Gender and Priming of Facial Attractiveness : A Lab-in-the-field Experiment on Dishonesty

In a recent study, Wang et al. (2017) tested whether the presence of an attractive female face would influence men's honesty, finding that men tended to behave more honestly when presented with photos of attractive female faces than when presented with plain looking facial images. Using a different experimental design to detect dishonesty, the present paper reports the results of a study on whether women behave as honestly as men in the presence of an attractive female face. The results confirm Wang et al.’s finding that men tend to behave more honestly when they perceive an image of a beautiful female face. However, our results show that women display an opposite pattern of behavior, acting more dishonestly when presented with a highly attractive facial image than when presented with a less attractive one. While Wang et al. concluded that beauty brings out goodness in people, the present study finds that this statement holds only when beauty is perceived by men. A possible explanation for women's greater dishonesty in the presence of an attractive female face is a negative emotional priming of jealousy and envy