Shutterstock
Not sure how I am supposed to feel about this, but a new study of 20,000 people conducted by the University of Boston over 13 years and published in the Journal of Business Psychology claims that income is somehow associated with attractiveness, or rather un-attractiveness.
According to their extensive research, “Very unattractive respondents always earned significantly more than unattractive respondents, sometimes more than average-looking or attractive respondents.”
BPS Digest explained the study this way…
• The researchers drew on a longitudinal study of 20,000 young Americans, interviewed at home at age 16 and then on three more occasions up to the age of 29. Each time the interviewer rated the person’s physical attractiveness, from very unattractive to very attractive.
• Those participants who were rated very unattractive at age 29 were earning significantly more than people judged more attractive than them, including (though to a lesser extent) the very attractive. For attractiveness measures earlier in life, which allow more persuasive claims of causality, echoes of this pattern were present, as the very unattractive went on to earn significantly more at age 29 than those who were earlier rated unattractive, and they earned in the same region or even slightly more than those who were earlier rated as attractive.
Got all that? Okay, good. Now the question becomes, why? Alex Fradera of BPS Digest has a theory.
As to what gives rise to the income advantage for the very unattractive group, the only speculation I can offer is that in this dataset the personality trait Openness to Experience – which is usually associated with higher pay – was surprisingly correlated with lower earnings and higher attractiveness, meaning it was the only “bad” trait associated with higher attractiveness.
Could this Openness-attractiveness association be an indicator that some of the very unattractive scored especially low on Openness, and were perhaps highly devoted to a specific topic area, pursuing it obsessively to the exclusion of all distractions and eventually entering the forefront of their field?
So, perhaps people with low amounts of confidence focus more and harder on work and therefore excel more often? I suppose that is certainly possible.