Data file for Study 1 from Creating beauty: creativity compensates for low physical attractiveness when individuals assess the attractiveness of social and romantic partners

As social knowledge of creativity may either enhance or ‘offset’ the appeal of social partners who differ in physical attractiveness, three repeated measures experiments were conducted to directly address these issues.

Here, participants rated a series of face–text pairs for attractiveness on trials that differed in one of four combinations of facial attractiveness (attractive and less attractive) and creativity (creative and less creative), rating story-tellers in two experiments (short interpretations of an identical painting) and creative ideas in a further experiment (alternate uses for an everyday object). Regardless of the sex of the judge, creativity and facial attractiveness had independent effects on men's overall attractiveness (initial experiment), and, in further experiments, more substantial effects on the attractiveness of men with less attractive faces than men with attractive faces (when using a different measure of creativity) and specific effects on the attractiveness of individuals with less attractive faces (when using different face stimuli).