Although the popularity of Botox and other such innovations suggests that many people do want to look better, it seems fair to conclude that they are not willing to pay any significant price to do so, since the great majority do not in fact have cosmetic surgery, exercise regularly, or maintain anything like their ideal body weight.
Like so much in our society, physical attractiveness is produced by those with the greatest comparative advantage, and consumed vicariously by the rest of us—purchased, in a sense, ready made. Whether our appearance is purposeful or accidental, the outcome is the same, which is that a great many of us look awful most of the time, and as a consequence of actions or inactions that are at least substantially the result of free will. M en dressed liked boys?
Flip-flops at the office? Health care workers who never get near an operating room but nevertheless dress in shapeless green scrubs? These sartorial statements are not just casual. On its face, so to speak, beauty presents some serious ideological problems in the modern world.
If beauty were a brand, any focus group that we convened would describe it as shallow and fleeting or perhaps as a kind of eye candy that is at once delicious and bad for you.
As a society, we consume an awful lot of it, and we feel darn guilty about it. Why should this be so? For one thing, beauty strikes most of us as a natural endowment, and as a people we dislike endowments. We tax inheritances, after all, on the premise that they are unearned by their recipients and might produce something like a hereditary aristocracy, not unlike the one produced by the competition to mate with beauty.
Appearance can be a source of inequality, and achieving some kind of egalitarianism in this arena is a long-standing and probably laudable American concern. The Puritans eschewed fancy garb, after all, and Thoreau warned us to beware of enterprises that require new clothes.
Nowadays, at a time of increased income inequality, our clothes paradoxically confer less distinction than ever. The same goes for age distinctions short pants long ago lost their role as uniform of the young , class distinctions the rich wear jeans too , and even distinctions between occasions such as school and play, work and leisure, or public and private.
Looks matter for good reason, in other words, and delegating favorable appearances to an affluent elite for reasons of cost or convenience is a mistake, both for the individuals who make it and for the rest of us as well. The slovenliness of our attire is one of the things that impoverish the public sphere, and the stunning rise in our weight in just 25 years is one of the things that impoverish our health. Looks seem to matter to all cultures, not just our image-besotted one, suggesting that efforts to stamp out looksism which have yet to result in hiring quotas on behalf of the homely are bucking millions of years of evolutionary development.
T he degree of cross-cultural consistency in this whole area is surprising. The evidence for this comes from the field of evolutionary psychology. Psychologists Michael R. Cunningham, of the University of Louisville, and Stephen R. Shamblen cite evidence that babies as young as two or three months old look longer at more attractive faces. New mothers of less attractive offspring, meanwhile, have been found to pay more attention to other people say, hospital room visitors than do new mothers of better-looking babies.
This may have some basis in biological necessity, if you bear in mind that the evolutionary environment, free as it was of antibiotics and pediatricians, might have made it worthwhile indeed for mothers to invest themselves most in the offspring likeliest to survive and thrive. The environment today, of course, is very different, but it may only amplify the seeming ruthlessness of the feelings and judgments we make. Disturbingly, the men who had viewed pictures of attractive women thereafter judged their actual partners to be less attractive than did the men who had viewed analogous pictures of women who were average in attractiveness.
Perhaps more important, the men who had viewed attractive women thereafter rated themselves as less committed, less satisfied, less serious, and less close to their actual partners. And status matters. And it turns out that Academy Award-winning actors and actresses outlive other movie performers by about four years, at least according to a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine in Redelmeier and Sheldon M. As any museumgoer can tell you, the big variation in male preferences across time and place is in plumpness, and Buss contends that this is a status issue: In places where food is plentiful, such as the United States, high-status people distinguish themselves by being thin.
There are reasons besides sex and status to worry about how we look. For example, economists Daniel S. Hamermesh, of the University of Texas, and Jeff E. Biddle, of Michigan State University, have produced a study suggesting that better-looking people make more money. The penalty for plainness is five to 10 percent, slightly larger than the premium for beauty.
Yet another study found that better-looking college instructors—especially men—receive higher ratings from their students. Hamermesh and some Chinese researchers also looked into whether primping pays, based on a survey of Shanghai residents. Several studies have even found associations between appearance preferences and economic cycles. Psychologists Terry F. Pettijohn II, of Ohio State University, and Abraham Tesser, of the University of Georgia, for example, obtained a list of the Hollywood actresses with top box-office appeal in each year from to During economic downturns, stronger and more rectangular female faces—in other words, faces that were more mature—were preferred.
In a study that appeared recently in Science , psychologist Alexander Todorov and colleagues at Princeton University showed photographs of political candidates to more than students, who were asked to say who had won and why based solely on looks.
The students chose correctly an amazing 69 percent of the time, consistently picking candidates they judged to look the most competent, meaning those who looked more mature. The losers were more likely to have babyfaces, meaning some combination of a round face, big eyes, small nose, high forehead and small chin. Those candidates apparently have a hard time winning elections.
Being beautiful attracts positive feedback and fosters positive interactions with others and thus boosts an individual's confidence and charisma and hence effectiveness in every aspect needing human interaction. Better-looking people are therefore more likely to be hired and, when hired, to get higher wages. With academic careers, appearance may work in similar ways. These Discussion Papers are circulated widely to other specialists in the research and policy community so that the results of the research receive prompt and thorough professional scrutiny.
The Centre produces more than Discussion Papers each year and has an archive of over 13, of them. Find out more here. Guys are often stimulated by visual cues. They will gravitate and hit on the girls they find physically attractive when they are out. But I hope that most guys are not judging books by the cover. In other words, I hope what most guys are looking for is a book with a pretty cover and a great story inside. A pretty cover alone can only go so far.
So, is it less shallow to say that guys are attracted to a girl at FIRST by how she looks, but then there must be more to formulate a deeper relationship? I've struggled for a long time: why can't I just be attracted to the great girl that isn't pretty on the outside in my eyes? Or, why do I only go for these girls that I find pretty on the outside before I know about what's on the inside?
When I meet an amazing girl personality-wise that is not physically attractive to me, she just becomes a really good friend, and once they are a friend it never changes. Here is what I notice in terms of appearance, in order, in a girl when I'm out:. I tried to tell my friend Margaret that I noticed eyes before anything else. But she was quick to point out that I won't approach a girl who is not petite and is not shorter than me. I'm average height and my first few girlfriends I ever had were all petite.
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