Is this why people are still wearing masks?
A new study from Seoul National University in South Korea found that ugly people are more likely to continue wearing COVID masks in the post-COVID era.
Specifically, young and middle-aged Americans who view themselves as attractive “believe wearing a mask hinders the opportunities to deliver a favorable impression to others.”
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The report cites “Overall, we provide a novel finding that self-perceived attractiveness has significant effects on mask-wearing intention via mask attractiveness belief in the post-pandemic of Covid-19.”
“Our findings suggest that mask-wearing can shift from being a self-protection measure during the Covid-19 pandemic to a self-presentation tactic in the post-pandemic era.”
The third study, where the most noteworthy results came from, looked at 442 people.
Researchers from Seoul National University in South Korea wanted to see if self-perceived attractiveness played a role in people’s mask-wearing intentions. They carried out three experiments on Americans recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcing website for businesses.
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Study three involved 442 people, half of whom were told they were going to walk the dog and the other half were told they were going to a job interview.
They were asked: ‘In this scenario, do you think others will perceive you as more attractive with a face mask?’
They were also asked: ‘How much do you want to make a good first impression on others?’
This makes more sense than wearing a COVID mask to stop transmission!