It is well known that people who are naturally attractive usually make for more desirable romantic partners.
No matter your individual preferences, you are likely to feel a natural pull towards your beautiful neighbor than to a person you don’t find physically attractive.
That being said, there may, in fact, be more perks to being seen as attractive that go beyond the dating scene.
Here are a few extra benefits to being beautiful:
1. Attractive people might be smarter
Researchers at the University of New Mexico discovered that there may be a connection between body symmetry and intelligence.
Body symmetry is believed by some experts to indicate developmental stability, or an organism’s ability to convert its genetic blueprint into a strong body regardless of the influence of harmful things such as toxins, genetic mutations, injuries, inbreeding, and parasites. Developmental stability is also strongly linked to body symmetry.
After assigning an intellectual test to a group of people, scientists found that those who exhibited greater body symmetry received higher scores.
2. Attractive people are seen as more able by employers
We are likely to reward people more depending on their looks. In a 2005 experiment recreating the hiring process, potential employers looking at pictures of potential employees were ready to give 10.5% bigger salaries to good looking people over unattractive ones.
Hiring managers responded in a similar way when interacting with people on the phone. In a nutshell, a person only needs to sound attractive to benefit from our beauty biases.
3. Attractiveness might give you political advantage
If you are climbing the political ladder, you might do much better if you’re good-looking. A Finnish study found that both male and female political figures fare better at the polls than more mediocre-looking politicians.
To what extent? An increase in the research’s measure of beauty by one standard deviation was associated with a rise of 20% in the number of votes a candidate received.
4. Attractive employees are more confident, and higher confidence increases wages
The “hallo effect” appears on all our heads – without us realizing it. We take a person’s appearance to be revelatory of their overall character.
Studies have demonstrated that we see attractive people “as more sociable, dominant, sexually warm, mentally healthy, intelligent, and socially skilled” than unsightly people.
By the time cute children become attractive grownups, they have benefited from this bias for years, gifting them higher levels of confidence.
Information scientists Markus Mobius and Tanya Rosenblat believe it’s a “self-fulfilling prophecy”:
“Teachers expect better-looking kids to outperform in school and devote more attention to children who are perceived to have greater potential,” Mobius and Rosenblat write in their 2005 paper “Why Beauty Matters.” “Preferential treatment in return builds confidence as well as social and communication skills.”
The finding suggests that such confidence translates into academic and professional success.
5. If you are good-looking, strangers might assume you lead a happier life
A study from back in 1972 revealed that people were more prone to assume attractive strangers had wonderful lives.
After showing college students pictures of people with different levels of attractiveness, researchers found that the participants more often estimated that the good-looking subjects were happy, successful, and less likely to remain alone.
They also believed that the attractive people in the photos would make “more competent spouses” and have better marriage lives than the rest.
6. Attractive women perform better academically
A 2015 research analyzed 77067 ID photos of students who were going to the Metropolitan State University of Denver.
The volunteers were asked to rate the attractiveness of others on a 10-point scale.
After each student was rated, it was found that women perceived to be attractive had higher grades on average.
This, however, did not hold true for male students.
7. Good-looking teachers can better teach students in both grade schools and college
One 80s study found that when comparing good-looking teachers to worse looking ones, about 100 pupils in the first and sixth grades reported they feel they would acquire more knowledge from the attractive teachers.
In a way these findings were replicated in a newer study from 2016, which found college students learn more when the teacher is attractive.
What are your thoughts on these studies? Let us know by joining the conversation in the comments, and please share this article if you enjoyed the read.
