Physical appearance must not unfairly affect people’s lives

I had been aware, from personal experience, as I am sure everyone has, that good-looking people seem to have unfair advantages in life: They are treated better, offered help more often, paid attention to, listened to and respected more. But a recent publication brought some stunning data to my attention and, as I decided to research the topic a bit, I found even more disturbing information that I believe we all need to be made aware of.

Last year, Galina Hale, a professor of economics at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and colleagues reviewed the careers of 752 economists over 15 years from the time they were students to well into their professional lives. They searched for correlations between their looks and their career success. This was done by, on the one hand, having 241 online evaluators rate their pictures from 1 “totally unattractive” to 5 “very attractive” and, on the other hand, ranking various indicators along their careers, such as acceptance at top doctoral programs, getting good first jobs, receiving invitations to prestigious conferences and being cited more in the literature. The research found a strong correlation between their physical appearance and their job and research success throughout the 15 years of data that was available.

I must admit that, while not really surprised by the findings, the size and strength of the data made me sit up and think about the implications. I decided to look for more data of the same kind in other walks of life.

I found that, in 2011, another economist, Daniel Hamermesh, who was then at the University of Texas at Austin and has since held various prestigious positions, published a book titled “Beauty Pays,” in which he showed that attractive people get easier employment, higher wages, bank loans more easily and with better terms, and other socioeconomic advantages. Even criminals get treated differently depending on their looks: Better-looking felons receive lighter sentences (statistically) and sometimes even become popular and have fan clubs, the so-called hot convict phenomenon.

In education too, some research has shown that attractive professors (both men and women) get better teaching evaluations and some researchers have claimed that students pay more attention to attractive teachers (when I mentioned this to some friends, they retorted: “And you didn’t know or witness this?”).

Before I discuss how we must react and try to redress these unfair practices in our lives, let me first mention some of the explanations that are usually given for this phenomenon.

Psychology literature says that young people, especially females, who are perceived as better looking get more attention and praise as they grow up, thus boosting their confidence into adulthood. Attractiveness also leads to more extroverted personalities, which in turn increases self-confidence. And strong self-confidence leads to greater career success, as it makes people better speakers and networkers, leading to easier employment, promotions and invitations (to meetings, conferences, events, etc.).

Likewise, bigger boys get more chances to play sports, also become extroverted and get more confidence, and are often seen as more attractive, particularly if they are tall. Interestingly, it has been found that greater physical size and strength in boys often makes them more aggressive, bullying their way in life.

Indeed, even men’s political views may be affected by their physical sizes: A study published in 2018 and conducted in 12 countries, including the US, Denmark and Venezuela, found that bigger, stronger men were less inclined toward political egalitarianism.

Impressions of attractiveness produce a larger impact, what is known in psychology as the “halo effect,” whereby a person’s beauty and good physical appearance gets translated in people’s minds into a generalized positive view of “nice person to work with,” intelligent and so forth.

What should we make of these findings?

Before we draw any conclusions, we need to raise some flags. First, most of the research on attractiveness and its impacts relies on highly subjective — and Western — conceptions and ratings of beauty. And, as we know, those standards, especially photoshopped images on social media, have had serious negative effects on youngsters everywhere.

Secondly, success, and more generally happiness, should not be equated with money and status — what most of those studies measure. Indeed, happiness is found to depend first and foremost on one’s social relationships (with family, friends and colleagues), not on salaries or any beauty ratings.

It is clear that people do, mostly unconsciously, deal differently with people depending on their looks.

Nidhal Guessoum

Having said this — and those are important caveats to keep in mind — it is clear that people do, mostly unconsciously, deal differently with people depending on their looks, and this can be seriously problematic in various places: in schools, workplaces, cultural settings, etc.

Likewise, socioeconomic injustice, such as unfair hiring, income inequality, harassment and bullying, and other such problems, are serious issues that we need to correct, first by being aware of them, as (mostly) unconscious biases in our behavior.

We educators and opinion-makers need to address all such issues that simply translate into unfair practices in life, as we want our societies to progress on the scales of equity and justice.

• Nidhal Guessoum is a professor at the American University of Sharjah, UAE. Twitter: @NidhalGuessoum