我猜对了结局，猜错了开始。。。。。。
IMAGINE you have two candidates for a job. They are both of the samesex—and that sex is the one your own proclivities incline you to findattractive. Their CVs are equally good, andthey both give good interview. You cannot help noticing, though, thatone is pug-ugly and the other is handsome. Are you swayed by theirappearance?
Perhaps not. But lesser, less-moral mortals might be. If appearancedid not count, why would people dress up for such interviews—even ifthe job they are hoping to get is dressed down? And job interviews areturning points in life. If beauty sways interviewers, the beautifulwill, by and large, have more successful careers than the ugly—even incareers for which beauty is not a necessary qualification.
f you were swayed by someone's looks, however, would that be wrong?In a society that eschews prejudice, favouring the beautiful seemsabout as shallow as you can get. But it was not always thus. In thepast, people often equated beauty with virtue and ugliness with vice.
Even now, the expression “as ugly as sin” has not quite passed fromthe language. There is, of course, the equally famous expression“beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, to counter it. But the subtextof that old saw, that beauty is arbitrary, is wrong. Most beholdersagree what is beautiful—and modern biology suggests there is a goodreason for that agreement. Biology also suggests that beauty may,indeed, be a good rule of thumb for assessing someone of either sex.Not an infallible one, and certainly no substitute for an in-depthinvestigation. But, nevertheless, an instinctive one, and one that isbound to redound to the advantage of the physically well endowed.
Fearful symmetry
The godfather of scientific study of beauty is Randy Thornhill, ofthe University of New Mexico. It was Dr Thornhill who, a little over adecade ago, took an observation he originally made about insects anddared to apply it to people.
The insects in question were scorpion flies, and the observation wasthat those flies whose wings were most symmetrical were the ones thatdid best in the mating stakes. Dr Thornhill thought this preference forsymmetry might turn out to be universal in the animal kingdom (and itdoes indeed seem to be). In particular, he showed it is true of people.He started with faces, manipulating pictures to make them more and lesssymmetrical, and having volunteers of the opposite sex rank them forattractiveness. But he has gone on to show that all aspects of bodilysymmetry contribute, down to the lengths of corresponding fingers, andthat the assessment applies to those of the same sex, as well.
The reason seems to be that perfect symmetry is hard for adeveloping embryo to maintain. The embryo that can maintain itobviously has good genes (and also a certain amount of luck). It is,therefore, more than just coincidence that the words “health andbeauty” trip so easily off the tongue as a single phrase.
Other aspects of beauty, too, are indicators of health. Skin andhair condition, in particular, are sensitive to illness, malnutritionand so on (or, perhaps it would be better to say that people'sperceptions are exquisitely tuned to detect perfection and flaws insuch things). And more recent work has demonstrated anotherassociation. Contrary to the old jokes about dumb blondes, beautifulpeople seem to be cleverer, too.
One of the most detailed studies on the link between beauty andintelligence was done by Mark Prokosch, Ronald Yeo and Geoffrey Miller,who also work at the University of New Mexico. These three researcherscorrelated people's bodily symmetry with their performance onintelligence tests. Such tests come in many varieties, of course, andhave a controversial background. But most workers in the field agreethat there is a quality, normally referred to as “generalintelligence”, or “g”, that such tests can measure objectively alongwith specific abilities in such areas as spatial awareness andlanguage. Dr Miller and his colleagues found that the more a test wasdesigned to measure g, the more the results were correlated with bodilysymmetry—particularly in the bottom half of the beauty-uglinessspectrum.
Faces, too, seem to carry information on intelligence. A few yearsago, two of the world's face experts, Leslie Zebrowitz, of BrandeisUniversity in Massachusetts, and Gillian Rhodes, of the University ofWestern Australia, got together to review the literature and conductsome fresh experiments. They found nine past studies (seven of themconducted before the second world war, an indication of how oldinterest in this subject is), and subjected them to what is known as ameta-analysis.
The studies in question had all used more or less the same methodology, namely photograph people and ask them to do IQ tests,then show the photographs to other people and ask the second lot torank the intelligence of the first lot. The results suggested thatpeople get such judgments right—by no means all the time, but oftenenough to be significant. The two researchers and their colleagues thencarried out their own experiment, with the added twist of dividingtheir subjects up by age.
Bright blondes
The results of that were rather surprising. They found that thefaces of children and adults of middling years did seem to give awayintelligence, while those of teenagers and the elderly did not. That issurprising because face-reading of this sort must surely be importantin mate selection, and the teenage years are the time when suchselection is likely to be at its most intense—though, conversely, theyare also the time when evolution will be working hardest to cover upany deficiencies, and the hormone-driven changes taking place duringpuberty might provide the material needed to do that.
Nevertheless, the accumulating evidence suggests that physicalcharacteristics do give clues about intelligence, that such clues arepicked up by other people, and that these clues are also associatedwith beauty. And other work also suggests that this really does matter.
One of the leading students of beauty and success is DanielHamermesh of the University of Texas. Dr Hamermesh is an economistrather than a biologist, and thus brings a somewhat differentperspective to the field. He has collected evidence from more than onecontinent that beauty really is associated with success—at least, withfinancial success. He has also shown that, if all else is equal, itmight be a perfectly legitimate business strategy to hire the morebeautiful candidate.
Just over a decade ago Dr Hamermesh presided over a series ofsurveys in the United States and Canada which showed that when allother things are taken into account, ugly people earn less than averageincomes, while beautiful people earn more than the average. Theugliness “penalty” for men was -9% while the beauty premium was +5%.For women, perhaps surprisingly considering popular prejudices aboutthe sexes, the effect was less: the ugliness penalty was -6% while thebeauty premium was +4%.
Since then, he has gone on to measure these effects in other places.In China, ugliness is penalised more in women, but beauty is morerewarded. The figures for men in Shanghai are –25% and +3%; for womenthey are –31% and +10%. In Britain, ugly men do worse than ugly women(-18% as against -11%) but the beauty premium is the same for both (andonly +1%).
The difference also applies within professions. Dr Hamermesh lookedat the careers of members of a particular (though discreetly anonymous)American law school. He found that those rated attractive on the basisof their graduation photographs went on to earn higher salaries thantheir less well-favoured colleagues. Moreover, lawyers in privatepractice tended to be better looking than those working in governmentdepartments.
Even more unfairly, Dr Hamermesh found evidence that beautifulpeople may bring more revenue to their employers than the less-favoureddo. His study of Dutch advertising firms showed that those with themost beautiful executives had the largest size-adjusted revenues—adifference that exceeded the salary differentials of the firms inquestion. Finally, to add insult to injury, he found that even in hisown cerebral and, one might have thought, beauty-blind profession,attractive candidates were more successful in elections for office inthe American Economic Association.
That last distinction also applies to elections to public office, aswas neatly demonstrated by Niclas Berggren, of the Ratio Institute inStockholm, and his colleagues. Dr Berggren's team looked at almost2,000 candidates in Finnish elections. They asked foreigners (mainlyAmericans and Swedes) to examine the candidates' campaign photographsand rank them for beauty. They then compared those rankings with theactual election results. They were able to eliminate the effects ofparty preference because Finland has a system of proportionalrepresentation that pits candidates of the same party against oneanother. Lo and behold, the more beautiful candidates, as ranked bypeople who knew nothing of Finland's internal politics, tended to havebeen the more successful—though in this case, unlike Dr Hamermesh'seconomic results, the effect was larger for women than for men.
If looks could kill
What these results suggest is a two-fold process, sadly reminiscentof the biblical quotation to which the title of this article refers.There is a feedback loop between biology and the social environmentthat gives to those who have, and takes from those who have not.
That happens because beauty is a real marker for other, underlyingcharacteristics such as health, good genes and intelligence. It is whatbiologists call an unfakeable signal, like the deep roar of a big,rutting stag that smaller adolescents are physically incapable ofproducing. It therefore makes biological sense for people to preferbeautiful friends and lovers, since the first will make good allies,and the second, good mates.
That brings the beautiful opportunities denied to the ugly, whichallows them to learn things and make connections that increase theirvalue still further. If they are judged on that experience as well astheir biological fitness, it makes them even more attractive. Even asmall initial difference can thus be amplified into something that justain't—viewed from the bottom—fair.
Given all this, it is hardly surprising that the cosmetics industryhas global sales of $280 billion. But can you really fake theunfakeable signal?
Dr Hamermesh's research suggests that you can but, sadly, that it isnot cost-effective—at least, not if your purpose is career advancement.Working in Shanghai, where the difference between the ugliness penaltyand the beauty bonus was greatest, he looked at how women's spending ontheir cosmetics and clothes affected their income.
The answer was that it did, but not enough to pay for itself in astrictly financial sense. He estimates that the beauty premiumgenerated by such primping is worth only 15% of the money expended. Ofcourse, beauty pays off in spheres of life other than the workplace.But that, best beloved, would be the subject of a rather differentarticle.
