Attractive People Play Life On Easy Mode (And What You Can Do About It)

We are all involved in a lottery. Some win, others lose.

Numerous statistics show that winners of this lottery have countless advantages over the course of their lives. I am talking about the genetic lottery. It pays to look good.

In many ways, attractive people are treated better. This phenomenon is referred to as “pretty privilege” or “beauty premium”.

In this article, I present some mind-blowing numbers on how this privilege manifests itself.

The Beauty Pay Gap

Attractive people are paid better.

Significantly better, in fact. That’s what economists who studied data from the USA and Canada found.

According to their research, attractive workers earn about 12–14% more than their less attractive colleagues.

Why is that?

The Halo Effect

Our thinking is more flawed than we think.

A heuristic called the halo effect causes us to subconsciously attribute other positive traits to good-looking people, such as intelligence, talent, kindness, or honesty.

The halo effect (sometimes called the halo error) is the tendency for positive impressions of a person, company, brand, or product in one area to positively influence one’s opinion or feelings in other areas. The Halo effect is “the name given to the phenomenon whereby evaluators tend to be influenced by their previous judgments of performance or personality.” The halo effect which is a cognitive bias can possibly prevent someone from accepting a person, a product, or a brand based on the idea of an unfounded belief on what is good or bad. — Wikipedia

There are further examples that can be used to quantify the effects of the halo effect.

Attractive People Are Invited More Often For Job Interviews

According to researchers, looking for a job might be partially a beauty contest.

Italian researchers from the University of Messina, University Politecnica delle Marche impressively proved with their study that beautiful people have a significant advantage when looking for a job.

They sent out over 11000 CVs to 1542 advertised job offers. In the process, they sent the made-up CV 8 times each, changing only the names, addresses, and the attached picture.

The results are so clear that the researchers even describe the job search as a beauty contest in their study report.

• The average callback rate of all CVs sent out was 30%.
• The callback for attractive women was 54% and for attractive men 47%
• Only 7% of unattractive women go a callback while 26% of unattractive men got one.

For both sexes, the more attractive persons have an advantage. In the case of women, however, this unfairness is much more pronounced.

So much so that one could speak not only of a pretty privilege but also of an ugly disadvantage.

If you’re interested in the study, you can read about it in more detail here.

Pretty Women Get Better Grades

Pretty students, especially pretty girls have an advantage in school.

Researchers have found in a study that attractive students get better grades. This effect is particularly pronounced in girls.

The study states:

We find that appearance matters: attractive female students receive higher grades in college courses compared to their unattractive peers. Furthermore, we provide evidence that in environments where students cannot be seen, more attractive students perform relatively worse than in traditional environments.

Attractive Teachers Are More Effective

Even pretty teachers have an advantage.

As a study from the year showed, being attractive is also an advantage as a teacher. According to the study’s findings, students remember more information when the teacher is hot.

Good-Looking CEOs Positively Influence Stock Prices

Hell, looks even heavily influence the stock market

Another study found that the better the CEO looks, the more companies’ stock prices respond to positive news reported on TV.

What To Do About It?

You’re probably thinking: “that sucks.”

I could not agree more with you, but we probably won’t be able to change these things.

The only things we can do, in my opinion, are the following:

• Accepting that the halo effect is real.
• Make sure we max out our genetic potential.
• Try to question our behavior so that we do not treat less attractive people worse.

Thanks for reading!

Wait a second. You should get my articles in your inbox. Subscribe here. Maybe you also want to start writing on Medium yourself and make money. I made a whopping $3400 in my second full month! You only need a membership for $5 a month. If you sign up with my link, you support me with a part of your fee without additional costs.

I think you will also like these stories: