98 male and female undergraduates judged the morality of a female who was described as having premarital sexual intercourse with a male she had never met before or with whom she had been dating for six months. Half were told that the female was extremely attractive and half were told that she was quite unattractive. As predicted, subjects evaluated the attractive female as being less moral than the unattractive one and this finding was most pronounced when she had not known her partner previously.
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