Shared brain activity for aesthetic and moral judgments: implications for the Beauty-is-Good stereotype

The Beauty-is-Good stereotype refers to the assumption that attractive people possess sociably desirable personalities and higher moral standards. The existence of this bias suggests that the neural mechanisms for judging facial attractiveness and moral goodness overlap, i.e., they are circumscribed to the same brain regions. The hypothesis of this overlap was investigated by Tsukiura and Cabeza1 and published in the March 2010 issue of the Journal of Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. The research participants were scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging while they made attractiveness judgments about faces and goodness judgments about hypothetical actions. Activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex increased as a function of both attractiveness and goodness ratings, whereas activity in the insular cortex decreased with both attractiveness and goodness ratings. These activations support the idea of similar contributions of each region to both judgments. The orbitofrontal and insular cortices were negatively correlated with each other, suggesting an opposing relationship between these regions during attractiveness and goodness judgments. These findings have implications for understanding the neural mechanisms of the Beautyis-Good stereotype. People judged to be physically attractive often have their personality also judged positively, be it as a person of good conduct, virtuous or even honest. One is capable of, at first sight, considering another human being attractive or unattractive while at the same time assigning values to that person. The study suggests a possible explanation for this fact since the same neural mechanisms are activated or deactivated during these types of assessments. So, perhaps now, we can explain why, when a person is seen as beautiful, they are likewise seen as good. In other words, how beauty becomes goodness. W h a t ́ s n e W i n D e n t i s t r y