What makes you popular: beauty, personality or intelligence?

TL;DR

This study investigates how beauty, personality, intelligence, and other traits influence the formation of friendship and advice networks among college students, highlighting attractiveness's role in social connections and perceived intelligence in advice sharing.

Contribution

The paper provides empirical evidence on the relative importance of physical attractiveness, intelligence, and creativity in forming social and advice networks.

Findings

Attractiveness is crucial for developing friendship and task-related interactions.

Perceived intelligence and creativity are significant in advice networks.

Results support stereotypes linking attractiveness with positive social traits.

Abstract

This study explores the determinants of popularity within friendship and advice networks. We involved almost 200 college students in an experiment to predict how personality traits, self-monitoring, creativity, intelligence, energy, and beauty influence the development of friendship and advice networks. Our results indicate that physical attractiveness is a key to develop both friendship and task-related interactions, whereas perceived intelligence and creativity play an important role in the advice network. Our findings seem to support the idea that there might be a kernel of truth in the stereotype that attractiveness correlates with positive social traits and successful outcomes.