount of .01) and also in relation to their positive self-reference ( r = .65, df = 22, p total disclosuure (r = SO, df = 22, p < .O5). In addition, the more attractive
