On these questions, researchers are just starting to deliver answers. And the early returns are disconcerting. An ongoing series of Japanese studies has concluded that attractive young males are relatively disinclined to co-operate with others or to share money, and while good-looking females come off better, Israeli psychologists have found they tend to be more socially conformist and self-promoting than observers presume them to be.
New 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—a result they fear unscrupulous campaign operatives will use in the future, favouring attractive candidates over good ones, or limiting the amount of useful information available to voters.
Not all of this comes as a shock. Surely, good-looking men have more opportunity to cheat. You might wonder how something as subjective as physical appearance can lend itself to scientific inquiry. Beauty, after all, lies in the eye of the beholder—or so Plato taught us. But even he must have noticed that the beholders have remarkably similar tastes: symmetry of facial and body structure; complementary features like full hair and smooth skin; hormonal indicators such as square jawlines on men and smaller chins on women.
This makes it surprisingly easy to design experiments on physical attractiveness. Most begin with a panel of randomly selected judges, who rate the attractiveness of the subjects, or photos of them. Researchers then categorize the subjects based on their relative attractiveness, and use those sets to perform experiments.
They might compare how they act in games of trust. Or they might observe how others judge attractive, versus unattractive, people. Technology plays a bigger and bigger role. A few years ago, neuroscientists at Duke University wired 22 college-aged women to MRI brain scanners, showing each photos of male faces of varying attractiveness, followed by written blurbs about the moral behaviour of the men they had just viewed.
In doing so, they may have pinpointed the physical source of the beautiful-is-good stereotype. In the Duke experiments, it surged with neural activity, not only when the women viewed the faces of attractive men, but also when they viewed the positive statements.
To the researchers, this suggested overlap in what are supposed to be two distinct functions—judging attractiveness and assessing moral goodness. So, essentially, we appear to be confused, possibly to our own detriment. If our responses to dishy humans occur in some instantaneous jumble of subconscious neural activity, how are we to protect ourselves from the handsome devils and femmes fatales of this world?
These are not rational processes. Among heterosexual college-aged men who were in permanent relationships, the good-looking ones averaged 2. No such link between appearance and infidelity surfaced among attractive females. This discrepancy lends poignancy to a thread that broke out a few years later on the online dating site PlentyOfFish. But the lovelorn poster was having none of it.
Its role in other arenas is more worrisome. A Japanese study published in , for example, concluded attractive young men are less likely, relative to women, older men or less-good-looking men, to co-operate for shared financial benefit.
The researchers tested participants with one-on-one money-exchange games, in which mutual generosity could yield modest reward for both partners, yet required trust to benefit both parties. The paper, published in Evolution and Human Behavior , found that young, attractive men skewed heavily to the selfish side, receiving more money on average and giving back less.
Based on findings of previous studies, the researchers ventured that confidence in their appearance, or their capacity to obtain resources, enabled attractive young men to share less and take greater risks. In other words, they press their evolutionary advantage.
The impact on election outcomes varies from contest to contest. But it seems clear the beautiful-is-good stereotype operates on voters as surely as it does on lovers and money-givers. Our own Prime Minister may be a case in point. In February , 16 months before the start of the recent election campaign, public opinion polls in Canada took a curious turn. During the following year, his leadership positives never appreciably declined.
His pleasing physical presentation became his most noticeable feature, filling the conversation void left by the absence of reliable information about his trustworthiness.
On Oct. Shortly after, he and his wife appeared on the pages of Vogue magazine. My nose was wide and squished. There were dents in the side of my head where my eyes had been before being moved to the front of my face. And I had scars running across my face that looked like train tracks coming into Grand Central Station. It developed over years of thinking, teasing, talking, friendship, bullying and love.
These are some things I figured out along the way. Ugliness is not the absence of beauty. Ugliness is its own, wonderful thing. Defining ugliness only in opposition to beauty narrows our sense of normal. A quick look at history shows that defining beauty in one particular way is just another fashion choice — apt to change with the seasons.
Appearance is linked to identity and self-worth. Acknowledging the breadth of differences in appearances helps us acknowledge differences between people. We can acknowledge differences in appearance without attaching value to them.
What we actually need to do is to remove the association between appearance and the set of characteristics assigned to it. Even our fairytales do it. But just because someone is attractive, it does not automatically follow that they are nice or smart. Just because someone may be less attractive, they are not automatically mean or stupid. Beauty is a contested space. No one, except maybe supermodels, will win, however, if we define beauty as just one point on the end of a continuum with ugliness at the other.
I talk to a lot of school groups about appearance and disability issues. Questions from our kids about appearance matter.
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