Thread: What causes physical attraction?

Originally Posted by MindGames

In general, I have found that they have personalities that I dislike, and are often annoying and clingy.

Replace 'ugly people' with 'black people' or 'women' or 'homosexuals' and the issue is the same. Someone judges a certain group of humans who are born into that group to tend to share some negative trait. I don't necessarily think there's something wrong with you for choosing to avoid ugly people, but I dislke your choice and it seems rather mean to me. It's strange that you find that 'ugly people' tend to have bad personalities. Maybe it's because I don't interact with people often, but I haven't seen evidence of that in my own life. If anything, it seems attractive people tend to be more likely to have bad personalities, since people like them based on their looks already so they don't need to develop alluring personalities.

The issue reminds me of a few I've been thinking about recently. What would happen if we had good scientific evidence that black people really do tend to have below-average IQs? Or if it were to be realized that women tend to have lower iQs? That may already be true, although I think they purposely make IQ tests now to give equal balance to both of the genders' brain strengths. But maybe that's been done as an example of the fear of rational inequality I'm bringing up. There was some study I heard about a few months ago which actually concluded that 'attractive' people tend to have higher IQs than average people, and the results were pretty substantial. It was something like a difference of +11 IQ points for women and +13 for men. I have no idea how reliable that study was, someone can correct me if they know better. I guess I'm just saying that issues like these are difficult, figuring out we have rational reasons to believe people 'inferior' that's more than blind prejudice, when we're striving for equality. Are any real differences just going to be ignored, and should they be?