The Cultural Grounding of Personal Relationship: The Importance of Attractiveness in Everyday Life Stephanie L. Anderson and Glenn Adams University of Kansas Victoria C. Plaut University of Georgia Previous research has suggested that physically attractive people experience more positive life outcomes than do unattractive people. However, the importance of physical attractiveness in everyday life may vary depending on the extent to which different cultural worlds afford or require individual choice in the construction and maintenance of personal relationships. The authors hypothesized that attractiveness matters more for life outcomes in settings that promote voluntaristic-independent constructions of relationship as the product of personal choice than it does in settings that promote embedded- interdependent constructions of relationship as an environmental affordance. Study 1 examined self- reported outcomes of attractive and unattractive persons. Study 2 examined expectations about attractive and unattractive targets. Results provide support for the hypothesis along four dimensions: national context, relationship context, rural-urban context, and experimental manipulation of relationship con- structions. These patterns suggest that the importance of physical attractiveness documented by psycho- logical research is the product of particular constructions of reality. Keywords: attraction, physical attractiveness, personal relationship, culture, life outcomes Physical attractiveness is in high demand: Hollywood glorifies it, a vast array of products and services promise it, and Americans are buying it. In fact, Americans spend more each year on beauty prod- ucts and services than they do on education (“Pots of Promise,” 2003). Why is physical attractiveness so important? Research within social psychology suggests one possibility: Physical attractiveness matters for important life outcomes. Attractive adults receive more attention, positive social interaction, and help from others than do unattractive adults; in addition, they achieve greater occupational success, have more dating and sexual experience, are more popular, and—perhaps as a result of positive treatment— enjoy better physical and mental health (see Langlois et al., 2000, for a meta-analytic review). It is no wonder then that people in contemporary American settings devote so much time and attention to physical attractiveness. There is reason to believe that the emphasis on physical attrac- tiveness is a panhuman characteristic. Although some aspects of what is considered beautiful may vary across time and place, research suggests that standards of beauty are somewhat universal; that is, people tend to agree about who is and is not physically attractive, both within and across cultural and ethnic groups (Cun- ningham, Roberts, Barbee, Druen, & Wu, 1995; Zebrowitz, Mon- tepare, & Lee, 1993). Furthermore, research suggests that attrac- tiveness is an important consideration in mate preference across several diverse societies (Buss et al., 1990). Without denying a shared evolutionary basis for some determi- nants of attractiveness (e.g., symmetry; Rhodes, 2006) or a general preference for good-looking mates, this article approaches the phenomenon of attraction from a cultural perspective. Contrary to popular understandings, the point of a cultural perspective is not to demonstrate that phenomena vary “across cultures”; instead, the goal is to illuminate a process that is typically invisible in main- stream accounts: the extent to which psychological phenomena are not “just natural,” but reflect particular constructions of reality. In particular, we propose that attraction is especially important for life outcomes in worlds that promote constructions of relationship as the product of personal choice (Adams, Anderson, & Adonu, 2004; Giddens, 1991). To the extent that people experience rela- tionship as an agentic creation and expression of personal prefer- ences, attraction and other bases of preference loom large in relationship life. However, attraction may be less relevant in worlds that promote constructions of relationship as environmental affordance (Adams et al., 2004). To the extent that people expe- rience less agency in the construction of relationship, attraction and other bases of personal preference have less impact on life outcomes. Previous Research: Attractiveness Effects as a Stereotyping Phenomenon Research has documented a physical attractiveness stereotyping (PAS) effect: the tendency to evaluate physically attractive people more positively than physically unattractive people, especially for Stephanie L. Anderson and Glenn Adams, Department of Psychology, University of Kansas; Victoria C. Plaut, Department of Psychology, Uni- versity of Georgia. Study 2 is based on portions of a Master of Arts thesis submitted by Stephanie L. Anderson to the University of Kansas under the supervision of Glenn Adams. A grant to Glenn Adams from the University of Kansas New Faculty General Research Fund provided support for research in Ghana. For assistance with data collection, we thank Kwarteng Ofosuhene Mensah in Ghana, Erika Jones at the University of Kansas, and Steven Middleton and Richard L. Miller at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. We also thank members of the Culture and Psychology Research Group at the University of Kansas, who provided valuable suggestions for both the research and article. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Stephanie L. Anderson, Department of Psychology, University of Kansas, 1415 Jayhawk Boulevard, Lawrence, KS 66045-7556. E-mail: stephanie@ ku.edu Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Copyright 2008 by the American Psychological Association 2008, Vol. 95, No. 2, 352–368 0022-3514/08/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.95.2.352 352