26 ms·

Bias in radiology resident selection against the obese and unattractive?

98 points by abhisuri97 6y ago

ineedasername 6y ago
My impression from similar studies is that we tend to discriminate against people who don't look like us, not necessarily based (just) on perceived negative characteristics. So, I wouldn't be surprised if obese/unattractive people still discriminates against those perceived negative characteristics, but I also wouldn't be surprised if that discrimination was to a lower degree than when the person doing the discrimination isn't obese/unattractive.
ponker 6y ago
Everyone everywhere discriminates against the obese and unattractive.
- wavefunction 6y ago
  Everyone? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_fetishism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_fetishism
  - viraptor 6y ago
    Sexual attraction and discrimination can coexist. See a large number of secretly gay politicians fighting against gay rights.
    - bityard 6y ago
      If their preference is secret, how can you know there are large numbers of them?
      - happytoexplain 6y ago
        Formerly secret, and perhaps extrapolating (surely for N > 0 discovered cases, there are M > 0 still secret cases, since it seems unlikely to have a 100% reveal rate). And "large numbers" is highly subjective in this case. It would be reasonable to consider two to be a high number for something so surprising.
      - MikeTheGreat 6y ago
        "See a large number of formerly, secretly, gay, politicians fighting against gay rights." There, fixed that for you Mostly unrelated: That's also the correct use of an Oxford/serial comma, yes?
        nkurz 6y ago
        > That's also the correct use of an Oxford/serial comma, yes? In the off chance you were being serious, no. An Oxford comma goes (or doesn't go) after the second to last (penultimate) item, not after the final. And even then it's only used when there's a conjunction between the penultimate and last item.
        MikeTheGreat 6y ago
        I was - thank you for the clarification! :)
      - viraptor 6y ago
        I mean large in a relative sense. If there is a known small number of elected people, and we know that only few of them will be gay/bi, and we still find out every year or so that someone loudly campaigning against gay rights visited same-sex prostitutes or has a stash of related porn... Then either it's common or there's some weird correlation between that behaviour and drive for powerful positions.
        ponker 6y ago
        A great explanation of this that I read somewhere was that only a gay person could believe the doomsday scenario of homosexuality ending human reproduction. A gay person thinks “huh that’s scary, what if everyone is like me” while a straight person thinks “I have 4 kids, how could that possibly happen.”
newfeatureok 6y ago
Would you really want a doctor who is obese? A mildly overweight doctor, sure. But obese? The reality is, if you have a list of doctors and their pictures and know nothing of them except for their appearance I highly doubt anyone would pick the obese person as their first pick. It’s just reality. Someone capable of going through medical school is capable of reducing their weight to being merely overweight as opposed to obese. People going on “yeah if they know their stuff” are missing the point. You don’t know if they know their stuff at all. As for unattractive, yes that’s bad.
- viraptor 6y ago
  You're saying that like being obese is has a trivial fix people just don't want to apply. I'd totally see a doctor who is obese. Or a doctor who smokes. Or many others. In terms of dealing with obesity they may actually have more insight and know more resources than people not affected by this issue. There's a big difference between behaviours applied to self and knowledge applied at work.
  - laichzeit0 6y ago
    The fix to obesity is caloric restriction. As an extreme example, look at pictures of people in concentration camps: no obese people there. The reason why it’s a good example is because it’s “forced” caloric restriction, and it shows that it works. Obese people make the choice to consume more calories than requires, hence being obese.
    - viraptor 6y ago
      Sure, but that doesn't make it a trivial fix. Unless you figured out how to influence ingrained behaviours / addictions better than any existing methods? This comment is like "the fix to smoking is to not smoke" - yes everybody knows that. Actually applying that across population is the hard part.
      - laichzeit0 6y ago
        The point still needs to be made, since there are _still_ people who honestly believe that weight loss is achieved by some mechanism other than consuming less calories than is expended. They still think there is some other form of "magic" involved. So to digress the discussion onto behaviours, etc. is a distraction from the fundamental fact that needs to be hammered home until it becomes ingrained. At that point we can work on the behaviours required to achieve that end. Otherwise you have what you have now, people changing behaviours and trying to eat healthy, or exercise more, thinking that those behaviours are the magic secret to weight loss. It is not, and you can lose weight eating McDonalds and sitting at your desk all day if the amount of calories in the McDonalds you're eating is low enough. It's not healthy, but healthy/not healthy has nothing to do with calorie restriction and consequently weight loss.
omarhaneef 6y ago
Thank goodness this doesn’t happen in finance.
- xiphias2 6y ago
  I'm not sure if you're serious or not, but at least the stock market doesn't care. Look at Warren Buffet drinking his coke, or Soros with his girlfriend on the beach.
  - mzkply 6y ago
    He's being ironic. As Will Smith's character said in The Pursuit of Happyness, finance is just about being good with numbers and good with people (for which you need rules 1 [Be Attractive] & 2 [Don’t Be Unattractive])
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
1996 6y ago
Previous discussion about the same effect in the legal system: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24044409 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24044409 Personally, I find it very surprising most hackers have such a disdain for physical beauty, given the huge ROI for every $ invested - reportedly about 1,000x for Elon Musk personal worth. Still, only a few CEO seems to have taken action to maximize their appearance, and mostly against their premature baldness. Even that is kind of taboo - while studying before an interview is not, even if it will certainly have a much lower ROI. Why not hack your appearance? There are many scientific studies documenting all that, but we ignore them. For an example of all the known variables, check for ex table 1 of the following for "Zero-order Pearson’s correlations between facial appearance and health, with the corresponding p-values and sample sizes": https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5290736/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5290736/ If you want more example for a given variable, for example the effect of adiposity (we know it's quadratic), read one of the original papers: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6308207/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6308207/ All this is well known now, as the first study was about 22 years ago: Perrett, D. I., Lee, K. J., Penton-Voak, I., Rowland, D., Yoshikawa, S., Burt, D. M., … Akamatsu, S. (1998). Effects of sexual dimorphism on facial attractiveness. Nature, 394(6696), 884–887. doi:10.1038/29772 So why do we keep ignoring it, while focusing on other signals like which search engine (or operating systen) you use?
- eastendguy 6y ago
  > reportedly about 1,000x for Elon Musk personal worth. Where does this number come from?
  - TechBro8615 6y ago
    Pretty sure he’s comparing Elon’s net worth before and after getting hair transplants. That’s a pretty ridiculous claim at best.
    - elil17 6y ago
      Well I for one think no one would be using PayPal if Elon didn't have those luscious locks.
wbraun 6y ago
Reading through the paper, I think the real buried lead here is that the reviewers discriminated in favor of selecting black and hispanic applicants, with a larger effect size than anything analyzed but test scores and attractive vs unattractive (not neutral vs unattractive). This includes obesity, grades / class rank, research publications, and honor society membership. At least your appearance and test scores are mutable characteristics.
- 474637374 6y ago
  Is it actually buried though when the context is America? It seems like this kind of behavior should be assumed as default when this sort of outcome is exactly what American advocacy groups have been persuing for years. If equity only matters for minorities then an org is just going to err on the side of caution and favor minorities.
- elil17 6y ago
  Yeah, but at least reviewers being biased towards Black and Hispanic applicants have some reason to be: they are trying to correct for society-wide discrimination. You can argue that it's not their place to do that, or that trying to do that on a case by case basis is unfair, etc., but it is at least some reason. Discriminating against unattractive people, has no equivalent justification. In fact, discriminating against unattractive people exaggerates a society-wide bias against unattractive people.
  - AmericanChopper 6y ago
    In my experience, most racists think that their views are motivated by noble intentions in one way or another.
    - t-writescode 6y ago
      When the privileged classes have had generations to generate social networks that connect privileged people with privileged people (arguably one of the greatest privileges white people have, along with generational wealth and societies general presuppositions that go along with it), is it so bad to actively recognize that and go against it? Racism says an ethnicity is better or worse than another intrinsically. This is recognizing a section of our population has been, by and large, historically kept from making those connections and intentionally favoring them, not just for their sake but for the sake of their children’s children, by working to get them the same levels of connections the privileged class has historically had.
jungletime 6y ago
What about mean looking people? Surely nobody wants to be around a mean looking person. They might do well in prison or during the draft for war. But otherwise, I'm sure they get ostracized....which just boils up their meanness. So that one day, they might be plotting to ruin Christmas from their cave overlooking Whoville.
- lumberjack 6y ago
  Could go either way, though. People don't want to upset mean looking people either.
- jmpman 6y ago
  My ex-sister-in-law has the worst RBF. Didn’t like her when I met her. 7 years later, still don’t. Maybe it’s not just the face.
- mr_toad 6y ago
  Depends on the job. It’s probably an advantage to look mean if you’re a bouncer or a bodyguard, or work at the DMV.
scarmig 6y ago
I was disappointed they didn't look at height as well, which is particularly relevant for men in both their pay and career progression.
- avgDev 6y ago
  Hmmm I wonder, I'm 6'4", average looking, have a European accent(which i hate) but last time I interviewed for 3 jobs I received offers from all of them. I don't think it was my actual skills as I failed two out of three questions in one of the interviews. I'm not particularly smart either, just common sense and can hack things together. I have a zoom interview soon, we will see how that goes, maybe I need to hold banana or something for scale.
  - Scoundreller 6y ago
    I thought there was always supposed to be a “you’re going to fail this” question so: 1. They have something to point to if/when they get sued for rejecting someone 2. Make you feel like you failed so you don’t ask for as much money 3. Helps prevent there being >=2 perfect interviews and then dealing with ties
    - titanomachy 6y ago
      Having been on the interviewer side of the table at a couple smaller companies as well as a FAANG or two, I can say I've never seen a question on the slate where the candidate was obviously intended to fail. Maybe some other companies do this. However, if a candidate answers my first question easily I will try to extend or constrain the problem enough that it pushes them out of their comfort zone a bit. This gives them a chance to show off more skill than if I only asked an easy question. Also, there are very rarely "perfect interviews"; it's rare for people to get the highest score on even one of their interviews, let alone all of them.
  - pavel_lishin 6y ago
    > I failed two out of three questions in one of the interviews Do you know for a fact that you failed them, or is that just your perception? Interview questions are typically a little more open-ended than you suspect, and not being able to deliver the full answer of what's being asked for isn't a failure when you've only got 30 minutes.
jsnk 6y ago
I like studies like these because it shows different types of discriminations the societies are comfortable with vs some other types of discriminations which are not only uncomfortable, but have severe legal consequences.
roflc0ptic 6y ago
Going through this latest round of job searching, rapport building/interview success has been so much more difficult over zoom/etc. It makes me wonder how much of my past success has been from being a tall-ish, attractive-but-not-so-much-it's-threatening, pleasingly built dude, instead of my apparent technical competence. All of my non-verbal rapport building skills really fall flat, and the fact that I'm bumbling, a little haphazard, kind of anxious is less charming quirk and more off putting anti-feature. I'm really pretty good at Scala, though.
- kepler1 6y ago
  Photographic evidence is required to back up such bold claims lol.
  - roflc0ptic 6y ago
    I mean, this isn't really about my looks per se, just the growing sense that I've been the beneficiary of positive discrimination to give anecdotal corroboration to the study. That said, people have repeatedly told me I look like Jude Law and Tobey Maguire. I have repeatedly been a focus of group discussion among strangers, "which celebrity does this guy look like?" Strangers also ask "Do I know you from somewhere?" No, I'm just pleasing to look at in a familiar, trustworthy sort of way. In my teens/early 20s was so common for women to approach me and tell me I have beautiful eyes that I didn't realize they were expressing interest. At my first programming job, a chinese woman came up to me and haltingly said (yes, this was a programming joke): "your eyes are so captivating, like a python's." I said thank you. She blushed and rushed away. My control here is that my weight fluctuates between 150-180, though, and when I'm heavier and I don't shave, the attention vanishes. Humans are just apes trying to be near the best apes. I'm glad I got a nice mannequin to walk around in, and I'm glad it compensates for the fact that I'm an objectively pretty weird dude. But it kind of sucks in every direction - beauty prevents people from getting really important negative social feedback, and often just exempts people from social consequences and warps their sense of reality. Likewise, preference-ing physical attributes over competence has to drive hilariously iniquitous outcomes, leaving a lot of smart, capable people in inferior positions. While I'm just talking about random stuff: taking pride in one's appearance is off putting because you didn't earn it. Likewise, being smart/likeable/socially capable are also things that people generally haven't earned. All of the good things in our lives are arbitrary, as are all of the bad things. The things we work for are the only things that are of value - "our actions are our one true possession."
m0zg 6y ago
As a high BMI individual, I'm fully in support of instituting minimal hiring and promotion quotas for fat people. Given that there's "obesity epidemic" going on, I propose we set it at 50% to ensure that there's no systemic discrimination. No fewer than 50% of people on corporate boards should be fat, also. /s
11thEarlOfMar 6y ago
Yes, all of us need to be aware that we have biases that impact decisions we make that affect the lives of others. Nonetheless, being obese or unattractive is a surmountable obstacle. One may have to take more interviews, but will ultimately find work. Moreover, those who are neither obese nor unattractive almost certainly have their own disadvantages they had to overcome. It's rare to find people who are successful and literally had no obstacles in life. Obstacles are an opportunity to learn persistence, diligence, and what we are and aren't suited for. Having zero obstacles might simply mean that a person simply has few ambitions. For me, the discussion ultimately leads to two points: First, do we believe that the playing field must be leveled for all from birth. If the answer to that is Yes, then you're probably in favor of socialism to some degree, such that opportunity is provided in equal measure to all citizens, regardless of the circumstances they are born into. Personally, I don't find this realistic, but I accept that there are people who do and that's fine. Second, if you don't feel the playing field should be leveled from birth, but rather that every citizen is born with a set of advantages and disadvantages, then the question is, do we need to afford special attention to those whose disadvantages are insurmountable? Regardless of whether you're born dull or smart, attractive or unattractive, African or Asian American, most Americans can find success in life by making more good decisions than bad and persistently working towards the life they'd like. We have had a 2 term black president, have a black woman vice president, an openly gay presidential candidate, an openly gay cabinet member, multiple black Fortune 500 CEOs, openly gay entertainers, and many wealthy black athletes and entertainers. Achieving success is possible for all, some have to work harder at it than others. But is such success possible for all? It's obvious to me that the answer is no. I am not referring to those with disabilities, but rather those whose life circumstances guarantee they have zero chance at success as defined in the US today. A kind of worst case situation might be a child born into a one parent household, parent is addicted, and neglects them. They live in the worst school district in the city, and in an area ruled by street gangs. What forces would enable an 8 year old in such circumstances to somehow push through all of that adversity and actually wind up in a college earning a degree that enables him to get a steady professional job? Or expose him to an opportunity to learn a trade, such as electrician or plumber? Or work up the ladder in food service or retail companies? In many cases, he's exposed to drugs, persistent gang violence, likely frightened for his life most of the time and learning that survival means physically subduing others or being subdued by them. Many life lessons about discipline, team work, 'social skills', and earning what you want are not modeled to such a child, and I'd not be surprised to learn there are 100s of thousands of them in America right now. My view is that if we are going to maintain the approach that hey, we all have advantages and disadvantages, we must recognize that groups faced with insurmountable obstacles to success need an effective accommodation or we are failing overall as a society.
alexpotato 6y ago
I was at a dinner once with several medical residents and they mentioned that at one hospital, the surgical scrubs were color coded by size. This meant that everyone knew which female residents were a larger size and which male residents were a smaller size. Everyone knew this which just added a distraction to an already information overloaded profession. In a profession where the goal is identifying the people with top competencies, it never made sense to me who signed off on ordering that particular type of scrubs. I would have thought everyone should wear the same color or at least have the colors indicate something useful e.g. speciality.
- nitrogen 6y ago
  One can imagine that color coding by size may have had good intentions, allowing people to grab the right size of scrubs quickly without having to check the tag. If so it'd be a good example of unintended consequences and not thinking through second order effects.
- koolba 6y ago
  I do this with my socks. The low cut ones are all one color and and the high tops are all a different color. It makes sorting laundry a breeze.
mhb 6y ago
Do obese or unattractive radiologists' patients have different outcomes?
hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
I'm sure I've commented something similar on another article, but as a rather unattractive person, can we please give these kind of studies a rest. Quite literally every single fucking study I've read that looks at this always says the exact same thing: being unattractive is correlated with lower salary, or being less likely to get a promotion, or being less likely to have other people think you are "nice", etc. etc. I just feel like being unattractive is correlated with about every negative outcome one can think of, and at this point I just want to scream: I get it! Being ugly sucks. You don't have to tell me twice (or five thousand times).
- ultrarunner 6y ago
  In aggregate, yeah, maybe. Individuals still get choices, though. In the most sincere way, I implore you to prove them wrong. Even judging only by your articulate comment (and in a place like HN), you have a lot going for you. Be the outlier with the personality and drive that the studies can't account for.
- calibas 6y ago
  Society cares more about appearance than substance. It holds us back as a species and has created an absolute mess of politics.
  - Blahah 6y ago
    Arguably politics is a mess in most places because of the incentives designed into the systems for elevating people to power, and because humans are predictably and inescapably manipulable due to their cognitive biases. Appearances in the aesthetic sense play a relatively minor role.
    - blackflame 6y ago
      "Appearances in the aesthetic" is literally hardwired into your reproductive biology
- zepto 6y ago
  I upvoted you, but one thing that is good about studies into stuff like this, is that they prove we aren’t imagining it. They are a good antidote against gaslighting.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
runawaybottle 6y ago
You are free to judge someone’s looks, we all do. What you are not free to do is judge someone’s looks and use that as a criteria in the hiring process in jobs where beauty is not a relevant criteria. If this study proved that X number of over-weight or unattractive people applied, but were rejected at a noticeable clip, how is this not legally actionable? Bringing it back to tech for a second. We all acknowledge the pipeline problem with women at tech companies. But, in my experience, a lot of your startups are really white across the various job disciplines (from the CEO down to the interns). That stuff is not an accident either, would love to see some studies on this. I suppose we all need to do a good job filling out the optional questions at the end of a job application that identifies your ethnic background. Where is all this data and how do we get it, and is it possible to dig down into the tech center and really see what’s going on?
- sethammons 6y ago
  > how is this not legally actionable? Because attractiveness is not a protected class, unlike sex, age over 40, religion, family status, race, or the couple other I must be missing.
justsomeuser 6y ago
Breaking news: “attractive people are attractive”. It’s good to get the data but surely they knew what the results would be? Next up: “The sun is bright”.
htnsao 6y ago
Not in the US but having hired quite a few fat guys over the years (agriculture, construction) I can say that obesity has always turned out to be a sign of them being lazy and untrustworthy, even in management positions. All drinkers mostly. Sadly one of them died recently at ~40, turns out he had an underlying heart condition since birth which might explain alot about his past performance. Having said that I did know a particularly fat and ugly friend that has a great personality and was quite successful running her own small publishing business. Smarts and drive can shine through no matter what you look like. If you can't get a job, start your own. Once you start seeing opportunities instead of wages you'll probably never go back.

98 points by abhisuri97 6y ago

My impression from similar studies is that we tend to discriminate against people who don't look like us, not necessarily based (just) on perceived negative characteristics. So, I wouldn't be surprised if obese/unattractive people still discriminates against those perceived negative characteristics, but I also wouldn't be surprised if that discrimination was to a lower degree than when the person doing the discrimination isn't obese/unattractive.

ponker 6y ago

Everyone everywhere discriminates against the obese and unattractive.

wavefunction 6y ago
Everyone? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_fetishism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_fetishism
- viraptor 6y ago
  Sexual attraction and discrimination can coexist. See a large number of secretly gay politicians fighting against gay rights.
  - bityard 6y ago
    If their preference is secret, how can you know there are large numbers of them?
    - happytoexplain 6y ago
      Formerly secret, and perhaps extrapolating (surely for N > 0 discovered cases, there are M > 0 still secret cases, since it seems unlikely to have a 100% reveal rate). And "large numbers" is highly subjective in this case. It would be reasonable to consider two to be a high number for something so surprising.
    - MikeTheGreat 6y ago
      "See a large number of formerly, secretly, gay, politicians fighting against gay rights." There, fixed that for you Mostly unrelated: That's also the correct use of an Oxford/serial comma, yes?
      - nkurz 6y ago
        > That's also the correct use of an Oxford/serial comma, yes? In the off chance you were being serious, no. An Oxford comma goes (or doesn't go) after the second to last (penultimate) item, not after the final. And even then it's only used when there's a conjunction between the penultimate and last item.
        MikeTheGreat 6y ago
        I was - thank you for the clarification! :)
    - viraptor 6y ago
      I mean large in a relative sense. If there is a known small number of elected people, and we know that only few of them will be gay/bi, and we still find out every year or so that someone loudly campaigning against gay rights visited same-sex prostitutes or has a stash of related porn... Then either it's common or there's some weird correlation between that behaviour and drive for powerful positions.
      - ponker 6y ago
        A great explanation of this that I read somewhere was that only a gay person could believe the doomsday scenario of homosexuality ending human reproduction. A gay person thinks “huh that’s scary, what if everyone is like me” while a straight person thinks “I have 4 kids, how could that possibly happen.”

newfeatureok 6y ago

Would you really want a doctor who is obese? A mildly overweight doctor, sure. But obese? The reality is, if you have a list of doctors and their pictures and know nothing of them except for their appearance I highly doubt anyone would pick the obese person as their first pick. It’s just reality. Someone capable of going through medical school is capable of reducing their weight to being merely overweight as opposed to obese. People going on “yeah if they know their stuff” are missing the point. You don’t know if they know their stuff at all. As for unattractive, yes that’s bad.

viraptor 6y ago
You're saying that like being obese is has a trivial fix people just don't want to apply. I'd totally see a doctor who is obese. Or a doctor who smokes. Or many others. In terms of dealing with obesity they may actually have more insight and know more resources than people not affected by this issue. There's a big difference between behaviours applied to self and knowledge applied at work.
- laichzeit0 6y ago
  The fix to obesity is caloric restriction. As an extreme example, look at pictures of people in concentration camps: no obese people there. The reason why it’s a good example is because it’s “forced” caloric restriction, and it shows that it works. Obese people make the choice to consume more calories than requires, hence being obese.
  - viraptor 6y ago
    Sure, but that doesn't make it a trivial fix. Unless you figured out how to influence ingrained behaviours / addictions better than any existing methods? This comment is like "the fix to smoking is to not smoke" - yes everybody knows that. Actually applying that across population is the hard part.
    - laichzeit0 6y ago
      The point still needs to be made, since there are _still_ people who honestly believe that weight loss is achieved by some mechanism other than consuming less calories than is expended. They still think there is some other form of "magic" involved. So to digress the discussion onto behaviours, etc. is a distraction from the fundamental fact that needs to be hammered home until it becomes ingrained. At that point we can work on the behaviours required to achieve that end. Otherwise you have what you have now, people changing behaviours and trying to eat healthy, or exercise more, thinking that those behaviours are the magic secret to weight loss. It is not, and you can lose weight eating McDonalds and sitting at your desk all day if the amount of calories in the McDonalds you're eating is low enough. It's not healthy, but healthy/not healthy has nothing to do with calorie restriction and consequently weight loss.

omarhaneef 6y ago

Thank goodness this doesn’t happen in finance.

xiphias2 6y ago
I'm not sure if you're serious or not, but at least the stock market doesn't care. Look at Warren Buffet drinking his coke, or Soros with his girlfriend on the beach.
- mzkply 6y ago
  He's being ironic. As Will Smith's character said in The Pursuit of Happyness, finance is just about being good with numbers and good with people (for which you need rules 1 [Be Attractive] & 2 [Don’t Be Unattractive])
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

1996 6y ago

Previous discussion about the same effect in the legal system: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24044409 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24044409 Personally, I find it very surprising most hackers have such a disdain for physical beauty, given the huge ROI for every $ invested - reportedly about 1,000x for Elon Musk personal worth. Still, only a few CEO seems to have taken action to maximize their appearance, and mostly against their premature baldness. Even that is kind of taboo - while studying before an interview is not, even if it will certainly have a much lower ROI. Why not hack your appearance? There are many scientific studies documenting all that, but we ignore them. For an example of all the known variables, check for ex table 1 of the following for "Zero-order Pearson’s correlations between facial appearance and health, with the corresponding p-values and sample sizes": https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5290736/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5290736/ If you want more example for a given variable, for example the effect of adiposity (we know it's quadratic), read one of the original papers: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6308207/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6308207/ All this is well known now, as the first study was about 22 years ago: Perrett, D. I., Lee, K. J., Penton-Voak, I., Rowland, D., Yoshikawa, S., Burt, D. M., … Akamatsu, S. (1998). Effects of sexual dimorphism on facial attractiveness. Nature, 394(6696), 884–887. doi:10.1038/29772 So why do we keep ignoring it, while focusing on other signals like which search engine (or operating systen) you use?

eastendguy 6y ago
> reportedly about 1,000x for Elon Musk personal worth. Where does this number come from?
- TechBro8615 6y ago
  Pretty sure he’s comparing Elon’s net worth before and after getting hair transplants. That’s a pretty ridiculous claim at best.
  - elil17 6y ago
    Well I for one think no one would be using PayPal if Elon didn't have those luscious locks.

wbraun 6y ago

Reading through the paper, I think the real buried lead here is that the reviewers discriminated in favor of selecting black and hispanic applicants, with a larger effect size than anything analyzed but test scores and attractive vs unattractive (not neutral vs unattractive). This includes obesity, grades / class rank, research publications, and honor society membership. At least your appearance and test scores are mutable characteristics.

474637374 6y ago
Is it actually buried though when the context is America? It seems like this kind of behavior should be assumed as default when this sort of outcome is exactly what American advocacy groups have been persuing for years. If equity only matters for minorities then an org is just going to err on the side of caution and favor minorities.
elil17 6y ago
Yeah, but at least reviewers being biased towards Black and Hispanic applicants have some reason to be: they are trying to correct for society-wide discrimination. You can argue that it's not their place to do that, or that trying to do that on a case by case basis is unfair, etc., but it is at least some reason. Discriminating against unattractive people, has no equivalent justification. In fact, discriminating against unattractive people exaggerates a society-wide bias against unattractive people.
- AmericanChopper 6y ago
  In my experience, most racists think that their views are motivated by noble intentions in one way or another.
  - t-writescode 6y ago
    When the privileged classes have had generations to generate social networks that connect privileged people with privileged people (arguably one of the greatest privileges white people have, along with generational wealth and societies general presuppositions that go along with it), is it so bad to actively recognize that and go against it? Racism says an ethnicity is better or worse than another intrinsically. This is recognizing a section of our population has been, by and large, historically kept from making those connections and intentionally favoring them, not just for their sake but for the sake of their children’s children, by working to get them the same levels of connections the privileged class has historically had.

jungletime 6y ago

What about mean looking people? Surely nobody wants to be around a mean looking person. They might do well in prison or during the draft for war. But otherwise, I'm sure they get ostracized....which just boils up their meanness. So that one day, they might be plotting to ruin Christmas from their cave overlooking Whoville.

lumberjack 6y ago
Could go either way, though. People don't want to upset mean looking people either.
jmpman 6y ago
My ex-sister-in-law has the worst RBF. Didn’t like her when I met her. 7 years later, still don’t. Maybe it’s not just the face.
mr_toad 6y ago
Depends on the job. It’s probably an advantage to look mean if you’re a bouncer or a bodyguard, or work at the DMV.

scarmig 6y ago

I was disappointed they didn't look at height as well, which is particularly relevant for men in both their pay and career progression.

avgDev 6y ago
Hmmm I wonder, I'm 6'4", average looking, have a European accent(which i hate) but last time I interviewed for 3 jobs I received offers from all of them. I don't think it was my actual skills as I failed two out of three questions in one of the interviews. I'm not particularly smart either, just common sense and can hack things together. I have a zoom interview soon, we will see how that goes, maybe I need to hold banana or something for scale.
- Scoundreller 6y ago
  I thought there was always supposed to be a “you’re going to fail this” question so: 1. They have something to point to if/when they get sued for rejecting someone 2. Make you feel like you failed so you don’t ask for as much money 3. Helps prevent there being >=2 perfect interviews and then dealing with ties
  - titanomachy 6y ago
    Having been on the interviewer side of the table at a couple smaller companies as well as a FAANG or two, I can say I've never seen a question on the slate where the candidate was obviously intended to fail. Maybe some other companies do this. However, if a candidate answers my first question easily I will try to extend or constrain the problem enough that it pushes them out of their comfort zone a bit. This gives them a chance to show off more skill than if I only asked an easy question. Also, there are very rarely "perfect interviews"; it's rare for people to get the highest score on even one of their interviews, let alone all of them.
- pavel_lishin 6y ago
  > I failed two out of three questions in one of the interviews Do you know for a fact that you failed them, or is that just your perception? Interview questions are typically a little more open-ended than you suspect, and not being able to deliver the full answer of what's being asked for isn't a failure when you've only got 30 minutes.

jsnk 6y ago

I like studies like these because it shows different types of discriminations the societies are comfortable with vs some other types of discriminations which are not only uncomfortable, but have severe legal consequences.

roflc0ptic 6y ago

Going through this latest round of job searching, rapport building/interview success has been so much more difficult over zoom/etc. It makes me wonder how much of my past success has been from being a tall-ish, attractive-but-not-so-much-it's-threatening, pleasingly built dude, instead of my apparent technical competence. All of my non-verbal rapport building skills really fall flat, and the fact that I'm bumbling, a little haphazard, kind of anxious is less charming quirk and more off putting anti-feature. I'm really pretty good at Scala, though.

kepler1 6y ago
Photographic evidence is required to back up such bold claims lol.
- roflc0ptic 6y ago
  I mean, this isn't really about my looks per se, just the growing sense that I've been the beneficiary of positive discrimination to give anecdotal corroboration to the study. That said, people have repeatedly told me I look like Jude Law and Tobey Maguire. I have repeatedly been a focus of group discussion among strangers, "which celebrity does this guy look like?" Strangers also ask "Do I know you from somewhere?" No, I'm just pleasing to look at in a familiar, trustworthy sort of way. In my teens/early 20s was so common for women to approach me and tell me I have beautiful eyes that I didn't realize they were expressing interest. At my first programming job, a chinese woman came up to me and haltingly said (yes, this was a programming joke): "your eyes are so captivating, like a python's." I said thank you. She blushed and rushed away. My control here is that my weight fluctuates between 150-180, though, and when I'm heavier and I don't shave, the attention vanishes. Humans are just apes trying to be near the best apes. I'm glad I got a nice mannequin to walk around in, and I'm glad it compensates for the fact that I'm an objectively pretty weird dude. But it kind of sucks in every direction - beauty prevents people from getting really important negative social feedback, and often just exempts people from social consequences and warps their sense of reality. Likewise, preference-ing physical attributes over competence has to drive hilariously iniquitous outcomes, leaving a lot of smart, capable people in inferior positions. While I'm just talking about random stuff: taking pride in one's appearance is off putting because you didn't earn it. Likewise, being smart/likeable/socially capable are also things that people generally haven't earned. All of the good things in our lives are arbitrary, as are all of the bad things. The things we work for are the only things that are of value - "our actions are our one true possession."

m0zg 6y ago

As a high BMI individual, I'm fully in support of instituting minimal hiring and promotion quotas for fat people. Given that there's "obesity epidemic" going on, I propose we set it at 50% to ensure that there's no systemic discrimination. No fewer than 50% of people on corporate boards should be fat, also. /s

11thEarlOfMar 6y ago

Yes, all of us need to be aware that we have biases that impact decisions we make that affect the lives of others. Nonetheless, being obese or unattractive is a surmountable obstacle. One may have to take more interviews, but will ultimately find work. Moreover, those who are neither obese nor unattractive almost certainly have their own disadvantages they had to overcome. It's rare to find people who are successful and literally had no obstacles in life. Obstacles are an opportunity to learn persistence, diligence, and what we are and aren't suited for. Having zero obstacles might simply mean that a person simply has few ambitions. For me, the discussion ultimately leads to two points: First, do we believe that the playing field must be leveled for all from birth. If the answer to that is Yes, then you're probably in favor of socialism to some degree, such that opportunity is provided in equal measure to all citizens, regardless of the circumstances they are born into. Personally, I don't find this realistic, but I accept that there are people who do and that's fine. Second, if you don't feel the playing field should be leveled from birth, but rather that every citizen is born with a set of advantages and disadvantages, then the question is, do we need to afford special attention to those whose disadvantages are insurmountable? Regardless of whether you're born dull or smart, attractive or unattractive, African or Asian American, most Americans can find success in life by making more good decisions than bad and persistently working towards the life they'd like. We have had a 2 term black president, have a black woman vice president, an openly gay presidential candidate, an openly gay cabinet member, multiple black Fortune 500 CEOs, openly gay entertainers, and many wealthy black athletes and entertainers. Achieving success is possible for all, some have to work harder at it than others. But is such success possible for all? It's obvious to me that the answer is no. I am not referring to those with disabilities, but rather those whose life circumstances guarantee they have zero chance at success as defined in the US today. A kind of worst case situation might be a child born into a one parent household, parent is addicted, and neglects them. They live in the worst school district in the city, and in an area ruled by street gangs. What forces would enable an 8 year old in such circumstances to somehow push through all of that adversity and actually wind up in a college earning a degree that enables him to get a steady professional job? Or expose him to an opportunity to learn a trade, such as electrician or plumber? Or work up the ladder in food service or retail companies? In many cases, he's exposed to drugs, persistent gang violence, likely frightened for his life most of the time and learning that survival means physically subduing others or being subdued by them. Many life lessons about discipline, team work, 'social skills', and earning what you want are not modeled to such a child, and I'd not be surprised to learn there are 100s of thousands of them in America right now. My view is that if we are going to maintain the approach that hey, we all have advantages and disadvantages, we must recognize that groups faced with insurmountable obstacles to success need an effective accommodation or we are failing overall as a society.

alexpotato 6y ago

I was at a dinner once with several medical residents and they mentioned that at one hospital, the surgical scrubs were color coded by size. This meant that everyone knew which female residents were a larger size and which male residents were a smaller size. Everyone knew this which just added a distraction to an already information overloaded profession. In a profession where the goal is identifying the people with top competencies, it never made sense to me who signed off on ordering that particular type of scrubs. I would have thought everyone should wear the same color or at least have the colors indicate something useful e.g. speciality.

nitrogen 6y ago
One can imagine that color coding by size may have had good intentions, allowing people to grab the right size of scrubs quickly without having to check the tag. If so it'd be a good example of unintended consequences and not thinking through second order effects.
koolba 6y ago
I do this with my socks. The low cut ones are all one color and and the high tops are all a different color. It makes sorting laundry a breeze.

mhb 6y ago

Do obese or unattractive radiologists' patients have different outcomes?

hn_throwaway_99 6y ago

I'm sure I've commented something similar on another article, but as a rather unattractive person, can we please give these kind of studies a rest. Quite literally every single fucking study I've read that looks at this always says the exact same thing: being unattractive is correlated with lower salary, or being less likely to get a promotion, or being less likely to have other people think you are "nice", etc. etc. I just feel like being unattractive is correlated with about every negative outcome one can think of, and at this point I just want to scream: I get it! Being ugly sucks. You don't have to tell me twice (or five thousand times).

ultrarunner 6y ago
In aggregate, yeah, maybe. Individuals still get choices, though. In the most sincere way, I implore you to prove them wrong. Even judging only by your articulate comment (and in a place like HN), you have a lot going for you. Be the outlier with the personality and drive that the studies can't account for.
calibas 6y ago
Society cares more about appearance than substance. It holds us back as a species and has created an absolute mess of politics.
- Blahah 6y ago
  Arguably politics is a mess in most places because of the incentives designed into the systems for elevating people to power, and because humans are predictably and inescapably manipulable due to their cognitive biases. Appearances in the aesthetic sense play a relatively minor role.
  - blackflame 6y ago
    "Appearances in the aesthetic" is literally hardwired into your reproductive biology
zepto 6y ago
I upvoted you, but one thing that is good about studies into stuff like this, is that they prove we aren’t imagining it. They are a good antidote against gaslighting.

deleted 6y ago

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runawaybottle 6y ago

You are free to judge someone’s looks, we all do. What you are not free to do is judge someone’s looks and use that as a criteria in the hiring process in jobs where beauty is not a relevant criteria. If this study proved that X number of over-weight or unattractive people applied, but were rejected at a noticeable clip, how is this not legally actionable? Bringing it back to tech for a second. We all acknowledge the pipeline problem with women at tech companies. But, in my experience, a lot of your startups are really white across the various job disciplines (from the CEO down to the interns). That stuff is not an accident either, would love to see some studies on this. I suppose we all need to do a good job filling out the optional questions at the end of a job application that identifies your ethnic background. Where is all this data and how do we get it, and is it possible to dig down into the tech center and really see what’s going on?

sethammons 6y ago
> how is this not legally actionable? Because attractiveness is not a protected class, unlike sex, age over 40, religion, family status, race, or the couple other I must be missing.

justsomeuser 6y ago

Breaking news: “attractive people are attractive”. It’s good to get the data but surely they knew what the results would be? Next up: “The sun is bright”.

htnsao 6y ago

Not in the US but having hired quite a few fat guys over the years (agriculture, construction) I can say that obesity has always turned out to be a sign of them being lazy and untrustworthy, even in management positions. All drinkers mostly. Sadly one of them died recently at ~40, turns out he had an underlying heart condition since birth which might explain alot about his past performance. Having said that I did know a particularly fat and ugly friend that has a great personality and was quite successful running her own small publishing business. Smarts and drive can shine through no matter what you look like. If you can't get a job, start your own. Once you start seeing opportunities instead of wages you'll probably never go back.