Beauty and the Bias: Exploring the Impact of Attractiveness on Multimodal Large Language Models

Physical attractiveness matters. It has been shown to influence human perception and decision-making, often leading to biased judgments that favor those deemed attractive in what is referred to as the "attractiveness halo effect". While extensively studied in human judgments in a broad set of domains, including hiring, judicial sentencing or credit granting, the role that attractiveness plays in the assessments and decisions made by multimodal large language models (MLLMs) is unknown. To address this gap, we conduct an empirical study with 7 diverse open-source MLLMs evaluated on 91 socially relevant scenarios and a diverse dataset of 924 face images - corresponding to 462 individuals both with and without beauty filters applied to them. Our analysis reveals that attractiveness impacts the decisions made by MLLMs in 86.2% of the scenarios on average, demonstrating substantial bias in model behavior in what we refer to as an attractiveness bias. Similarly to humans, we find empirical evidence of the existence of the attractiveness halo effect in 94.8% of the relevant scenarios: attractive individuals are more likely to be attributed positive traits, such as intelligence or confidence, by MLLMs than unattractive individuals. Furthermore, we uncover gender, age and race biases in a significant portion of the scenarios which are also impacted by attractiveness, particularly in the case of gender, highlighting the intersectional nature of the algorithmic attractiveness bias. Our findings suggest that societal stereotypes and cultural norms intersect with perceptions of attractiveness in MLLMs in a complex manner. Our work emphasizes the need to account for intersectionality in algorithmic bias detection and mitigation efforts and underscores the challenges of addressing biases in modern MLLMs.