Does beauty matter? Exploring the relationship between self-consciousness and physical attractiveness

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between self-consciousness and physical attractiveness from a psychological perspective, examining the relationship of physical attractiveness with the three dimensions of self-consciousness.

Design/methodology/approach

The research involved investigating the relationship between self-consciousness and physical attractiveness, focusing on how the three self-consciousness dimensions (i.e., private self-consciousness, public self-consciousness and social anxiety) affected physical attractiveness. Clustering techniques using self-organizing maps of data mining and decision trees were used in this study. The primal concept of clustering entails grouping unsorted and disorganized raw data and arranging data with similar properties into clusters. Classification primarily involves establishing classification models according to the category attributes of existing data. These models can be used to predict the classes of new data and determine interdata relationships and data characteristics.

Findings

Public self-consciousness was most strongly related to physical attractiveness, whereas the other two dimensions exhibited no obvious relationship to physical attractiveness. It may be concluded that people with higher physical attractiveness draw attention from others more easily and are more likely to be evaluated positively, and that they thus tend to be more confident in front of others and less likely to care about the opinions of others. Alternatively, perhaps people with lower public self-consciousness care less about how others view them and have the courage to express themselves, which signifies confidence and increases their physical attractiveness.

Practical implications

This research investigated the importance of self-consciousness that may apply to recruitment in practice. People with low public self-consciousness may have high confidence and efficiency. People have low social anxiety may not be nervous or anxious in public and easy to speak to strangers. This kind of employees are appropriate for the jobs involving team work and interaction such as public relations. Hence, companies can apply our findings to search appropriate employees except the first impression of appearance.

Originality/value

The results revealed that high physical attractiveness is related to low public self-consciousness, whereas low physical attractiveness is related to high public self-consciousness. Good-looking people tend to attract attention from others. The relationship between private self-consciousness and physical attractiveness is non-significant. The relationship between social anxiety and physical attractiveness is non-significant.

Citation

Chang, W.-L. (2019), "Does beauty matter? Exploring the relationship between self-consciousness and physical attractiveness", Kybernetes, Vol. 48 No. 3, pp. 362-384. https://doi.org/10.1108/K-12-2017-0494