There was a great short story by Ted Chiang about the biases that surround physical attractiveness. In the story, people could have a brain implant to suppress the brain’s ability to judge other's beauty (or lack thereof). It was pretty thought-provoking and not the typical predicable dystopian parable that most brain modification stories fall into.
I find it fascinating that people seem to care so little about this particular bias when compared to other types of discrimination.
>"Liking What You See: A Documentary" is a science fiction novelette by American writer Ted Chiang, published in the 2002 collection "Stories of Your Life and Others."
>Plot summary
The novelette examines the cultural effects of a noninvasive medical procedure that induces a visual agnosia toward physical beauty. The story is told as a series of interviews about a reversible procedure called calliagnosia, which eliminates a person's ability to perceive physical beauty. The story's central character is Tamera Lyons, a first-year student who grew up with calliagnosia but wants to experience life without it.
Is it? The actual discrimination can be quantified in a typical way. Attractiveness is only a bit trickier, but there's a high degree of agreement on attractive vs unattractive. Give a team of raters a group of people, present them pairs of people and ask them to select the more attractive one. Then you can create an average ordering, which you can map to whatever numerical range you want, and that score would be highly predictive of what future raters (and the real world) would find attractive.
this is a pet peeve of mine. I remember back around the time that the paper(s) were published establishing that facial symmetry played a big role in attractiveness. Before that time, nobody ever said, "oh, how attractive, look at that facial symmetry", because the point was that we are not consciously aware of what makes somebody attractive, it's our (metaphorical) lizard brain making those judgements, like the way we can generally tell M/F for people very far away. (and to add on, before this it was a quite popular "psychology experiment" to show two pictures of people, their left and mirrored left, and their right and mirrored right, to demonstrate that our faces are not symetric. One usually looked like a brooding criminal, and the other a beatific calm)
so, announcing whether you find somebody attractive or not is a far more authentic piece of information than your judgement of how symmetric their face is. Symmetry is far from the only input, and it's not conscious, it's only part of the wiring of the brain.
It is interesting to learn that the brain has wiring for unconscious symmetry measurement.
Now, I do wonder if, developmentally, the conditions that allow facial symmetry to develop somehow also allow higher IQ wiring to develop, or something hand wavey like that.
I would say that's wrapped up in "makes me laugh." Aside from slapstick and puns requires thinking outside the box and making distant but (humorously) relevant connections. It also ties into "gets me" finding the same things funny.
I can think of a couple reasons of why perfect axial symmetry is mechanically advantageous.
I must also mention that we aren't perfectly symmetric anymore. The most obvious difference is the heart, but the brain is no longer functionally symmetric anymore, either.
I'm no expert in morals, so I won't comment on that.
But wrong or not I'm pretty sure it's a useful tool in assessing people. Not assessing their innate "good given looks" of course, but to look really good you have to put effort into it. Real effort - studying fashion trends, purchasing decisions, time spent on personal grooming. Time spent doing that is time they could have doesn't dining other things, like learning their craft. Go too far the other way to the extent of ignoring personal hygiene and it shows a lack of respect for their fellow workers.
I've never interviewed anyone who deviated too far from the norms, so they are fairly well known and respected. Still, it's not difficult to imagine an attire that would get a near automatic reject. It would trigger questions that help me understand why they chose to look so different from the norms, like cultural background and family background - things I normally wouldn't spend any time on.
I didn't want to put too many caveats in my original statement, but yes - there's a difference between judging someone on physical attributes they can change vs. on attributes they can't. How you dress is a valid signal of something, how much effort you put into your appearance is a valid signal of something too.
But even past a baseline of putting some effort into looks, there is still some difference between how good different people look. Judging based on that is stupid (because it's not actually correlative with anything) and immoral (same reason).
You talk about those that are already spoiled by their environment, I guess we all have seen it more than once.
Attractive women are 'hit' by this particularly hard - all those guys trying to get them to bed, get another score, the curve is exponential with beauty. Women usually hit on guys they like with much more subtlety, and stop when told directly immediately. Men, often not so much, even these days.
One of my ex-gf (pretty, smart, rich, very hard working commodity trader) told me on a bad day its about 30 unknown guys who try to strike conversation out of blue, 'go to coffee', etc. She was so tired of this since she saw every possible pick up line, every situation they tried to create, every expensive cocktail sent her way.
Its extremely hard for women to not get spoiled by such constant attack, imagine this constantly from teen years, it drills into your personality.
Those who persist despite this are really awesome, driven and very strong internally, or broken beyond repair in some way. My ex was a mix of both. Good luck to her wherever she ended up.
Yes, its mostly fault of us guys, even if only all those before you.
How is it guys' fault for wanting to strike up conversation with females they find attractive?
If you always avoid doing this on the excuse that "oh well, she's probably already had 30 guys hit her up today, I should just not even try", you'll die alone and write yourself out of the gene pool.
>Attractive women are 'hit' by this particularly hard - all those guys trying to get them to bed, get another score, the curve is exponential with beauty.
Bill Bradley's Life on the Run discusses this. Bradley was the
* #1 high school basketball player in the country
* #1 college basketball player in the country at Princeton
* Rhodes Scholar
* NBA player
* US Senator
* ran for President
From high school on, Bradley avoided the many, many women who wanted to date him just because he was a celebrity. In Life on the Run, written during his NBA career, he wrote about how such experiences gave him an understanding of what life is like for beautiful women: "the unnaturalness of being a sex object".
I once - by complete chance - sat next to Henry Cavill at a bar. He was trying to talk to a friend and then an attractive woman interrupted them almost right away to strike up conversation with him. Over the next hour I watched dozens of women come over, throwing themselves at him. It was eye-opening seeing the way he was treated, I actually felt kinda bad for the guy. He was trying to have a nice drink with a friend but was treated like some sort of show animal.
Fame is a 100x multiplier for these things. Harrison Ford talked about his sudden fame. "As a young actor, you spend your life observing people. Then, suddenly, everyone is staring at you."
Ford was 35 when Star Wars came out. Overnight he went from an actor who worked as a carpenter to pay his bills, to to one of the three leads on the biggest film franchise of the century. When he went to a record store to buy an album, fans ripped half his shirt off.
People, on average, have a hard time being cool and treating another person as their equal and as a normal human being.
People who bring more love, positive vibes, and value to others without resting on privilege or manipulation and don't snub people through unreasonable snap prejudices are the cool ones. That's worth a million times more than looks or wealth.
that when she ages out of it she'll look at her craggy face in the mirror and breathe a sigh of relief? very likely not.
not criticizing her or the men hitting on her, we are animals who try to spread our genes, and we like being found attractive as much as we like finding attractive. It creates a bit of a prison for us, it's impossible to be free of the side effects.
> >She was so tired of this
>
> that when she ages out of it she'll look at her craggy face in the mirror and breathe a sigh of relief? very likely not.
A friend of mine expressed relief when she reached her 30s. She still looks good but isn't treated like a piece of meat by men literally every single day any more.
Not just attractiveness bias, but having been on juries, all sorts of biases people have come out, age, sex, appearance matching their perceived gender, sexuality, the list goes on.
Humans are really not great when it comes to stuff like this. Hell, we can't even stop eating so much sugar and buying cheap plastic crap to throw away. We shouldn't be trusted with anything.
Interesting that they only looked at federal appellate court trials, where there are only judges. I would think there would be an even larger effect in jury trials.
Although the overall conclusion is not surprising, it is at least modestly surprising that professional judges (as opposed to jurors) are swayed by looks.
On the other hand, it's possible that there is a correlation between the best attorneys and the most attractive attorneys (because they were given many opportunities coming up through the ranks), and what is being measured in this study is actually the correlation between high-skill attorneys and winning outcomes.
I doubt that at the Supreme Court level there is any difference.
Recommend reading the book "The Knowledge Illusion". People believe text in a larger font, for example. Taller people are more trusted. Your brain is not doing what it tells you it's doing.
Probably, but this kind of study isn't to convince you, it's to convince the other idiots who would claim being attractive doesn't make a difference, that showering and wearing deodorant is what makes an attorney successful.
Which begs the question, if attractiveness is such a big predictor of success, why hasn’t everyone evolved to become very attractive? The evolutionary pressure for increased attractiveness should be very high, since it affects so many areas of your life, from career success, to getting partners etc.
Is it that the speed at which we evolve to become more attractive is superseeded by our ability to become better at discriminating for attractiveness?
It's possible that people have evolved to be more attractive than a long time ago, but the issue is not of absolute beauty but rather relative attractiveness. There will always be a top 10% and a bottom 10%, even if the entire population increases in attractiveness across the board.
But separately, it's not clear that attractiveness is hereditary in the same way that height, for example, is. If two tall people have kids, they will almost certainly be tall. It's also incredibly unlikely that two short people will not have kids that are tall.
With attractiveness, heterogeneity between generations is much more common. I know some very attractive people who have not-very-attractive offspring, and vice versa. It depends on how the features of the two parents mix together.
I mean at the very minimum there lies a great deal within our locus of control that can influence overall attractiveness. Are you in shape and well groomed? So many are not, and it’s weird that people don’t at least try to hit that Pareto inflection point within their own possible range of attractiveness, knowing, as we all do, that it makes a difference.
Do you have a study showing this? Also what’s your definition of “success”? I will argue that less attractive people have to work harder, gain more skills, and develop a personality. All attributes that makes you more likely to succeed in whatever you want to achieve.
And justice for all (who are attractive). The biggest con is that the criminal prosecution system is blind and unbiased when it clearly is anything but.
I wish more studies like this would separate the effect of things people have no control of. Attorneys clothing can have big impact. But also eye color, skin color, etc. can have impact. In my opinion there is important difference between these sources and how acceptable they are.
There's a strong correlation between attractiveness and IQ [1], which in turn is going to result in there being a strong correlation between attractiveness and anything that higher IQ would be predictive of - which presumably includes success in court.
Years ago I read that the first Rothschilds to go into banking (men, of course) were not especially attractive. Financial success supposedly helped successive generations of the men to marry attractive women, so that later generations of men in the family looked like models or movie stars. (I wouldn’t know a Rothschild if I saw one so can’t opine on that.)
This is similar to Ashkenazi Jewish history where "blending in" with the native European population was crucial to their survival. Many wealthy traders married in to the aristocracy.
It's not about marrying more attractive spouses for breeding better looking offspring, but what a lot of these studies miss is that wealthy people who are genetically disadvantaged have the funds the invest in their appearance to become better looking: best timely medical care, fixing teeth, becoming taller, correcting posture, hair implants, plastic surgery and skin care, hiring professional trainers and nutritionists, living in nice, quiet, green areas to reduce stress and sleep better, and other potential quackery rich people have access too like blood transfusions.
Just look at Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk before and after they became wealthy, they're better looking despite being 10-20 years older.
Basically, higher IQ can help you build wealth, and higher wealth can help you become better looking, but high IQ is not directly responsible for better looks.
I think another aspect is that many things that are within someone's control that positively affect attractiveness require patience and long-term thinking. Working out, brushing teeth regularly, eating healthy, etc, are not enjoyable in the short-term, and people with higher IQ / more successful tend to be able to better control their impulses and have longer-term vision.
>. Working out, brushing teeth regularly, eating healthy, etc, are not enjoyable in the short-term, and people with higher IQ / more successful tend to be able to better control their impulses and have longer-term vision.
That's not as easy as that.
Having dealt in your formative childhood years with poor health due to poor medical care where doctors just pump you with antibiotics and fuck you up, poor dentists and orthodontists who make your conditions worse, living in loud polluted neighborhoods where you're not getting quality air and sleep, not getting proper nutrition as a kid due to poverty, getting bullied and harassed every day leading to constant stress and anxiety, etc, all these impact your looks from your early life and are not in your direct control as you make it be, and won't easily get remedied no matter how much you brush your teeth, eat well and work out in adulthood.
That’s just anabolic steroids (plus drugs to keep their testes), six hours a week at the gym, and about 1000 grams of dietary protein a week. None of that requires being a billionaire or even close.
I see little reason to think Bezos is on any sort of enhancement. He previously looked like he'd literally never worked out in his life, and probably also had a horrible diet. Put somebody like that in the gym with a proper diet and routine, and they're just going to blow up fast, even when starting late. Most people can't do it for lack of self discipline, but that's one thing he seems to have no lack of. And no idea what people are saying about Musk. He just seems like a typical yo-yo dieter with a hair transplant.
Also, it's relevant that Bezos is one of the guys blowing money on life extension tech. So I think there's 0 chance he sees anabolics (or other enhancements) as a good risk:reward when he certainly fantasizes about there being a possibility of life extension happening within his lifetime.
> Just look at Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk before and after they became wealthy, they're better looking despite being 10-20 years older.
I doubt this is really true, you're just seeing the results of frequently getting photographed/recorded in staged managed situations by professional photographers, probably with makeup. That's also something that happens more often when you're wealthy.
> Elon Musk before and after they became wealthy, they're better looking despite being 10-20 years older.
IMHO sort of but when you massively overdo it like some you start looking pretty freakish. Also I don't think there is any evidence Bezos had any plastic surgery done? He probably just got a better stylist. Must OTH.. well...
This is interesting...considering the high IQ profession aren't seemingly littered with attractive people. I'm sure there are stronger correlations for that case though.
Just about everything good is correlated, and also everything bad. We could also talk about the correlation between attractiveness and good health, or between IQ and healthiness, which surely works both ways, as well having common causes.
Sometimes when try to draw the casual graph, you find that it’s fully connected. There are all sorts of reasons for connections. It would be unusual for a correlation to be exactly zero.
But because people vary, it doesn’t mean that this sort of reasoning works well for individuals.
Or the attorney has some success, spends the effort to get a professional photo, is motivated to brush their hair in the morning, and so it was better success that made them "attractive".
This is one thing that could probably be solved by AI.
For these high-stakes situations, we could benefit from an algorithm that turns everybody into a nondescript face attached to an autogenerated, toneless voice.
You don't technically need AI for that, text chat is enough, but text chat is far slower than voice conversations, and people seem to prefer video in many contexts.
"solved" by optimizing the outcomes to whatever biases are trained into the model? Please think through this type of thing for one minute before proposing robocop + judge dredd as a good future.
I'm not saying the AI should make the decisions, that's silly. It should merely be a face and voice changer, turning everybody's face and voice into something far more generic and unattractive. All the decisions would still be made by a human judge talking over video, but the judge wouldn't see how attractive the attorneys are, but would have to focus on what they're actually saying.
Correction: Physically attractive people tend to have an easier time in general at everything in life that involves IRL person-to-person interaction. Try going to interviews with missing front teeth and see how far you get.
Thank you for attending my TED Talk, now feel free to spend that research money on curing cancer instead of studying obvious things humans knew for hundreds of years.
Just because something appears immediately obvious doesn’t imply we shouldn’t study it. Plenty of “common sense” thing are wrong, and even when “common sense” is right, it can be useful to figure out the “why” or to what extent.
Yes, attractive people generally have an easier time in life, we all know that, this is surprising to nobody, but at the same time, it probably doesn’t affect every field equally. Being attractive probably matters an awful lot in the modeling industry, but probably matters less in the tech support industry. This doesn’t mean that it matters 100% in modeling or 0% in tech support.
Also, I mean, how much money is spent on truly useless stuff? I spent multiple years working for the marketing tech team of a company. Wall Street traders contribute a lot less to the world than medical researchers but get paid an order of magnitude more. It’s hardly like this is the low hanging fruit in fund-reallocation.
I think putting a more constructive aspect to it would be great though. I guess there is still judicial systems in which everyone wears a rob and wigs. Was it studied if this lessens the effect? Wonder if it makes sense to come back to those things to counteract biases.
I don’t think it needs to supply a prescription, at least in the initial research. I think it’s valid enough to determine if the bias exists before we try and figure out solutions for it.
> now feel free to spend that research money on curing cancer instead of studying obvious things humans knew for hundreds of years.
This is a false dichotomy. We can and indeed should study medicine and psychology, among countless other subjects. The author of the article isn't a medical researcher and wouldn't be able to cure cancer regardless of whether he received research money for that. Moreover, the article gives no indication that it was funded by any grants. Professors publish articles as part of their regular jobs. Unless you're proposing that universities abolish all departments except medical research?
I'd guess that it's probably cheaper to prevent cancer than to cure cancer. One way to help prevent cancer is to successfully sue and/or prosecute companies who introduce cancer-causing substances into the air, water, food, and other parts of our environment. Thus, I'd say that the factors resulting in courtroom success are relevant to the fight against cancer.
> Unless you're proposing that universities abolish all departments except medical research
Doesn’t follow, and I’m sure you’re not proposing that funds/time/attention spent in one place can be double spent in another. It’s reasonable to criticize a waste of resources since there’s always a real opportunity cost
> It’s reasonable to criticize a waste of resources
I don't believe it's a waste of resources.
> there’s always a real opportunity cost
Pitting cancer research vs. psychology research is a false dichotomy. (And again, the article author didn't appear to receive any extra funding for this research aside from his regular professorial salary.) Society spends vast sums of money on a vast number of things. If you want to talk about a waste of resources, I could list a million things that are worse than this research, not just worse as in less useful, but worse as in actively harmful to society.
> I could list a million things that are worse than this research, not just worse as in less useful, but worse as in actively harmful to society.
The thing that comes to mind is the “manufactured ewaste” that people buy on AliExpress and Wish.com and Temu. The products on there are enticingly cheap, but are often so crappy that they rarely even get a single use, and end up in a landfill.
Plastic waste is bad, but I am even more concerned with potential problems with lithium batteries piling up in landfills, not even considering the potential ethical issues with mining the resources for the battery.
It’s one thing to me if the device you are actually using was made with dubious labor, it’s another if it’s a device that will immediately become waste.
Just to establish a base line.. can you give any example of a specific kind of academic research that would qualify as a waste of resources? Or is everything worth it by definition?
I get that as a process science and the pursuit of knowledge require us to prove some “obvious“ things because hey, it might not be as obvious as you think and you might learn something. But with that attitude how do you even want to establish the boundaries or the agenda of what we ought to research?
> Just to establish a base line.. can you give any example of a specific kind of academic research that would qualify as a waste of resources?
I don't have an example off the top of my head. This isn't an issue that I track or have a particular concern with.
> But with that attitude how do you even want to establish the boundaries or the agenda of what we ought to research?
I would generally leave those judgments to the academic community, who I don't consider infallible by any means but do consider significantly less fallible in their judgments of the value of academic work than, say, anonymous commenters on Hacker News.
Physically attractive people are going to have an advantage in many things, depending on the field. However, sometimes it doesn't matter all that much. And I think in some circumstances it works to their disadvantage esp. when it comes to women.
Some Youtube personalities have been able to succeed despite not being very physically attractive, e.g. Sabine Hossenfelder (sp.), or not even showing their face at all (e.g. Perun) They are just know WTH they are talking about and present it in relatable/funny way.
I think a lot of people have some intuition that Berkson’s paradox is at work and that’s where the disadvantage comes in.
If skill and attractiveness are unrelated but there’s a filter process at some point that only lets people through if they’re hot OR talented, you’ll see a negative relationship between skill and attractiveness after the filter.
the prosecutor example is interesting because it suggests that either thats not happening
They also tend to be smarter[1]. What we perceive as physical attractiveness is obviously some kind of mate selection adaptation. It’s no surprise that it would correspond with both intelligence and fertility.
The halo effect exists because it’s a somewhat valid heuristic.
It correlates, which could also explain a link in the opposite direction. Secondary sex characteristics sometimes have nothing to do with overall fitness. You can see this most clearly in animal species where the females value elaborate ornamentation, like peacocks.
Science is still worth doing to confirm our intuitions, but I agree that this headline approaches a tautology. "People who other people like tend to be favored by those people"
>The first measure introduced an objective counterpart to human ratings by employing a machine learning algorithm developed by Megvii (Face++ Beauty Score).
Apparently obfuscating a subjective variable makes it objective in soft science research.
I think the "homeless guy" social experiment where he tries unsuccessfully to get a table but then drives off in a Lambo is the peak of our social progress.
That and the % of poor and minority men in prison.
psypost.org? This looks like one of those content farms sites that we criticize google for including in its results. These kinds of domains need to be banned from here as well.
Not just physical attractiveness, but skin tone matters in America where the conscious and subconscious biases are formed before children speak which are then reinforced through media which decides for them what is attractive and what is not, and manifested in their reality. The target groups almost suffer trauma, passed on to their children and their children, paraded as not humans but caricatures of the dominant megalomaniac Pan-Euro-American psyche.
What's interesting is that the article claims the findings are that physical attractiveness has a greater effect (in gaining the judge's favor) than skin tone or "race". It also claims that while attractive women have a slightly higher success with male judges, even so gender is not that important for the effect to take place.
the argument that attractive caucaisan women and men vs attractive african american women and men are treated equally at American court, is undeniably wrong. Backed up by real world numbers.
The article doesn't claim they are treated equally, just that the effect of being physically attractive is more important than the rest of the factors.
From the article:
> "Attorneys who are considered more physically attractive are more likely to win their cases and receive favorable votes from judges, according to new research published in the Journal of Law and Courts. This advantage holds even when taking into account other important factors like race or the attorney’s experience."
> "This “treatment” variable (attractiveness) allowed for the isolation of its effect from other confounding variables such as attorney experience, ideological alignment, and financial resources."
> "These findings were robust, holding true across various measures of attractiveness and even when accounting for traditional factors known to influence courtroom success, such as experience, ideology, and financial resources."
> "Female attorneys with higher attractiveness scores appeared to receive a greater advantage, especially when arguing before male judges. But otherwise, there was little evidence that race or gender significantly influenced the attractiveness advantage."
> “To some extent I was surprised that the results were consistent regardless of the race and gender of the judges, attorneys, and survey respondents involved in my study,” Waterbury said. “There was some suggestion in my review of previous research that race and gender effects would impact attractiveness ratings and thus impact the relationship between attractiveness and success in court. I did not find strong evidence to support that expectation in my analysis."
Note that none of this says that race and gender don't matter, just that they don't seem to hugely impact the attractiveness factor.
Rest of the globe just doesn't compare with the rest. In North America especially its subtle/overt hateful ignorance. In Europe its overt hateful ignorance. In Middle East its a mix bagged. The racism outside these parts is mostly based off curious ignorance, (they just havent seen foreigners for a long time due to isolating themselves).
My first parent comment was to describe systematic and intentional hateful ignorance of the West and below I lay out the religious origins of this:
Western perception is especially vulnerable through image/narrative manipulations with gaslighting, labeling and ignorance being its main tool of oppression especially when told through manufactured stories from a religious authority traditionally apt at targeting groups that rejects its main state religion (ex. Jews persecuted in Catholic Europe) which uses fear and idolation to further cement others as undesirables/dangerous/lesser.
The rest of the world see the cumulation of such lazy thinking in Western political spectrums, both believing they are better than the rest of the world, supported by populist foreign & domestic policies through slogans and manufactured merit warps its subjects that simply cannot see past the illusion. Societies gets complex before entering decline and we are finally seeing this play out even in institutions that we all agreed would be free from these biases for a fair trial.
I find it hard to believe that racism in Europe and NA is particularly more rampant than in the rest of the world. Probably the complete opposite these days.
I find it fascinating that people seem to care so little about this particular bias when compared to other types of discrimination.