A pro-attractiveness bias may exist even in education, with studies showing that physically attractive students tend to obtain higher grades at university, partly because they are deemed more conscientious and intelligent, even when they are not. Furthermore, attractiveness already helps students to get into university in the first place, by eliciting more favorable evaluations during college admissions interviews. This is consistent with the broader finding of a very well-established “halo” effect whereby attractive people are generally perceived as being more sociable, healthy, successful, honest, and talented. In fact, meta-analytic studies suggest that even children are deemed smarter, more honest, and driven, when they are more attractive – and children make the same type of inferences when they evaluate more or less attractive adults. In an experiment, researchers asked kids to pick an imaginary boat captain for a game, and they were told to choose from photographs of actual politicians (unknown to the 5-year old kids). More often than not, they picked the more attractive candidate, and their choices predicted the results of past political elections with an accuracy of around 80%. Unsurprisingly, the beauty bias transfers into the workplace, with scientific studies showing that less attractive individuals are more likely to get fired, even though they are also less likely to be hired in the first place. For example, in an experimental study, researchers sent 11,000 CVs to various job openings, including identical CVs accompanied by candidate photographs of different levels of attractiveness. Attractive women and men were much more likely to get a call back for an interview than unattractive (or no-photograph) candidates were. Given these findings, one wonders how many countries in particular Germany request that job applicants include a picture in their resumes. By the same token, it’s not always easy to determine whether appearance should be treated as a bias factor or job-relevant trait, especially when employees’ performance depends on the perceptions customers or clients have of them. As a Glassdoor report noted, “there are many industries and businesses that would suffer immeasurably if we were to legislate out beauty bias.” In support of this idea, evolutionary scientists report positive correlations between attractiveness ratings on one hand, and actual scores on socially desirable personality traits, such as emotional stability, extraversion, and ambition on the other. Perhaps, because the alternative is to discriminate against less attractive individuals, which will include people from minority groups who don’t fit the dominant “beauty norms”. But when employers simply pretend to ignore attractiveness, focusing on candidates’ past performance or interview performance, and interpreting these data as objective or “bias-free”, there is no guarantee that less attractive candidates won’t be handicapped. It is no different from pretending to ignore race or social class, while selecting candidates on academic credentials, which are actually conflated with race and social class. Clearly, then, there’s an unfair advantage to being deemed more attractive, and an unfair disadvantage to being deemed less attractive. Although employers can mitigate this bias by eliminating appearance data from their hiring practices for instance by focusing on science-based assessments, past performance, and resume data, instead of face-to-face interviews such measures will not be sufficient to eliminate bias, since even seemingly objective data is likely to have been influenced by historical biases: for example, if attractive people have been evaluated more favorably in the past, they will show up as high performers in their CVs, and so on. In short, it’s a challenging task to eliminate the beauty bias from work and make attractiveness a less significant driver of peoples’ career success. But one thing is clear: we will never manage to achieve this by avoiding the subject or pretending that the bias doesn’t exist. Questions: Which industries / organizations do you feel would benefit the MOST from instituting appearance regulations? Why? Why would eliminating “picture needed” when applying for a job still not fix any potential bias in hiring discrimination when it comes to appearance? Do you feel that your college should implement appearance regulations for students attending classes? Why or why not? List TWO positives of such an implementation (i.e., two things that might be good about requiring students to dress professionally for class). List TWO negatives of such an implementation (i.e., two drawbacks of requiring students to dress professionally for class).
A pro-attractiveness bias may exist even in education, with studies showing that physically attractive students tend to obtain higher grades at university, partly because they are deemed more conscientious and intelligent, even when they are not. Furthermore, attractiveness already helps students to get into university in the first place, by eliciting more favorable evaluations during college admissions interviews. This is consistent with the broader finding of a very well-established “halo” effect whereby attractive people are generally perceived as being more sociable, healthy, successful, honest, and talented. In fact, meta-analytic studies suggest that even children are deemed smarter, more honest, and driven, when they are more attractive – and children make the same type of inferences when they evaluate more or less attractive adults. In an experiment, researchers asked kids to pick an imaginary boat captain for a game, and they were told to choose from photographs of actual politicians (unknown to the 5-year old kids). More often than not, they picked the more attractive candidate, and their choices predicted the results of past political elections with an accuracy of around 80%.
Unsurprisingly, the beauty bias transfers into the workplace, with scientific studies showing that less attractive individuals are more likely to get fired, even though they are also less likely to be hired in the first place. For example, in an experimental study, researchers sent 11,000 CVs to various job openings, including identical CVs accompanied by candidate photographs of different levels of attractiveness. Attractive women and men were much more likely to get a call back for an interview than unattractive (or no-photograph) candidates were. Given these findings, one wonders how many countries in particular Germany request that job applicants include a picture in their resumes.
By the same token, it’s not always easy to determine whether appearance should be treated as a bias factor or job-relevant trait, especially when employees’ performance depends on the perceptions customers or clients have of them. As a Glassdoor report noted, “there are many industries and businesses that would suffer immeasurably if we were to legislate out beauty bias.” In support of this idea, evolutionary scientists report positive correlations between attractiveness ratings on one hand, and actual scores on socially desirable personality traits, such as emotional stability, extraversion, and ambition on the other. Perhaps, because the alternative is to discriminate against less attractive individuals, which will include people from minority groups who don’t fit the dominant “beauty norms”. But when employers simply pretend to ignore attractiveness, focusing on candidates’ past performance or interview performance, and interpreting these data as objective or “bias-free”, there is no guarantee that less attractive candidates won’t be handicapped. It is no different from pretending to ignore race or social class, while selecting candidates on academic credentials, which are actually conflated with race and social class.
Clearly, then, there’s an unfair advantage to being deemed more attractive, and an unfair disadvantage to being deemed less attractive. Although employers can mitigate this bias by eliminating appearance data from their hiring practices for instance by focusing on science-based assessments, past performance, and resume data, instead of face-to-face interviews such measures will not be sufficient to eliminate bias, since even seemingly objective data is likely to have been influenced by historical biases: for example, if attractive people have been evaluated more favorably in the past, they will show up as high performers in their CVs, and so on.
In short, it’s a challenging task to eliminate the beauty bias from work and make attractiveness a less significant driver of peoples’ career success. But one thing is clear: we will never manage to achieve this by avoiding the subject or pretending that the bias doesn’t exist.
Questions:
- Which industries / organizations do you feel would benefit the MOST from instituting appearance regulations? Why?
- Why would eliminating “picture needed” when applying for a job still not fix any potential bias in hiring discrimination when it comes to appearance?
- Do you feel that your college should implement appearance regulations for students attending classes? Why or why not?
- List TWO positives of such an implementation (i.e., two things that might be good about requiring students to dress professionally for class).
- List TWO negatives of such an implementation (i.e., two drawbacks of requiring students to dress professionally for class).
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