The Ugly Side of Beauty

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In the famous children's fairy tale, The Ugly Duckling, a mother duck lays a clutch of eggs. When the hatchlings emerge, one is different from the rest. He is huge and awkward looking. His feathers are not yellow or black, but a muted gray. As soon as he's hatched, the bullying begins. Not only from his siblings, but other animals too. And so the ugly duckling roams the countryside, slowly accepting his fate of being an outcast. Then one day, he sees a flock of swans. Entranced by their beauty, he swims toward them. As he gets closer, he expects them to be disgusted by his appearance, just like all the other creatures he has encountered. But to his surprise, they welcome him with open wings. You know the rest of the story. The flock of swans sees the duckling for what he truly is— a young swan who will grow up to be as beautiful as the rest of them. I've long had misgivings about this story. What is its moral? If people don't look like they belong to our tribe, It's okay to treat them badly? We can only find acceptance among people who are just like us? To be ugly is to be cursed? In our episode last week, we explored the science of beauty, why we are attracted to it, and how we are moved by it. If you missed that episode, please do listen to it. This week, we explore some of the more complicated elements of our fascination with beauty, especially beautiful people. From infancy, human beings are fascinated by those who are good-looking. They are the stars of our movies and magazines, objects of our adoration. But our unthinking adulation of beauty can come with steep costs. The science of beauty bias This week on Hidden Brain. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Principal, the perpetual pen tapper, the arbitrary fridge reorganizer, the holiday party planner that starts in May. Principal knows your star employees have their work quirks. Principal also knows how much those employees mean to your business. You need them. They need benefits. Work with Principal so they can help you help your team with a retirement and benefits plan that's right for them. Principal Life Insurance Company, Des Moines, Iowa. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates, and other insurers. Not available in all states.

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From a very young age, we are taught to see past people's looks. We tell children, don't judge a book by its cover. Beauty is only skin deep. It's what's on the inside that counts. Growing up, Vivian Zayas heard these aphorisms many times. But when she was in graduate school, she found herself drawing a quick and unkind impression about a young student.

My advisor came and he said, I have an undergraduate who wants to work in the lab. And she would be great as a research assistant for you. And so he introduces me to this student. And she was really disheveled. Like, her hair wasn't, like, combed well. And she wasn't well put together. Her appearance looked a little messy. And I was like, uh-oh.

Vivian felt she was in a high-stakes setting. She didn't want anyone on her team who wasn't top-notch. Would this undergraduate be able to cut it?

I mean, I can— I see it in my mind's eye. They're standing there by the doorway into the lab, and he just brings her and introduces her to me for the first time. And I wasn't happy. But we worked together a lot. We worked together over the course of a year. And she was socially warm and engaged. She was very— Orderly and dutiful, so she was able to meet all the requirements very quickly and did it well. And it turned out that she was one of the best research assistants I ended up having. She was excellent. My impression was so wrong that has stayed with me all these years.

Did you ever apologize to her for your initial impressions of her?

I don't know if she registered it. I mean, I think I was still polite. I was definitely not rude. And I think I might have a judgment that is registered internally, and it's— I don't know how much she picked up on that. I would be doing a lot of apologizing if every time I made a judgment I was wrong, I had to apologize.

Part of the reason the story has stayed with Vivian is that she went on to become a psychologist who studies the very mistake she made with the young undergrad. Vivian, who now works at Cornell University, would come to study the so-called beauty bias. She says this bias involves leaping to a number of unsupported conclusions.

What is beautiful is good, and what is good is right. Is beautiful is also intelligent and popular and strong and competent and happy. And so we usually, when we judge someone as beautiful, we go way beyond the judgment of their physical appearance to making inferences about what they are like in a whole number of other domains. And so we think they have a lot of friends, and they're really good parents, and they're a wonderful partner, and they must have such fun when they go on vacation. So we really overgeneralize way beyond what we should based on the information that we're gleaning from just physical appearance.

Vivian remembers another time she drew a quick inference about someone Based on looks.

We have speakers give various academic talks, and often now to advertise the talk, you see the person's photograph. So their photograph is presented along with the title of their talk. And I remember seeing— there was a speaker coming in and seeing this person's photograph, and I didn't think it was a very good photograph. But I remember I had a very strong reaction to the photograph, which is kind of rare because often they're very standard pictures that people have of themselves. The person comes and gives a talk, and actually that photograph was so strong, had elicited such a strong reaction in me, it was almost to the point where I was like, how could this person give a good talk? It was such a strong reaction. The person comes to visit, they give a talk, and they're the loveliest person. They are so authentic and engaging, and that initial impression was erased. And I think it really said a lot about the person and their talk and their energy during the talk that was able to kind of undo that initial impression.

Hmm. Of course, what usually would happen is that we might look at a photograph, reach an unconscious conclusion about that person, and never attend that talk, and never have that impression corrected.

Yeah, absolutely. I think also sometimes it is harder to correct for it. I think in the case of the research assistant, in the case of the speaker giving their talk, they provided clear And diagnostic information that my initial impression was wrong. And sometimes when we meet someone, they might not be able to provide that clear information that the impression is wrong. You know, some interactions are pretty mundane, and you engage in small talk. Perhaps in those conversations, there wouldn't be enough disconfirming information to undo that initial impression.

In fact, the swift conclusions we draw about people based on how they look can often be confirmed by our perceptions of how they act. We are often on the lookout for evidence in the way people behave that will back up our initial impressions. Like heat-seeking missiles, we zero in on any clues that suggest that our biases are not biases, But facts. Vivian remembers the time she saw the movie No Country for Old Men. It's based on the great novel by Cormac McCarthy, and it features a psychopathic killer named Anton Chigurh.

Yeah, one thing that stuck with me was his bowl cut, right? His haircut was just cut straight across, straight down. And I think the way that framed his face was just— he looked like a psychopath. And so part of me thought that the way he looked was the way the actor looked. And so to me, I was like, well, that must be an easy role since the actor looks like that. It's easy for him to play a psychopath.

Sometime later, Vivian was watching the Oscars. The actor who played Anton Chigurh was up for an award. And Vivian realized she had pictured him all wrong.

The way he presented himself in that movie was drastically different than the way he typically presents himself. And at the Oscars, like, Javier Bardem, you know, is a very attractive man, right? And very handsome, warm. You know, he transformed himself physically for that role. And it's really interesting because sometimes you think, I mean, that's the same person. The person in the movie would not be someone that you would judge as attractive, right? Not attractive. He's unattractive. And yet he, as an actor, is extremely attractive.

I mean, really what this shows is that he was actually acting. He wasn't just playing himself. He was actually acting.

And when I first saw it, I was like, that's the way he looks? But it was part of how he acted that, you know, gave off this impression of who he was.

I asked Vivian why we draw such sweeping conclusions from the faces we see.

I think that as social beings, we want to make sense of this world that we're in. And the social world is highly complex. And so we want to make a prediction of Who is it that we're interacting with? And so we use these cues that we see to make predictions, and it kind of simplifies the world for us.

Most of us know that discriminating against people on the basis of race or gender or sexual orientation is wrong. But it's harder to be outraged by the beauty bias, even though it can have pernicious effects in the world. That's because when we stare adoringly at movie stars and music icons, this bias doesn't feel like a negative thing. It feels positive, even joyous. When we come back, how appearances influence our interactions with others, affect our relationships, and shape the most important decisions in our lives. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates, and other insurers. Not available in all states. Want more cash? Get a $450 bonus after your first 45 deliveries with Uber Eats. Now, how you work it is up to you.

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See app for details. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. On TV, celebrities hawk everything from shoes and soda to clothes and car insurance. Why is this? Why do we care if Tiger Woods wears Nike apparel? Or if Patrick Mahomes uses State Farm Insurance? Well, the answer is obvious. If we like the celebrities, advertisers are hoping that some of our affection for these stars will rub off on their products. At Cornell University, psychologist Vivian Zayas has studied why we draw quick conclusions about others based on how they look. and the effects this has on our lives. She says the beauty bias is part of a larger phenomenon in psychology known as the halo effect.

The halo effect is that when we judge someone to be attractive, we go beyond their physical appearance and make a whole bunch of other inferences that they're good at work and have lots of friends and they're funny and social and make a lot of money. And so the halo effect is just that we go way beyond the judgment of attractiveness and make an inference that that person is good at a whole number of other things and has a number of positive attributes.

So some years ago, Vivian, you brought people into the lab, and you showed them photographs. And these photographs resembled someone they knew. Tell me about this study and what you found.

So in this study, we brought in couples, heterosexual couples that had been in a relationship for about 6 months, and we took their photographs. They then came back into the lab, and we told them that they were going to do a task where we were going to show them photographs of strangers, and that they were just going to make their snap judgment. They were going to assess whether they— They were going to assess whether they Thought the person was trustworthy or not, attractive or not, intelligent or not, competent or not. But what they didn't know is that we had taken the photographs of their partner, and we had morphed them with the photographs of another participant's partner.

People thought they were simply rating pictures of random strangers. What they didn't know is that half of those pictures had been altered. Vivian and her team morphed photographs of strangers with photographs of people's own romantic partners. In other words, a volunteer may have thought she was looking at the face of a stranger, but the face she saw subtly resembled her boyfriend.

And what we found was that women in particular were more likely to judge a stranger who bore resemblance to their partner more favorably, as more trustworthy, as more intelligent, more attractive, less aggressive. Men only showed a preference for the judgment of attractive. They ended up judging strangers that resembled their partner as more attractive. But for the other traits, there was no significant difference.

It was a simple test of the idea that we have quick and automatic associations with the faces we see. In this case, by having a photograph resemble a volunteer's boyfriend, the volunteer associated the warm feelings she had for her partner With a stranger.

So in this study, we were interested in what's called transference. And I know transference is a psychodynamic term, a Freudian term, where the patient is having a therapy session and then starts transferring their feelings from an existing relationship onto the therapist. And that was deemed as an important milestone because then in therapy, they can kind of work out some of these dynamics that the patient is experiencing in their existing relationships.

Hmm.

But there's social cognitive perspective. We can study transference where if you meet someone and they bear some resemblance to someone that you already know, it's going to basically activate the representation, the memory you have of the person that you know. You might not be aware that's being activated. You can activate that memory implicitly. You're not necessarily consciously aware. And you activate the memory of the person you already know, and you basically transfer that memory onto this new person. And you think the new person has all the characteristics of the person that you already know.

Hmm.

You're going way beyond the information that you have, and you think that the person is— they're attractive, They're trustworthy. They're competent. They're intelligent. They're less aggressive.

Vivian emphasizes that so much of this happens outside of our awareness. The volunteers in the study had no idea why they suddenly felt warmly toward one stranger and cold toward another.

At the end of the study, we asked them, what did you think the study was about? So we were looking to see, are they saying, well, you showed me photos of my partner? And people didn't say that. Then we asked them, did anyone seem familiar?

Hmm.

And we basically were probing to see were they aware. A small fraction expressed some— once we said, did any of the people look like your partner? A small fraction did report some acknowledgment, but even when we removed them and we only looked at people who didn't report any awareness, we still found these effects.

Hmm.

I think the mechanisms why this occurs or how this occurs is that when you meet someone, you know, we're trying to make a prediction of what they're like, and we have this huge database in memory of all past experiences. And so when this person has some features that map on to features of people that we already know, it activates that memory. And so then we fill in the blanks. We're not even aware that the memory of our partner's activated, but now we start filling in the blanks and we say, I like this person, I'm attracted to this person. And then we go beyond that judgment and say, I think this person's a trustworthy person and they're intelligent and they're competent and they're safe. They're not gonna be aggressive.

Notice how much information we can draw from just a face. This, of course, is exactly what Vivian did when she saw the undergraduate student with the uncombed hair or the speaker who she thought didn't look very competent. Now, you could say that we are careless about the judgments we make about other people because it doesn't hurt us to draw quick conclusions about them. Most of the time, we draw conclusions about people and move on with our lives. Our judgments might hurt other people, but they don't always hurt us. Vivian wanted to test whether people became more accurate in their judgments when they themselves had something on the line.

Yeah, so in this study, we present participants with 4 financial partners. Side by side and with a portrait of what they look like. Every time they select a partner, they learn whether they got money or they lost money. And they're supposed to figure out who's the best financial advisor.

Sometimes attractive financial partners helped volunteers make money. But sometimes it was the unattractive financial partner who was the wiser choice. The question was, over time, would people learn to ignore attractiveness as a cue and focus only on the quality of the financial information?

So the way that we structured the paradigm was really to allow people to compare apples to apples. How much money are you earning? How much money are these financial consultants able to confer to you? And would we see this halo effect, this beauty is good bias, even when it comes to the money that people are earning?

And presumably, in this situation here, the thing that you should care about is how much money you're earning because that's what you're looking to get out of the enterprise. It's not so much whether your partner is good-looking or not. That should not matter one bit.

Not one bit. It's completely irrelevant. You just want to make as much money as possible.

So who did the volunteers tend to pick? The financial partners who gave them steady gains over time, or the financial partners who were attractive?

What we found was that even though facial attractiveness is sort of irrelevant to what participants were doing in this task, they were highly swayed by the facial attractiveness of the financial partner. They selected the attractive financial partners. Much more often than the unattractive. Participants would get feedback, and when there was a loss, so the financial advisor conferred a loss, financial loss, participants would return more quickly to the attractive partner than to the unattractive partner.

Wait, you're saying that when they lost money, they still wouldn't learn? They still kept going back to the attractive partner?

They might sample someone else for a moment and then go back to the attractive partner. And they were quicker to choose them again in the future. They were quicker to sort of forgive or give the attractive person another shot. And then at the end of the study, participants were asked, who do you think was the most helpful in helping you earn money? Participants strongly thought that the attractive financial partner was most helpful in helping them earn more money.

Wow.

Even when that was not the case?

Even when that was not the case.

It's kind of remarkable, isn't it, Vivian? Because in some ways, you're giving people every incentive to learn that attractiveness, in fact, is not only irrelevant, but in fact, potentially counterproductive to what their goals are, and yet people effectively refuse to learn.

Yes.

And even though they learned which partners were more advantageous, they still preferred the attractive partner over the unattractive partner.

I mean, this is a study in the lab, so obviously you're not actually stealing people's money here. But you can see how this can have effects and impacts in the real world that could be quite profound.

Yeah. I mean, it really says a lot about how these impressions that we make about another person based on appearance have profound consequences, even if those impressions are not right.

There's been a ton of other work that shows a relationship between attractiveness and various life outcomes. I'm wondering if you can paint me a picture of what some of these other studies have found. What does the overall literature on the beauty bias show, Vivian?

It shows that individuals who are deemed as more attractive obtain a number of benefits. In the courtroom, they're more likely to get lighter sentences. People who are judged as more attractive earn more money. In classrooms, are more likely to get attention from teachers. And so starting from an early age, the world starts to—

Reward you.

treat attractive individuals differently than unattractive individuals, and those create a self-fulfilling prophecy where if someone treats you as if you're a good person, as if you're a smart person, then you're more likely to meet those expectations. And so these types of effects accumulate over a person's lifetime.

Researchers have explored how far the beauty bias will go. One study examined how parents treat their own attractive and unattractive children.

This is an observational study, and the research team basically coded for the facial attractiveness of the child and also some of the parenting behaviors, especially around safety. And one parenting behavior that they were looking at is whether the parent would buckle in the child in the shopping cart as they're going around the grocery store.

Hmm.

And what they were reporting there was that children that had been judged to be more attractive based on the independent coders were more likely to be buckled in in the shopping cart by their parents. It suggests that even parents might be affected by this type of beauty bias when interacting with their own children.

Our judgments about attractiveness are so sticky that Vivian finds people regularly go to lengths to preserve their initial impressions of others. If I think someone is attractive, in other words, my behavior toward that person changes, often without my being aware of it.

So this is a study done with Gül Günaydın, a former graduate student and now professor. And we had participants complete a survey. And in that survey, there were photographs of about 8 women. And we asked them, do you like the person in the photograph? Would you want to hang out with the person in the photograph? How attracted are you to the person in the photograph? And these were all same-sex, so women judging women. They were also asked, do you think the woman in the photograph is like an extrovert, conscientious? Do you think she's agreeable? So what's called the Big 5 personality traits. So they made personality judgments of the woman.

What the volunteers in the experiment did not know is that they were looking at photos of a research assistant.

Let's call her Jamie. So we have Jamie's photograph in the initial survey. We selected participants so that half the people liked Jamie and that half the people did not like Jamie so much based on the photograph. Then they came in and they all interacted with Jamie. Now, Jamie didn't know how they had judged her. They're interacting with the same person, but if they initially liked her based on the photograph, they ended up liking her based on the interaction. And if they initially were kind of lukewarm about her based on the photograph, then they remained lukewarm after interacting with her.

Hmm.

And that's really interesting to us because we separately had asked participants, Do you think you can judge a person based on their photograph, or do you think you would update your impression? And in this survey, people think that they'll update their impression based on an actual conversation with someone. When you talk with someone, you get a lot more information than a photograph. You hear their voice. You see their behaviors. They tell you what they like. And so participants thought that they would certainly update. And that's not what we found.

Some of the most remarkable work on the beauty bias has explored how our judgments about attractiveness affect not only our behavior, but the behavior of the people we observe. I asked Vivian to tell me about an experiment conducted by Mark Snyder at the University of Minnesota.

So that's a classic study where he had men as participants, and they were asked to have a conversation with a woman. Now, the experimenter presented the men with photographs of the woman, but it wasn't the photograph of the actual woman that they were talking to. The experimenter gave them photographs of another woman, and sometimes the male participant got a photograph of an attractive woman, or in another condition, that they got a photograph of an average-looking or unattractive woman. So now, some men thought that they were talking to an attractive woman, and some men thought that they were talking to an unattractive woman.

Because all of this is happening on the phone.

On the phone. And they recorded the conversation. They had independent people judge the conversation. And they found that independent judges thought that the male participant who thought he was speaking to an attractive woman, they judged him to be warmer and more engaged and more interested as compared to the male participant who had thought he was talking to a more average-looking or unattractive woman.

Notice this is similar to Vivian's finding many years later in the study featuring the research assistant she called Jamie. Men who liked Jamie's photo were more engaged when they talked to Jamie in person. In the University of Minnesota study, the independent judges were asked to also judge the women in the conversations. What did the judges think of the women on the phone?

What they found was that when the woman was speaking with a man, who thought he was speaking to an attractive woman, she actually was judged as more attractive by the independent judges based on her voice as compared to the woman who was speaking to the man who thought he was talking to an unattractive or average-looking woman.

So, I mean, what this is suggesting is that if I think I'm speaking to somebody attractive, regardless of whether the person actually is or isn't attractive, if I think I'm talking to someone attractive, What the study was suggesting was that I become more engaged, but even more than that, the person I'm talking with becomes more engaged and has an effect on them. And so you can see in some ways how the beauty bias has effects not just on our behavior, but on the targets of our behavior.

Yes. And in the study where we had our participants interact with Jamie, we had a video camera in that study. And what we found was If participants liked the woman based on the photograph, now when they're interacting with her, we coded their behavior and independent coders judged the participant as warmer, more engaged, more interested.

The independent coders made the same assessment of Jamie, saying she was also warmer, more engaged, and more interested.

And as a result, the participant leaves the conversation by saying, Oh, wow, we had a really great conversation. She was really engaged and warm and interested, and I really like her. And part of the reason the participant ends up liking her after the interaction is partly because of what the participant elicited from her. And so participants who, based on the photograph, for whatever reason, were lukewarm towards her, well, they were more disengaged, less interested. And less warm.

Jamie, in turn, would then be less engaged, less interested, and less warm with the participants who felt lukewarm toward her. These interactions created a feedback loop.

And the participant themselves is saying, oh, well, that person was less interested, less engaged, and less warm. I don't really like them. But part of it was what they created, what they brought into the situation.

Whether we realize it or not, we all make inferences about what goes on inside of a person based on what we see on the outside. And because we're naturally drawn to what we find attractive, there are big benefits to being beautiful. If you're good-looking, chances are you have a leg up socially, academically, even economically. But is beauty always an advantage? When we come back, when beauty backfires on us. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

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This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. There's no question about it. If you had to choose between being beautiful or not, all of us would choose to be gorgeous. There are so many advantages to being good-looking, right? Yes, but not always. At the University of Colorado Boulder, psychologist Stephanie Johnson has studied a paradoxical effect of beauty in the workplace. Stephanie Johnson, welcome to Hidden Brain.

Hi. Thanks so much for having me.

Now, you found that female entrepreneurs are deemed less trustworthy when they're attractive. You have an interesting term for this. Tell me about the term, and tell me about the study you conducted.

Yeah, absolutely. So this was some work I did with Leah Shepherd on an idea she calls the femme fatale effect, and it really builds from the narrow window in which more attractive people don't benefit. So usually more attractive people walk away with better results, but there's this small area of research that shows that at least for women, Being more attractive can have negative effects. And one of those negative effects is that people see you as less trustworthy. And if you think of, you know, the femme fatale who's able to manipulate others to get her way based on her beauty, right, this kind of Greek myth, the sirens, um, I guess this sticks in people's minds. And so more attractive women, they're seen as less trustworthy and people are more likely to want to fire them.

Stephanie has run experiments where she has tried to tease out the femme fatale effect in the lab. In one study, she presented a female public relations executive who was announcing bad news at her company. Volunteers were shown pictures of the executive. Some were shown an attractive woman. Others were shown an unattractive woman. Volunteers were asked to imagine a scenario.

It says this company has to engage in layoffs, and this PR person is saying, this is the reason why we're doing it. Do you believe her? Do you trust her? And what we find is the more attractive women are seen as less trustworthy.

And why do you think this is happening? So in the scenario you described, the woman is essentially acting as a spokesperson for the company, and you're evaluating whether people trust what she is saying, and you're finding that The more attractive the person is, the less they trust her and the less they trust the company?

Yeah, no, exactly. So why does it happen? It's a great question because she's just the messenger, right? And you often think of messengers and spokespersons as being good-looking because they're in front of the camera. I think it's the idea that when we see attractive women, you know, you want— maybe you want to be around them, maybe you feel your heart rate's elevated, you're more interested in talking to them, but you also feel a little bit protective because you, you know, might fear that they can potentially manipulate you.

Stephanie and her colleagues repeated the study, this time using pictures of men. As before, they asked volunteers to rate the trustworthiness of attractive and unattractive men.

Yeah, no, we didn't find it for men. We looked for but didn't find a hemphetal effect.

And again, what is your theory about why that would be the case?

You know, I think it's because of this stereotype of the seductress, the, you know, woman who's going to use her feminine wiles to manipulate and entrap men. I don't know that you have that same, that same stereotype for the really gorgeous male, even though I would imagine that he can use his masculine whatevers to manipulate people. I don't know if there's that same character in literature and mythology. So I don't feel like we have that stereotyped as strongly as we do for women.

Now, obviously, when we're thinking about these situations, some of this, a lot of this is happening perhaps unconsciously. People are not thinking about this. But when you think about the seductress or the template of a seductress, Is this something that affects both men and women? In other words, do both men and women— are they suspicious of good-looking women?

Yes. So we looked for gender differences in respondents. And I guess I didn't really think we would find the same effect for women mistrusting other women, maybe because I'm like a woman who loves women kind of woman. But we didn't find differences in the respondents.

You mean that women showed the same suspicion for good-looking women as men did?

Yes, yes, women were just as suspicious as men.

The idea that attractive women are somehow less trustworthy is an example of something called the beauty is beastly effect. Coined by a group of researchers in the 1970s and '80s, the beauty is beastly effect is like the beauty bias in reverse.

The original work was done by an outstanding researcher, Madeline Heilman, and she was looking at what is beautiful is good. Just this, that's the, more attractive people tend to be more successful, loved more, get more rewards, seen as extroverts, intelligent, all the things. But she was finding that there was an instance in which this wasn't true, and it was for women applying for managerial jobs, which this was done in the 1970s. And so, you know, at that time, managerial jobs were seen as masculine. Today, I think over 50% of managers are women. So I don't know that that would be true, but she found that more attractive women were actually seen as less competent and less suited for managerial jobs than attractive men, unattractive men, or unattractive women. And so she coined this phrase, the beauty is beastly effect.

Madeline Heilman speculated the bias might come about because of the preconceptions people had about leadership and mismatches in people's minds between the kind of person who becomes a leader and the kind of person who is an attractive woman.

She phrased it as a lack of fit. So the job is masculine. Attractive women are actually by definition feminine. If you look at characteristics of what makes men and women attractive, for women, being more feminine is correlated with being more attractive. It's seen as more attractive. And so if I see you as feminine, you actually don't have what it takes to do this masculine job because you're too feminine. for this masculine work. And it sounds silly for managerial jobs, I would say, at this point, because I actually see leaders in management as having a lot of feminine skills. Like, you have to have empathy and be supportive. But if you were to take it to the extreme and say, like, okay, what about this gorgeous woman comes in and applies for a job as a construction worker, and she's wearing heels and, you know, has on makeup, you're like, well, is she going to be able to lift the equipment and get all dirty and wear the work boots? That's what the lack of fit concept was.

So I spoke some time ago with Marco Petesca at the University of Maryland. I believe he is now at the Singapore Management University. He ran a study looking at how good-looking men fare in the workplace. Now, he found that good-looking men were always considered more competent regardless of profession. But then he looked at how these men were evaluated by their colleagues, and he found that because of the stereotype that good-looking men are competent, these men were treated less well in workplaces that were competitive. I want to play you a short clip of what he told me. When there are these subtle hints of competition within colleagues, as is often the case, then attractive males are actually at disadvantage, and they're actually discriminated against. So if you're working on a sales team and things are competitive between you and the other salespeople, and you mistakenly believe that a good-looking salesman is going to be a better salesman, now you might be more likely to be biased against him. So this might be an example where the good-looking man now actually has tougher sledding than the average-looking man.

That's right. So I loved that study. Because to me, I couldn't believe they found a beauty is beastly bias for men. But when you read it, the study and the nuance, it's that the people making the decisions would be in direct competition with that man, which isn't often the case for people you hire. But what that study showed is people are self-interested. And if I know that I'm gonna bring someone onto the team—

Yeah.

that can outcompete me because they're better looking and they're more competent, then I might be less likely to give them a chance.

But isn't it the case that this is not just about hiring? So to go back to the sales example that we talked about, let's say you have a car dealership and you have like 20 salespeople. And you have 3 very good-looking salesmen on this team. I think what the Petitia study is suggesting is that these men might actually have a tougher go of it among their colleagues because their colleagues see them as more threatening Because of the association between being good-looking and competent and therefore a threat?

No, absolutely. And you see this on sales teams all the time that a potential client or customer comes in and do I call the person who I'm trying to refer them to or do I try to steal the customer? Because it's one of those tough things that like I can work really hard, I can stay extra hours I can try to get ahead, but I can't really— it's pretty hard to change my appearance. And so, it becomes a real competitive advantage for people that might threaten others in the organization.

I mean, it's an interesting idea because I think both with the case of good-looking women and good-looking men, I think our stereotype as a general rule is that these people always have it good, they always have it easy. And I think what this research is suggesting is that, at least in some limited circumstances, they actually might not.

Yeah, I think that's a good summary of at least what my research shows. And I find that more attractive women are more likely to experience sexual harassment and doubts of competence and all these other things. And so I'm very sensitive to that. I think these are important findings. And if you just look at the overall data, at the end of the day, as you started our conversation, we would all be better off being beautiful. Like, that is the strongest effect. Even though there's instances where people might not trust you, think they feel more competitive toward you.

Yeah.

Your salary's still higher.

Yeah.

And particularly for men compared to women.

Stephanie has found that one way to mitigate the negative effects of beauty in the workplace is to bring the bias to the surface, to make people aware of the bias. In one study, she had volunteers evaluate beautiful candidates for a job where the candidates expressly put the issue of their attractiveness on the table.

And they say, I realize I don't look like your typical construction worker, or I realize there aren't a lot of women in construction. And then it's followed with, but if you look at my resume, you'll see I have a lot of experience in this area and I'm, I'm very competent, is what it says. In the other condition, the control condition, they don't acknowledge their appearance or their gender. They just say, if you look at my resume, you'll realize I have a lot of experience and I'm very competent. And we found less bias against attractive women when they acknowledged the fact that they were different.

Hmm.

And I, you know, what does this mean? It's like, I think people are focusing on the fact that this person doesn't fit in. They're not really listening to what they're saying. They're just like, this is— what is she doing here? And when you acknowledge it, you kind of like pop them out of their bubble. And then of course they say, oh no, I wasn't thinking that at all. And then, then they start paying attention to what you're saying.

Right. So in other words, calling attention to the bias and basically saying, it may appear that I'm not a good fit, allows people in some ways to maybe stop thinking about this unconsciously and start thinking about it consciously and say, oh, yeah, in fact, I did think that you were not a good fit. Thanks for flagging that. And now maybe I'll actually give you a serious second look.

I think so, yeah. I mean, I feel like you have to tread carefully because I can't imagine going into that So, you know, my interview and saying, listen, I know I'm so beautiful, and like— and that's weird because then there's like a whole other list of problems they might have with like, this person's a narcissist and not very beautiful, so probably insane. And yeah, so I think there's caveats. You know, we tried to say—

Yeah.

I know I don't look like your typical Construction worker. I realize I'm probably younger than many people in your organization, but I started working— I have 10 years of work experience even at this young age.

So one of the complicated things about the beauty bias is that unlike biases like racism or sexism, where we would say it's wrong in every circumstance and every situation, there are many domains where we all enthusiastically endorse the importance of beauty. So no one would find it problematic if you said, That you liked a movie star because of how he looks, or that you admire a fashion model because she's gorgeous. And of course, in our personal lives, recognizing and complimenting one another on how we look is routine in many relationships and almost something of a requirement in romantic relationships. I'm wondering if this complicates the fight against the beauty bias, the fact that we heartily endorse the bias. In fact, we don't even think of it as a bias in many domains of our lives. Does that make it harder to actually fight it? in other domains?

I think it makes it impossible to fight it in other domains. You know, I think psychologically I would say it's not possible to get rid of it. In my head, in my mind, I unconsciously will make eye contact longer with people who are better looking. Like, studies show this. I can try not to. If I see a good-looking person, I can be like, oh, and let me not look at them But realistically, if I'm not, you know, today I'll probably be good, but tomorrow I probably will not.

Hmm.

So I don't think we as humans can overcome the bias. So I think instead you have to have systems and structures in place, like at least in a hiring context or workplace context. In a dating context, you know, you do you. But when it comes to hiring and making good business decisions, Finding ways to evaluate people that are not subject to the bias of appearance.

Stephanie Johnson is a psychologist at the University of Colorado Boulder. She's also the author of Inclusify: The Power of Uniqueness and Belonging to Build Innovative Teams. Stephanie, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

Thank you so much for having me.

Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Bridget McCarthy, Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Querelle, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. If you enjoy the show and would like to support our work, please consider becoming a member of our podcast subscription, Hidden Brain Plus. That's where you'll find exclusive episodes you won't hear anywhere else. To become a member of Hidden Brain Plus, find Hidden Brain in the Apple Podcasts app and then click the Try Free button. For a 7-day trial. Or you can sign up at apple.co/hiddenbrain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.

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