Dr. Sarah Burnell

Aging is now almost seen as a medical condition.

Across the board, we found that people who were described as considering having plastic surgery were perceived as less warm, competent, moral and human.

I am Dr Sarah Bunnell.

I'm a research fellow at the Bolton Clark Research Institute here in Melbourne and

We took photos of women, kind of a standardised database of photos of women who were considered conventionally attractive and women who were considered conventionally unattractive.

So we either described them as doing sort of everyday boring activities, you know, walking their dog, whatever it might be.

But then for some of the photos, we included the description that they were planning to undergo plastic surgery.

And we were also looking at whether that effect was influenced by the conventional attractiveness of the woman pictured as well.

And we sort of measured that on a whole bunch of different traits.

So we were looking at whether the plastic surgery description made women seem more or less moral.

But we also looked at competence and warmth and humanness as well, which was an interesting one.

You'd be like, come on, humanity.

We're really going to get in deep here.

Yeah, exactly.

Like surely they won't be seen as less human, we would hope.

That's where maybe the line is drawn.

Yeah, what were some of the trends that you saw?

So across the board we found that people who were described as having or considering having plastic surgery were perceived as less warm, competent, moral and human.

But interestingly, we only found that effect recently

for photographs where the woman pictured was conventionally attractive.