Are Attractive People More Employable? | Hacker News Reader

Are Attractive People More Employable?

economix.blogs.nytimes.com

11 pointslinhir9 comments

The big question is how they quantified attractiveness in their study, it seems to be one of those "I know it when I see it" things.

Attaching a photo to a resume is a huge no-no in the US, but I've seen many people check applicants' photos online (OK, I admit, I've done it, too).

Other things being (almost) equal, I see no problem in hiring a more attractive man/woman applicant over a less attractive one. I think attractive people in general have more self esteem and make friends more easily, both good traits in the workplace. Why discriminating based on intelligence is OK while doing it based on beauty such a taboo?

I imagine it's likely because intelligence will actually influence your capacity to do your job in the vast majority of cases, whilst appearance will not. I understand in instances where this is not the case, such as hooters waitresses, they do actually openly discriminate based on attractiveness.

I wasn't talking about Hooter's waitresses and other such jobs, e.g. playmates :-)

Why do you think that in the vast majority of cases appearance will not influence your output? I think this is a clear fallacy: Although you attractiveness may not influence the work you do, the additional qualities you develop over the years because your attractive, like high self-esteem, may be very important and relevant to the workspace.

Hold on, you say that it's a clear fallacy that your attractiveness does not influence your output, and then you directly claim afterward that your attractiveness may not influence the work you do? That was my original point, so it seems much like you're saying I'm wrong and then restating my original point.

The problem I have with regards to your secondary argument, that attractiveness contributes to self esteem and is thus important and relevant to the workplace as a contributing factor towards building soft skills is that it equally promotes simple narcissism.

Full disclosure; I think that we may just be getting over a long standing hangover where "touchy feely" attributes of a person were valued over their actual aptitude and intellect and I'm quite happy not to see us sliding back into that particular arena and being surrounded by pleasant but incompetent people

Who are you arguing with? The article said nothing about hiring more attractive people being wrong.

I didn't say the article implied that, I was just making a general comment. There's a big taboo associated with considering an applicant's physical characteristics explicitly in the hiring process. If you don't believe me, next time you're involved interviewing candidates mention this aspect.

They usually quantify attractiveness by asking a bunch of (ideally) randomly-selected people to rate the attractiveness of a bunch of photos of people. Datasets of things like this are often published in tables of norms that researchers can buy access to.

The most interesting thing I ever learnt in Psychology was how attractiveness is judged/recognized and how it affects peoples' reactions. For instance, one study showed that people can smell a more attractive person from their clothes alone. Like 'smell these shirts, and tell us which one you suspect has the most attractive owner.' And other things like how attractive people are less likely to be found guilty by juries, or tend to be given lighter sentences.

This is why diversity is good. Even in HR (needs more men).

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