A beautiful face is good when we’re judged by others, a moral character is better

Moral beauty, reflected in one’s actions, and facial beauty both affect how we are judged. Here, we investigated how moral and facial beauty interact to affect social judgments and emotional responses, employing event-related brain potentials (ERPs). All participants (female) associated positive, neutral, or negative verbal information with faces scoring high or low on attractiveness and performed ratings of the faces as manipulation checks. In a separate test phase, the faces were presented again, and participants made valenced social judgments of the persons. Results show a dominance of moral beauty in valenced social judgments as well as ERPs related to reflexive and evaluative emotional responses (early posterior negativity and late positive potential), whereas facial attractiveness mattered little. In contrast, facial attractiveness affected visual processing (N170). Similarly, relatively shallow impressions of attractiveness and likability that require no knowledge about the person were influenced by both facial attractiveness and social-emotional information. This pattern of dominant effects of social-emotional information regardless of attractiveness shows that when it comes to our emotional responses and social judgments, moral beauty is what matters most, even in the face of physical beauty.