Pratfall effect

In social psychology, the pratfall effect is the tendency for attractiveness to increase or decrease after an individual makes a mistake, depending on the individual's perceived ability to perform well in a general sense. A perceived highly-competent individual would be, on average, more likable after committing a blunder, while the opposite would occur if a perceived average person makes a mistake.

Originally described in 1966 by Elliot Aronson, numerous studies have since been conducted to isolate the effects of gender, self-esteem, and severity of the blunder on change in attractiveness or likability. Occasionally referred to as the blemishing effect when used as a form of marketing, generalizations of the pratfall effect are often used to describe the counterintuitive benefits of making mistakes.

Details of the pratfall effect were first described by Aronson in his experiment testing the effects of a simple blunder on perceived attraction. The experiment was set up involving male students from the University of Minnesota who would listen to tape recordings of a (actor) pretending to be a contestant for the show College Bowl. The tapes consisted of an interview with extremely difficult questions. The confederate plays the role of either an unrealistically intelligent individual who answers a majority of the questions correctly (92%), or a exceedingly mediocre one who answers only a few questions correctly (30%). After the questioning, the strong performing actor admits to a stellar high school career, marked with academic and nonacademic success, while the more unremarkable actor describes an ordinary high school career, consisting of average grades and weak involvement in extracurricular clubs. At the end of the interview, a pratfall, or small blunder, was introduced in the experimental case and omitted to serve as a control. Aronson's research found that a blunderer was rated to be more attractive only if they were previously portrayed as intelligent--blunderers portrayed as average suffered decreases in their perceived attractiveness. Later research inspired by Aronson experimentally defined attractiveness as a combination of liking and respect, and replicated similar results.

Effects of pratfall are most directly applicable to males. Women tend to prefer the non-blunderer regardless of gender, and although findings of pratfall cannot be readily generalized to female populations, neither population preferred the mediocre blunderer.

Research by Mettee and Wilkins reveals that severity of pratfall plays a major role on determining attractiveness after a pratfall is committed. Experimentally, each condition was conveyed by changing the response of the interviewer and blunderer:

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