Truth doesn't matter, perceived truth is what's important. Society revolves around it's beliefs, not indisputable facts.
In addition, if most people believe in something, it's usually not far from the actual truth.
Perceived truth only explains behaviour, not validity. Yes, societies do run on shared beliefs, but that says nothing about whether those beliefs track reality or quality. Propaganda works for the same reason since effectiveness does not equal correctness.
If “most people believe it” were a reliability filter, mass delusions wouldn’t exist, yet they do constantly on a grand scale.
Most people believed the sun orbited earth for the longest, or that smoking was healthy. Smoking is actually a great example here since it was an idea deliberately manufactured by Edward Bernays, who literally wrote a book about using propaganda and social proof to engineer mass perception. Majority belief correlates with exposure, repetition, and incentives, not the truth, because reality is not a democratic process.
Lynching was seen as good by some because it made people think twice before committing crimes. But how do we know how the average person really felt? Any critique could have resulted in being lynched yourself, fear factor.
That invalidates your own premise. If dissents risked social exclusion, injury, or even death, that just means that the consensus was artificially enforced and not organic.
Apparent agreement does not equal genuine belief. You can’t cite social agreement as evidence when agreement is enforced or manufactured, which is exactly how most mass beliefs form all the time.
First two, debatable.
Attractiveness, absolutely not. Sexual attraction was always the same. Faces and body shapes considered attractive today would have been attractive at any time in history. Dimorphism and youth indicators were always law.
Ofc youth indicators and dimorphism matter, I'm not denying baseline biology. But that does not mean specific bodies or faces are universally preferred across time and class. Preferences shift all the time through status signalling, scarcity, and culture. For example, being fat was considered attractive at stages when food was scarce.