>Yet those of us who never got that genetic golden ticket should take heart: The halo effect appears to go both ways. A number of studies show that goodness often enhances our looks. A paper in PLOS One in February, for example, reports that people found faces in photos more attractive when they learned the subjects were honest, kind and not aggressive. The results suggest that “facial attractiveness is malleable,” the authors write. Or as Sappho observed: “What is beautiful is good and what is good will soon be beautiful.”

Well there goes the correlation/causation angle. I'm sure everyone has experience with seeing someone for the first time and thinking that they're incredible attractive until they open their mouth. The mind builds perception out of many signals and ocular vision is just one kind. Typically 'ugliness' is the presence of unwanted phenotypes, and in the absence of that 'ugliness' it's very easy to impute beauty.

I also think the idea that beautiful people become more likely to believe in a 'just world' is a strange way to think of it. If we're assuming a baseline level of selfishness, evolutionarily it would make much more sense for ugly people to try to shift consensus away from a 'just world' as doing so is likely to increase the amount of resources they receive. That is, instead of beautiful people recognizing their own privilege and thus lobbying for more, to me it makes more sense that people who don't see themselves as beautiful will tend to lobby for more beauty-blind practices. No one complains the deck is stacked when they're winning.