Do "Beautiful" People Have an Advantage? (2024)

Yes, says Astrid Hopfensitz, Professor in organizational behavior, EM Lyon Business School. She says “In today’s fiercely competitive job market, the economic advantages of beauty are undeniable. Numerous studies have shown that attractive individuals benefit from abeauty bonusandearn higher salarieson average. Certain high-paying professions are built around beauty (such as show business) but more surprising is that for almost any kind of employment, beauty can lead to a positive halo effect. Beautiful individuals are consistently expected to bemore intelligentand thought to bebetter leaders, influencing career trajectories and opportunities.”

Hopfensitz gives a warning to recruiters. She says “Recruiters or managers should guard themselves against being fooled. One way of doing this is to make CVs anonymous and forbid photos in applications. But in many interactions, we see people who we have to decide to trust. Being aware of one’s bias is therefore crucial. Our results stress that this bias is very hard to overcome, since even individuals who from their own experience should be aware of beauty’s skin-deep value fall prey to it.”

• Certain physical features are preferred.High cheekbones, fuller lips, big eyes, and a thin chin areassociated with sexiness in women, whereas a big jaw and broad chin are preferred in men. Smooth skin, shiny hair, and facial symmetry are also key aspects of beauty. According to various studies, these provide measures of health, good genes, intelligence, and success.
• Physically attractive people are healthier.Although the link between facial symmetry and real health is weak, there is some evidence that individuals with more distinct facial features, considered less attractive, are more susceptible to disease, parasites, and other illnesses. Specifically, in a study of 17-year-olds,researchers found that facial distinctiveness was linked to poor healthin both men and women, either during childhood or adolescence. Facial averageness, on the other hand, was linked to good health. One theory is that distinctive facial traits are tied to chromosomal disorders. The preference for average faces may have evolved to identify a mate with good genes.
• It’s easier for physically attractive people to find mates.According to several research studies, men seek attractive women as mates because good looks signal youth, health, and reproductive fitness.
• Physically attractive people are more intelligent.University of New Mexico researchers found thatgeneral intelligence is positively linked to body symmetry,a characteristic that is indicative of attractive qualities like health, social dominance, and fitness-related biological traits.
• Physically attractive people are more persuasive.Good-looking people canuse their sex appeal to command attention and to get ahead, say in a job interview or when asking for a promotion. Attractive people are more persuasive, in part because they also possess or develop key personality traits — like intelligence and strong social skills — thatmake them more effective communicators.Researchers also found that compared to unattractive speakers, attractive speakers were much more fluent talkers.
• Companies with physically attractive executives have higher sales.In a study of nearly 300 Dutch advertising agencies,economists found that firms with better-looking executives had higher revenues.Overall productivity and resulting sales were greater in companies with more attractive managers, partly because firms with more attractive workers have a competitive advantage when client interactions are involved. Companies that place a premium on hiring beautiful people had, on average, higher revenues than similar companies which did not. He says the public rewards businesses with the beautiful faces. InThe New York Timesinterview, Hamermesh found that for beautiful people in general, “Most of us, regardless of our professed attitudes, prefer as customers to buy from better-looking salespeople, as jurors to listen to better-looking attorneys, as voters to be led by better-looking politicians, as students to learn from better-looking professors.”
• Physically attractive people have an advantage in politics.Beautiful people have the upper-hand in politics, according to a study in Finland which found that bothmale and female political candidates who look better than their competitors are more successful. The study’s authors suggest that voters favor good-looking candidates because they enjoy watching them and they fare better in social situations. Canadian research, meanwhile, is diving deep into how beauty influences politics, finding that good-looking politicians of both sexes enjoy a distinct advantage when wooing uninformed voters. Daniel Stockemer, a political studies professor at the University of Ottawa, published the latest in a series of studies that use images of candidates in 2008 U.S. congressional elections to gauge how physical attraction affects voting preferences. A test group of more than 2,400 Canadian participants — students from the University of Ottawa and Western University in London, Ont. — were shown the candidates’ photos without any indicator of the person’s name, party affiliation or qualifications. On average, these “voters” cast 34.8 per cent more ballots in favor of attractive candidates than unattractive ones, 21 per cent more for candidates whose appearances had been rated as neutral.
• Physically attractive people are perceived as more likeable and trustworthy.Beautiful people are typically treated better by others. In a study from Harvard University, researchers found that wearing makeup, shown to enhance a woman’s attractiveness,boosted people’s perceptions of that subject’s competence, likability, attractiveness, and trustworthiness.
• Physical attractiveness is correlated with height for men, giving them a financial advantage.An individual’s salary and success level are contingent upon their height and their income can be penalized if they have only attained the nation’s average height. In examining society’s perception of success, taller people appear to command a presence in the room. Therefore, tallness lends itself to the general perception of power and dominance, which is favoured ineffective business practices. This has been illustrated in CEOs who were found to be overall taller than the average man. To illustrate, in Malcolm Gladwell’s best-selling bookBlink, he found that: “on average CEOs were just a shade under six feet. Given that the average American male is 5'9” that means that CEOs, as a group, have about three inches on the rest of their sex. But this statistic understates matters. About 14.5% of all men are six feet or over in the U.S. population. Among CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, that number is 58%. Even more strikingly, in the general American population, 3.9% of adult men are 6'2" or taller. In another CEO sample, 30% were 6'2" or taller.” This height advantage translates not only into a more prestigious job title but also an impressive salary to match. The British National Child Development study conducted by Daniel Nettle of the Open University shows that the taller men are, the less likely they are to be single or childless, concluding that taller men are deemed more sexually attractive and more likely to find a mate. “In choosing a husband, size matters,” Dr. Nettle argues. A study by researchers at the University of Florida, the University of North Carolina, and the University of Pittsburgh found that tall people earned considerably more money throughout their careers than shorter workers.
• Physically attractive men have higher IQs.Researchers at the London School of Economics studied 52,000 people in the U.K. and U.S., and their results were conclusive: Attractive men have IQs 13.6 points above average, while attractive women score 11.4 points higher. “Physical attractiveness is significantly positively associated with general intelligence,” said the lead researcher, Satoshi Kanazawa. The research was published in the professional journalIntelligence. In what many would regard as a controversial perspective, Kanazawa says, “Our contention that beautiful people are more intelligent is purely scientific,” adding, “It is not a prescription for how to treat or judge others.”
• Face symmetry is seen as attractive.Charles Feng of Stanford University, writing in the Journal of Young Investigators,contends that people believed in the ideal proportions of a woman’s face as far back as Plato in ancient Greece. Today, science has demonstrated that symmetry is inherently attractive to the human eye, in terms of the similarity between the left and right sides of the face. Victor Johnson of New Mexico State University used a program called FacePrints, which shows viewers facial images of variable attractiveness in which viewers rate the images as a perfect 10 out of 10 in attractiveness were those images of almost perfect symmetry. A University of Louisville study gave viewers a similar test, which included photos of Asians, Latinos and other ethnic groups from 13 different countries. The results were the same, concerning symmetry. Other research has pointed to men’s preference for women with a low waist-to-hip ratio (WHRs). Elaine Wong and her team at the University of Wisconsin analyzed photos of 55 male CEOs of large companies and the companies’ return on assets. The study found that companies with CEOs with a higher facial width than facial height perform better financially. The group included former CEOs Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines and Bob Allen of AT&T. Similarly, researchers at the University of Toronto and University of California found that female faces were deemed most attractive if the vertical distance between the eyes and the mouth was 36% of the face’s length and the horizontal distance between the eyes was 46% of the facial width.
• First impressions count.A University of British Columbia study found that people identify the personality traits of physically attractive people more accurately than others during short encounters. The study showed a positive bias toward attractive people. “If people think Jane is beautiful and very organized and somewhat generous, people will see her as more organized and generous than she is, says lead researcher Jeremy Biesanz. The researchers argue that people are motivated to pay closer attention to beautiful people.
• Physically attractive people make higher salaries.In the workplace, your face really can be your fortune. When everything else is considered, more attractive people tend to earn more money and climb higher on the corporate ladder than people who are considered less pleasing to the eye. One study of MBA graduates found that there was about a 10 to 15% difference in earnings between the most and least attractive people in the group — whichadded up to about $230,000 over a lifetime.“You are being conferred advantages throughout your life, from your schooldays into the workplace,” says Walker. Economist Daniel Hamermesh, of the University of Texas, Austin, has found that nicely put-together men generally have better luck than other men in snagging extra earnings and fetching pretty, high-salaried wives. He led a major study in four countries, including Canada. In his new book,Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People Are More Successful,Hamermesh cites studies showing handsome men, on average, earn five per cent more than their less-attractive counterparts, while good-looking women earn four per cent more. A recent study by the University of Wisconsin reports that hiring a beautiful person, say, as an S&P 500 company’s CEO, may boost its bottom line. The study's results, which used an algorithm on a facial beauty analysis siteto rate the attractiveness of 677 CEOs, confirmed that better-looking CEOs make more money (sometimes called a “beauty premium”). It also found that stock market returns were higher on M&A announcement dates for companies whose CEOs ranked high on the Facial Attractiveness Index.
• Physically attractive students get better grades and are treated better in school. Being the most beautiful or handsome is not as important as being above average, sociologist Rachel Gordon of the University of Illinois-Chicago suggests in a peer-reviewed book from theSociety for Research in Child Development, which she co-authored. For both girls and boys, being rated as attractive rather than average in looks — what Gordon calls “standing out from the crowd” — is most important for adolescents, she says. “The attractive do have a GPA advantage (over) the average,” Gordon says. Findings appear inPhysical Attractiveness and the Accumulation of Social and Human Capital in Adolescence and Young Adulthood. The advantage often stems from adolescence, when the better-looking get better grades and are more likely to attain a college degree, setting them on a path for economic advantages as well, she says. According to the available evidence, the bubble is a reality. Researchers Slattery Walker and Tonia Frevert found a wealth of research showing that better-looking students at school and university tend to be judged by teachers as more competent and intelligent — reflected in the grades they gave them. Alongside metrics like “uses a textbook”, the popularRate My Professorswebsite allows students to score their lecturers’ “hotness”. This might not be as frivolous as it seems, according to anew paperinThe Journal of General Psychology, which claims that students learn more effectively from more attractive lecturers. Richard Westfall and his colleagues at the University of Nevada asked over 100 students to listen to an audio recording of a 20-minute physics lecture delivered by a man or woman. As the students listened, they were presented with a photograph of either a highly attractive man or woman, or an unattractive man or woman, and they were told that this was the lecturer they were listening to. No note-taking was allowed. The students thought the study was about the influence of different lecture styles. Next the students completed a multiple-choice quiz about the lecture content. The students who believed their lecturer was attractive scored better on the quiz than those who’d been led to believe their lecturer was unattractive (18.27 items correct on average versus 16.68 — a small but statistically significant difference). Replicating the well-establishedhalo effectof attractiveness, the students who listened to an attractive lecturer also rated him or her more highly on a range of measures, such as teaching ability, health and intelligence and said they found it easier to pay attention and would be more motivated to learn from their lecturer, as compared with students who listened to an unattractive lecturer. The apparent beneficial effects of an attractive lecturer were the same regardless of whether the lecturer and students were the same sex or not, which to the researchers indicated the effect is cognitive, to do with motivation, attention and expectations, rather than sexual interest.
• Physically attractive people are treated better in the justice system. The influence of beauty does not stop at the political choices we make. Our judicial process is also susceptible to the influences of body dimension and bone structure. Researchers have found that attractive male criminal defendants are twice as likely to avoid jail time as unattractive miscreants. That’s why trial lawyers dress their clients up. The relative good looks of civil litigants also influence juries, which award twice the damages when plaintiff is better looking than the defendant and half the compensation when the defendant is more physically attractive than the plaintiff.
• Physically attractive CEOs are presumed to be more competent.Asecond studyby Duke University researchers John Graham, Campbell Harvey and Manju Puri found CEOs are more likely than non-CEOs to be rated as competent-looking. The team found that CEOs rated competent just by appearance tended to have higher incomes.

It's not all good news for beautiful people. Psychologists describe the dark side of being physically attractive:

• Physically attractive people are less likely to be hired (sometimes). Although beauty can help search for a job, it’s not always true. When employers are making a decision about someone of the same sex, they can let their jealousy get the better of them.One recent studyhas suggested that people who are highly attractive are at a disadvantage in the hiring process when the decision-makers are the same sex. It seems we perceive beautiful people who are the same sex as a threat.
• Physical attractiveness limits job choice for females.There’s evidencethat female beauty can be a problem in jobs with strong gender stereotypes. For example a beautiful woman may be at a disadvantage when applying for a job which is associated with masculinity, like a prison guard or a mechanical engineer. The same doesn’t seem to be true for attractive men. They can happily apply for jobs as nurses, lingerie salespersons or HR managers without their beauty counting against them
• Successful physically attractive people are judged more harshly. If beautiful people are successful, is it because of their talent or their looks? After all, people are lucky to be beautiful and we know all the advantages of that.Researchfinds that when judging their sex, people are more likely to think beautiful people’s success is due to their beauty, not their talent.
• Many physically attractive people face social rejection.Although attractive people are generally more popular socially, there’ssome evidencethat very attractive people can experience social rejection from members of their own sex. People in relationships also protect themselves from beauty by ignoring it.Researchshows that when we’re thinking about love we automatically ignore attractive members of the opposite sex, probably to protect our feelings about our long-term partner. Research has shown that when women and men look at gorgeous women’s success, they immediately tend tocredit their success to their looks, and not any talents or brains they may possess. Actually, beauty has bothpositive and negative effectson us. Chances are she’ll be taken more seriously by a male, but not by much. If she’s being scrutinized and considered by other women, then the highly attractive woman is at a big disadvantage. Probably the most difficult thing a beautiful woman has to deal with is social rejection. When it comes to members of her own sexshe is often an outcast. As listed by theTop 10 Things that make a woman threatening to other women, the #1 threat is beauty. Whether it’s true or not, other women perceive the beauty as a threat to steal their man away. They may not trust their spouse/boyfriend/lover in the presence of such beauty, and prefer to reject her instead.
• Physical attractiveness can hurt income.Researchers have previously found that income is associated with attractiveness, leading to both a beauty premium and an ugliness penalty. A common explanation is discrimination: employers seek out beautiful people and reject or ignore those harder on the eye. But in theJournal of Business Psychology,Satoshi Kanazawa and Mary Still have published research aiming to upset this. The biggest takeaway is that being perceived as unattractive may not incur an income penalty. The researchers drew on a longitudinal study of 20,000 young Americans interviewed at home at age 16 and then on three more occasions up to the age of 29. Overall, there was a positive association between attractiveness and earnings. But there was an anomaly: very unattractive participants kept bucking the trend. Those participants rated very unattractive at age 29 were earning significantly more than people judged more attractive than them, including (though to a lesser extent) the very attractive. The correlation between extreme unattractiveness and higher pay remained using median earnings and looking separately at men and women. The authors argue this is hard to square with the usual discrimination explanation for why attractiveness (or lack of it) is associated with income. After all, why would employers be less discriminatory towards the worst-looking people?
• Physically attractive people may have less stable long-term relationships.You probably won’t be reaching for your violin too quickly, but a series of new studies providecompelling evidencethat beauty is a kind of “relationship liability”. While more physically attractive people have a clear advantage when finding partners, the results suggest that their relationships are more likely to break down, at least in part because they take a greater interest in alternative partners, especially when dissatisfied with their current relationship. It seems there are complicating factors: jealousy is one, and thisresearch,published inPersonal Relationships, suggests that less stability in their romantic relationships is another. Christine Ma-Kellams at Harvard University and her colleagues began by asking two women to judge the attractiveness of 238 men as pictured in their high school yearbooks aged 17 to 18. The researchers then accessed Ancestry.com to find the men’s marriage and divorce data for the 30 years since their high school photos were taken. The men who were rated as more facially attractive were more likely to be divorced and to have had marriages of shorter length. Next, the researchers accessed the divorce and marriage data for the top 20 actors and actresses listed on IMDB.com and the world’s 100 most powerful celebrities, according toForbes(removing duplicates resulted in a list of 130 celebs). The same female raters who judged the men’s attractiveness in the first study also rated the attractiveness of the celebrities. The more attractive celebrities were more likely to be divorced and tended to be married for shorter lengths of time. A final study conducted on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk survey website was similar but added a couple of twists: some participants were first made to feel attractive by looking at pictures of unattractive people before rating their attractiveness; also, participants in this study rated their satisfaction with their current relationship. All participants then rated the physical appeal of several images of good-looking people of the opposite sex. The results showed that participants made to feel physically attractive tended to rate the good-looking people in the photos as more appealing, but only if they were dissatisfied in a relationship with them.
• Physical attractiveness can work against male and female employees at performance review time, according to Professor Comila Shahai-Dennin. Bosses regard good-looking employees as failing because of their own shortcomings, but they see less attractive workers as victims of circ*mstance. In addition, co-workers often perceive the very attractive as self-centered and even resent them. Finally, those with superstar appearances sometimes rely on those looks instead of putting forth the same effort as average-looking workers.
• Physically attractive people can be lonely.And the bubble of beauty can be a somewhat lonely place. One study in 1975, for instance, found that people tend to move further away from a beautiful woman on the pathway — perhaps as a mark of respect, but still making interaction more distant. “Attractiveness can convey more power over visible space — but that in turn can make others feel they can’t approach that person,” says Frevert. Interestingly, the online dating website OKCupid recently reported that people with the most flawlessly beautiful profile pictures are less likely to find dates than those withquirkier, less perfect pics– perhaps because the prospective dates are less intimidating.

Summary:

Whether we like it or not, and whether it’s less a case of cause and effect than correlation, in Western culture, which is highly influenced by media and advertising, research shows beauty matters; it permeates our society and how we choose our leaders, our loved ones and friends, bosses and co-workers. On the other hand, making judgments and decisions about people in terms of relationships, hiring, promotion and compensation solely based upon physical attractiveness — or even being influenced by it — is discriminatory and ultimately harmful.