It’s possible that your identity as a smart person can lead you to become a bit too much of a smart-aleck. Having long been reinforced for being clever and bright, you play out this role, constantly trying to outwit everyone in your circle. You might also come to think that the only route to acceptance is to question or challenge what others around you are saying. Rather than endearing yourself to others, though, your intelligence seems like showing off, and you become a source of annoyance.
Being smart, then, can have its drawbacks particularly if your intelligence is limited to the academic and not the personal. How about appearance?
In a society that values beauty, how can anyone be too pretty or handsome? To answer this question, we can turn to a 2012 study by Swedish psychologists Jean-Cristophe Rohner and Anders Rasmussen that investigated the “physical attractiveness stereotype.”
This refers to our tendency to judge beautiful people as sharing a variety of psychological characteristics based on their looks alone. As Rohner and Rasmussen point out, “People have been associating beauty with positive qualities since the cultural ascension of the Ancient Greeks” (p. 60). Beautiful people, they argue, are perceived as nicer and more successful.
