Everyone knows that appearance has a very important impact on people's lives.
Research over the past few decades has found that good-looking people earn higher wages, better grades, and higher satisfaction with their lives. They are less likely to commit crimes and are in a slightly higher social position than people from the same background.
This phenomenon is called "beauty premium" or "beauty privilege" by sociologists.
Why does it appear?
There are two mainstream explanations:
First, employers, teachers, and leaders naturally prefer good-looking people, consciously or unconsciously, they will give them preferential treatment.
In other words, the privilege of beauty derives from the "differential treatment" of those in power.
Second, good looks are "productivity" in themselves. Because beauty can enhance people's self-confidence, make people more active in doing things, and more keen to make friends. These characteristics enhance people's abilities.
There is a lot of debate about who is right and who is wrong about the two interpretations. Adrian Mehic, a graduate student at Lund University, is interested.
"I've always been interested in discrimination. In economic research, discrimination against gender and race has received a lot of attention, but not much attention has been paid to discrimination based on appearance in educational settings. So, I want to fill that gap. ”
Mehic wanted to study how students' looks affected the professor's grading. He found 307 industrial engineering students at Lund University, all taking the same 15 subjects in the first two years, including math, physics, computing, business and economics. Over the next three years, students study in their preferred directions.
In order to ensure that the content of the exam is the same, Mehjic is looking for freshmen and sophomores. In 2019, they all took classes in person, and in 2020, after the outbreak of the epidemic, everyone switched to online classes.
This is exactly what Mehjic wants.
When offline, professors and students meet every day, and good grades can be explained by "differential treatment" or "productivity".
After switching to online classes, although Lund University encouraged students to turn on cameras, most people were reluctant to turn on them, and professors could not see students' faces at all for a year. If the results are still good, it can only be explained by "productivity".
"To sum up, the difference between these two observation methods can help us distinguish whether the beauty privilege is due to the professor's appearance discrimination or the ability improvement brought about by the student's appearance." Mešić wrote in the paper.
Mehjic recruited 74 people to rate 307 students on a scale of "very unattractive" and 10 as "very attractive." After some calculations, he got an average score for each student's appearance (fortunately, the students themselves could not see the score).
To control for variables, he also included data on student age, gender, parental income, and gender of professors.
Mehjic then divided the 15 courses into two categories, quantitative and interactive. Quantitative courses are so-called hard courses, such as mathematics and physics, which only look at the results of the written test, and there will be no interaction between the professor and the student.
Interactive courses include a lot of teacher-student interaction, students need to do PPT, group homework and speeches, etc., the scoring mechanism is relatively loose. It includes business and economics classes, among others.
After collating more than two years of data, Mešić finally got the results of the study.
As a result... It's a bit unexpected...
Let's start with offline courses. When 15 courses are counted together, the better-looking people score, but the correlation is not obvious enough.
If you remove the quantitative courses and only count the interactive courses, then the quality of appearance and the quality of grades are strongly correlated.
Even, Mehic wrote a formula that can predict a student's grades by his appearance score.
After switching to online classes, strange situations appeared. Everyone's quantitative class grades have not changed, while in the interactive class, the grades of good-looking girls have dropped significantly, but the handsome boys have not changed.
In other words, although the professor can't see everyone's face, handsome boys still enjoy beauty privileges.
"In in-person teaching, both boys and girls have beauty privileges, but when they switch to online education, the privileges of girls disappear. This means that beauty privileges in the education system are gender-specific. Mešić told the media.
"I think the professor's aesthetic preferences best explain the beauty privilege of girls. Boys, on the other hand, still have good grades and high attractiveness despite low teacher-student interaction, are more likely to have beauty privileges due to characteristics produced by beauty (e.g., they have higher self-confidence). ”
Mehjic thinks of several reasons to explain how appearance enhances the abilities of boys.
"Compared with average-looking students, attractive boys have a greater and more lasting influence on their peers, which is a personality trait that is positively related to academic performance." In addition, attractive people are more sociable, have more open relationships, and are more popular. ”
"What's more, these traits are significantly associated with creativity. In interactive courses, such as marketing and supply chain management, students need to demonstrate 'creativity' in order to get a high score. Coupled with the fact that there are often group assignments in interactive classes, only those with excellent social skills have an advantage. ”
Well, it sounds reasonable, but the problem is...
Why don't good-looking girls get an ability improvement because of their appearance? Logically, they should also be more confident and social?
Some netizens believe that it may be that social discipline has caused girls' self-confidence to be generally lower than boys, even if they are beautiful.
"If a beautiful woman's self-confidence is not as good as that of a handsome guy, I am not surprised at all.
Society has quite strict standards for women, and I have never met a woman who is 100% satisfied with her appearance. ”
"Come to think of it, good-looking women are more likely to be harassed from childhood, and have even been sexually harassed."
Sometimes beauty can get into trouble, so some girls try their best to keep a low profile.
"My eighth-grade English teacher used to deliberately drop things so that he could crouch down and peek at the beautiful girls in the class.
To avoid being peeked at by him, I wear sweatshirts and baggy jeans every day and dress myself ugly... Those teachers who are not perverts, I am really grateful to you for making today's children feel better. ”
Some worry that the study will exacerbate discrimination.
"A lot of people blame women for [the change in grades], completely ignoring that it's professors who give marks based on appearance, not that they get points based on their appearance."
In the comment area, there are also many teachers who say that it is difficult to give marks completely objectively. Sometimes, they just can't help but feel good about some students and bad feelings for others.
Further research is needed on the differences between men and women in beauty privileges, and Mešić's sample size is simply too small.
However, no matter how far you go to research, people's preference for beauty cannot be changed.
Human beings are not as rational as they think, and when they see good-looking people and things, they can't help but pay more attention...