Transcription
Why would you rate yourself on a scale of 1 to 10? 10. But I'm also an international pageant queen. You think others would agree? Yes. Yes. All right, let's see.
You may have seen the kind of video circulating TikTok or YouTube Shorts where people are just rating each other based on their looks. So when someone says you're a five, we don't usually take it as a flattering comment. And so what's the deal with that? Why is the physical attractiveness 1 to 10 rating scale so controversial?
Well, it's unclear when this concept of rating people's looks on a number scale first started, but it does seem to be quite a modern trend. Social media has also made it quite trendy to rate people's looks, almost as if it's a game. You'll find YouTube Shorts, TikToks, and even various subreddits all asking to rate each other's physical attractiveness, and people love this stuff too. It isn't even a fringe concept. The 1 to 10 rating scale—it's almost a standardized, unified way that we use to get the idea across of how physically attractive someone is. In simple speak, this is an attempt to boil down a person's physical attractiveness to a single communicable number: a 1, a 2, a 3, a 4, a 10, maybe even. And we can say that the majority of people would agree that the scale does a pretty poor job at communicating how physically attractive someone is because it's very one-dimensional. But there may be some other ways that we can use it effectively, which we'll cover in this video.
So in this video, let's try to talk about the 1 to 10 scale, break it down, and see if it actually holds true when trying to rate your own attractiveness. The basic premise behind the scale is to rate an individual's physical attractiveness apart from personality or other non-physical factors. A 10, in theory, should represent the most attractive people in the world, or the level of looks you'd see among the world's, say, top models. And yes, we use the word "top models" because they do exist, and social media has made that trend all the more obvious to everyone. There is an oversaturation of good-looking people. So the scope of what makes a nine or a 10 has, in theory, broadened and is a lot more accessible.
We can think back to as recent as the early 2000s where only 5% of people would be using social media, or in the common sense, it didn't even exist. And today, the number is more like 60% globally and about 90% in the US, according to Our World in Data article. That doesn't even factor in the great deal of hours that we actually spend on social media. And in theory, the amount of tens that we see now is a lot higher than ever before, almost like an attractiveness inflation. This is well documented, and we did make a video on this on TikTok, which covers the theory behind this. Being average-looking in your normal day-to-day life just doesn't seem to cut it anymore, even though most people around you are still mathematically average, or the mean of the population. You could certainly create unique 1 to 10 rating scales where you hear people say things like, "An LA 6 is a 10 elsewhere." We can also look at beauty standards in the West versus the East in terms of their differences in beauty culture, and there will certainly be some differences in the facial traits that are being preferred. Still, there is no doubt that the 1 to 10 rating scale, as a function of a linear scale today, is a lot less forgiving than it would have been 100 years ago. As we've explained on the channel before, if we really want to assign statistics to the rating scale, it would look a lot more like this. This is a Gaussian curve, or the normal bell curve, where most people fall right in the middle, around 4 to 6 out of 10. And we see this with almost all human traits: take height, weight, speed—all of them, generally like beauty, also have a normal distribution. And there's a good amount of sevens here and a few eights there, and above that is how it should work in theory. But there's also new research coming out showing that this scale could be skewed because of our reliance on plastic surgery, people having better nutrition, and in general, greater inequality between those who can afford to look good and those who cannot.
If you've watched our previous video on the topic, it also seems that when asked, most people rate themselves a 7 out of 10, and that mathematically cannot be the case without distributing this curve differently. Funnily enough, recent work by Cooper et al. shows this exact phenomenon. Frankly, we can call it delusion, but it applies to pretty much everyone, and it's not something we do to be spiteful or malicious. The study asked what university students would rate themselves from 1 to 10, and unsurprisingly, about one-third of the students gave themselves a seven, making it the most frequently chosen rating. The seven was also the most frequent rating chosen as the lowest rating that they would date at the same time. More than half of the students said a 10 was the highest attractiveness level they would date. And the men in the study really seem to stand firm on the importance of looks, while women said more personality-focused aspects. Like most people that are above a 7 tend to know and be conceited. "If he wasn't conceited, I'd be able to date him."
Everyone has their own interpretation of the 1 to 10 scale, where you often even see people rating themselves an 11. This is actually the first reason the scale doesn't do a good job of telling you how attractive you are. Two different people could have completely different perceptions of what a seven means to them. To one person, a seven could basically mean average look, but to another, it may mean that you're actually above average, which is the correct mathematical definition. However, there is also a fine line between trying to rate beauty and reducing people to a number based on their appearance, or a fixed perception. Like we've mentioned earlier, there is also not a single universal beauty standard. Even on this channel, we look at Western, Eastern, and perhaps some other micronations of beauty standards to better understand what we're talking about in context. Later in the video, we'll also try to break down how you can rate your own attraction accurately, but for now, let's look at some examples of how not to rate someone.
"Open your mouth, I need to see the teeth. A- you got a good face, but you need to get your teeth fixed. I'm going to give the face an A, fix the teeth, the body a nine, and the sex appeal a seven." The show "Are You Hot?" just took the idea of rating people and ran with it as the whole premise for their show. It featured some harsh comments from their judges and it seems to have shown no regard for people's feelings. Where judging someone's physical appearance is particularly sensitive because it is one of those things that is difficult to change, especially if we're talking about bone structure. Most importantly, the show is public, and it is difficult for a lot of people to accept. So what we can take away from this is that it's probably not a good idea to rate other people's appearances, especially if the rating comes from overly critical commentary about features that you can't particularly change.
So we have kind of alluded to this earlier, but the main thing that prevents the 1 to 10 scale from being useful is cognitive bias. There are various biases that our brains will deploy, almost as if we're bending reality in a way that is more pleasing to us. And on this channel, we've covered almost all of the ones that relate to beauty previously. We've touched on the Dunning-Kruger effect as one type of bias, where, in this case, less attractive people tend to overestimate how good-looking they are because they simply don't know how much more there is to looks. On the other hand, more attractive people tend to give themselves a lower rating because they know how much more there is to looks, and so their self-esteem is lower, thinking that they're not good enough. You haven't really changed the reality of how good-looking you are to everyone else, but your brain is making you think that you're a 10 when you may be a seven. A 10 could also see themselves in terms of a seven because they have lower self-esteem.
There are other psychological biases as well, such as Festinger's theory of social comparison, which suggests that people have an innate drive to evaluate themselves, often in comparison to others. Various emotions like jealousy can come into play when making those types of comparisons. So imagine you're comparing yourself to, say, the conventionally attractive girl in your group, and in doing so, your brain may try to subconsciously lower her rating. So now, instead of her being a nine, she is a seven in your mind. You may not even be aware that you're doing it. That is why the concept is called an unconscious bias. By lowering her rating, you are effectively boosting your attractiveness rating since it's all relative to the most attractive girl in this example of the group. And while yes, it is true that humans are partial to ourselves and biased when it comes to pretty much anything, we fortunately do have ways to check ourselves. This is done through empirical evidence or experiments where we can control these biases. In other words, we're making the rating process more clinical or emotionally detached. And that's kind of what this whole channel is basically about.
Obviously, every person watching this does not have the means to conduct a controlled experiment on their own physical attractiveness, but we can still take a few key points that will help us rate our own appearances and perhaps accurately judge physical improvements that we can make to look better every year. Maybe you've had a glow-up, but you can't seem to objectively tell if you are that much more attractive. The first thing, in that case, in order to rate yourself accurately and even others, is to be mindful of your biases. On this channel, we've made a particular video that covers the types of beauty biases that influence how we look at people, and if you go through that, you'll be quite aware of all the ways our mind plays tricks on us. This may sound simple, but even being aware of the biases themselves—their existence—will make it a lot easier to tell where you stand. The second is to gain knowledge in that area. If it's facial aesthetics, then you have to know what makes an attractive face—training the eye, as Leonardo da Vinci famously called it. And in this case, we want research-based knowledge on what makes physical features desirable. We've made plenty of videos on that exact topic here at CS because that's what we do. But the reason this is so important is because it adds a bit of objectivity to the rating, just like in the Dunning-Kruger case: when you don't know how much more there is to know, you're not going to be able to rate people accurately because you think that beauty ends here, and that's all. In fact, there are many studies, much like this by Fors et al., that try to answer these exact questions: like what is the most attractive jaw shape, what does an attractive side profile look like, or what do the most attractive eyes look like. And these studies often have two or more groups of observers: there are lay people, or just normal people that don't know much about the science behind facial attractiveness, and the other groups are actual clinicians. They could be orthodontists, plastic surgeons, or any other practitioner that has experience putting these concepts of what makes an attractive face to actual people. The ratings often are between different groups because they have different information bases for judging attractiveness, and often times the orthodontist or the clinicians and the lay people have slightly different definitions of what makes an attractive face. And that's why it's really important that we learn the theory behind it. At the same time, we don't really need science to tell us when someone is attractive. I mean, just think about it: you look at her face, you either like it or you don't. Even with all of the research, artificial intelligence, and the top minds at our disposal have still been unable to find a way to fully capture or quantify what makes a face attractive. Until that changes, the best way is just using a trained eye. Your trained eye. Our eyes are surprisingly good at quickly discerning an attractive versus unattractive face. If someone is exceptionally beautiful, we can just tell. And most of us don't lie at the extremes, say something like a three or above an eight. So these biases make a big difference in how we perceive beauty. Most of us lie in the middle ground, where a little bit of bias can knock us down from an 8 to a 6, which is not actually a linear decrease as we've seen in the bell curve distribution, or even boost us from a 5 to a 7. And to sum this up, a knowledgeable and unbiased eye is the best way to rate yourself from a one to a 10.
So this is easier said than done because being honest with yourself can be tough. Unless you can gather a group of the world's top plastic surgeons or modeling scouts and ask them to rate your appearance, this is the best way to rate yourself on the 1 to 10 scale, where you become the eye of the plastic surgeon or the modeling scout instead of having to hire them.
For any words spoken, an individual's appearance is his or her first line of nonverbal communication with the world. Being a nine on the looks scale can certainly be an advantage—don't need me to tell you that—just like being a 9 out of 10 in intelligence or charisma. But a rating of 1 to 10 on your appearance doesn't capture all of what makes you, you. In fact, it doesn't even do a good job of capturing your appearance, and that's why we also argue that the rating scale is very flawed. And in all of our aesthetic reports everywhere in the CS company, we don't actually give out ratings to anyone because, again, it's flawed.
So with that being said, while we don't give out ratings of 1 to 10 in any of our products, you can still order a comprehensive facial aesthetic assessment to get a better understanding of what would theoretically make you a rating if that's what you're after, without the rating itself. In other words, explanation, criticisms, and positives and negatives of your face that make you attractive and can also help the way you change your aesthetic. All of that done by a team of professional researchers, doctors, and dentists. And that's all available over at CS's website. As for now, I'll catch you in the next one.