It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.

People assign character on the basis of a face, instantly, without noticing they have done it. Attractive strangers get read as kinder, more competent and more honest, and the assumption survives a surprising amount of contrary evidence because nobody experiences it as a judgement. It feels like perception rather than inference.

The correction is not to distrust good-looking people, which is the same error inverted. It is to slow down where the stakes are real, in hiring, in lending, in who you let close, and ask what somebody has actually done rather than how they came across. Write the evidence down, because memory quietly rewrites it in favour of the face.