Why attractive people earn more

Do you still believe that career success is achieved through hard work, professionalism and perseverance? We hasten to disappoint you: getting a high position and salary depends not only on business and working qualities, but also on appearance – attractive people are easier to hire, they get promotion faster and higher salaries than their colleagues who are not so lucky with physical data.

It may well be that beautiful people are indeed more useful to their companies – for example, Dario Maestripieri, professor of evolutionary biology and neuroscience at the University of Chicago, believes that they bring more significant profits to companies and, as a result, can expect higher rewards (1). It can be suspected that external data plays a significant role for employees involved in sales, as well as for those who participate in business negotiations. But how much more useful for your company is a nice programmer or an irresistible writer girl? Most likely, external data should not play a significant role here – as well as for many other “fighters of the invisible front”, whose activities are not tied to constant communication with customers and partners. However, their salaries are on average higher, and the point here is in evolutionary psychology.

According to Maestripieri, people are more attuned towards attractive colleagues of the opposite sex, as they subconsciously consider them to be potentially more attractive sexual partners. As a result, they tend to communicate with them more often than with ugly ones, and give them various kinds of gifts: choosing from two applicants for promotion – beautiful and not very, the male boss will undoubtedly prefer the first if there is no quality between them. difference in ability. Beautiful people seem to others as brighter personalities – others tend to attribute intelligence, communication skills and other skills that are important from a business point of view.

And yet it’s not just about attractiveness: Maestripieri notes that beautiful people tend to be more self-confident. One of the curious observations made by him is that on airplanes, people with a model appearance most often end up in business class, and people with a regular one in economy class – as if we are facing two different races with different rights!

Inequality is evident already at the interview stage: Rice University and the University of Houston have studied how the appearance of candidates affects the personnel officers who interview them (2). It turned out that such features of appearance as moles, scars, freckles, minor deviations from the symmetry of the face, significantly reduce the chances of candidates. They literally distract personnel officers from the content of the conversation with the candidate: the more of them the candidate had, the worse the personnel officer remembered what he was talking to him about. As a result, such a candidate left a rather dull impression on the personnel officer.

True, the difference between “beautiful swans” and “ugly ducklings” may not be so significant: according to the calculations of Daniel Heimermesh, an economics professor at the University of Texas at Austin, the former earn on average 3-4% more than the latter (3). In addition, as Heimermesch emphasizes, beauty is not just a relative concept: it is often mistaken for a well-groomed appearance, which can speak of a person’s self-esteem. And those who have a higher opinion, as a rule, demand higher salaries for themselves. It turns out that the lack of external attractiveness can be more than compensated for by self-confidence: remember that a great many historical figures who occupied the highest posts – from Caesar to Napoleon, from Genghis Khan to Lenin – were far from handsome.

1. D. Maestripieri «The truth about why beautiful people are more successful», Psychology Today, March 2012.

2. J. Madera, M. Hebl «Discrimination against facially stigmatized applicants in interviews: An eye-tracking and face-to-face investigation», Journal of Applied Psychology, vol. 97(2), March 2012.

3. D. Hamermesh «Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People Are More Successful» (Princeton University Press, 2011).

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