Friday, April 07, 2006

Beauty and the Fattened Wallet

Beauty and the Fattened Wallet
(The New York Times)
Armed with the data from these experiments and surveys, the economists found several interesting results. It turned out that beautiful people were no better than ordinary people in solving mazes. But despite having the same productivity as others in this task, beautiful people were a lot more confident about their own abilities. Being good looking seems to be strongly associated with self-confidence, a trait that is apparently attractive to employers.

When employers evaluated employees only on the basis of résumés, physical appearance had no impact on their estimates, as one would expect. But all of the other treatments showed higher productivity estimates for beautiful people, with the face-to-face interviews yielding the largest numbers.

It’s a curse, I tell you.

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