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>In survey after survey, beautiful people are described as trustworthy, competent, friendly, likable and intelligent, while ugly people get the opposite labels.

• MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
  If I had to wager a guess, it could signal that you have wealth, time, energy, apply effort into bettering yourself, and you care about things that do matter. Ugly people can reflect often that they aren't putting effort in their lives whether it comes to being fat. Genetic issues can signal basically, you have bad genes. If you see someone with down syndrome, your first instinct isn't "They are so attractive!" because it is an enormous detriment to your survival and future offspring. It's all a show. But wisdom isn't what you know, it's knowing how to exploit what others don't to your benefit. It's not nefarious but part of the game. Now this is clearly speculative and based off my own observations. It's significantly more nuanced than this and more than just one unconscious decision people make. It is however ingrained in us to know culturally what "success" looks like, and we meter others based on that.
• inglor_cz 5y ago
  > Are attractive people actually more intelligent, friendly or trustworthy? You are getting downvoted, but this seems to be a very non-trivial question, especially if historic context is taken into account. For example, a mere 100-150 years ago, syphilis was widespread in the population, and it often resulted in face deformities [0] and deterioration of the mind [1] at the same time. For someone living in that era, avoiding people who looked ugly and unhealthy might have been a useful heuristic. Maybe we still use an outdated heuristic from the age of syphilis. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syphilis#Tertiary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syphilis#Tertiary [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurosyphilis#Neuropsychiatric https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurosyphilis#Neuropsychiatric
  • snet0 5y ago
    I think a problem with my line of reasoning is that, as a society, we don't really want to care about the objective measures. I don't pick sides in this argument, but there is an ongoing argument about things like "women have a lower population standard deviation in intelligence, so we'd expect them to be underrepresented in high-demand fields like software engineering, and low-demand fields like <politely left blank>", and the other side (ignoring those who doubt the empirical basis) just say "who cares? as a society we ought to treat people equally regardless of the hand they were dealt". That being said, I think your analysis is correct. I think, if you removed a lot of the technology-based attractiveness (make-up, haircut etc.), attractiveness is probably just a heuristic for genetic or general health. Of course, this is an empirical statement, so I imagine it is something that could be/has been studied, I was more commenting on the fact that the article totally ignores this thinking.