It’s Smart To Be Good-Looking
‘Baywatch” beauty Pamela Anderson may rake in the bucks for her work posing for anatomically correct photos in girlie mags. But it’s attractive guys who profit most on the job from their looks, says psychologist Linda Jackson of Michigan State University.
Good-looking men are viewed as more intelligent and competent in the workplace than less attractive but equally bright and capable guys, while beauty confers comparatively little advantage to attractive working women, she said.
Jackson and her colleagues recently combined and then analyzed data collected in 68 scholarly studies of physical attractiveness conducted over the past 25 years involving more than 17,000 men, women and children. Their bottom line on beauty and smarts: Attractive adults and children are consistently perceived as more intellectually competent than the less aesthetically pleasing, they reported in the latest Social Psychology Quarterly.
Willie the Dog-Faced Boy can take heart. Competence counts, just not for everything. “Attractiveness had stronger effects when quality of performance was low than when it was high, although attractiveness was a benefit in either case,” Jackson found. Actually, some sociobiologists argue attractive people should be smarter than the rest of us, the result of selective breeding over the millennia. What historically has defined “beauty” in women (youthful appearance, facial symmetry, a reasonably curvy body) actually is nature’s way of signaling good breeding potential to men driven to pass on their genes, Jackson said.
Women seek good providers, and brains historically bring home the bacon. One theoretical result of men with big brains selectively mating with women with hot bodies should be a class of lucky people who are very attractive and very smart. In reality, “physical attractiveness was unrelated to actual intellectual competence in adults, but was related modestly in children,” Jackson’s analysis disclosed.
That’s because children may be more dependent on cues from others to inform them of their relative smartness, she said. Cute kids get more positive cues - and respond by behaving in more “intelligent” ways. Adults have other ways to fix their self-image - SAT scores, job performance, ability to bluff at poker - and don’t have to rely so much on oohs and coos from others.
Unmarried moms around the world
Out-of-wedlock births aren’t just an American phenomenon. In fact, the United States ranks behind several Western nations in terms of the percentage of all births to unmarried females.
Topping the list: Sweden, where half of all births in 1992 were to unmarried women, followed by Denmark, France, the United Kingdom and then the United States. Laissez-faire attitudes toward nonmarital births and low marriage rates likely explain the high rates in Scandinavia, according to Christine Bachrach of the U.S. National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
In some Scandinavian countries and elsewhere, the hugely negative impact of out-of-wedlock births is blunted because children are more likely to live with their co-habitating but unmarried parents, she said. Sadly, America still outpaces the Western world in the rate of births to unmarried teenage women and in the percentage of households headed by a single parent. xxxx OUT OF WEDLOCK By country, percentage of all births to unmarried women: Sweden………….50 Denmark…………46 France………….33 United Kingdom…..31 United States……30 Canada………….29 Germany…………15 Netherlands……..12 Source: Birth data provided by demographer Stephanie Ventura of the National Center for Health Statistics.