Being in shape is an honest and almost unfakable signal of work and personal discipline, which has knock on effects to your credibility in any discussion. It

Being in shape is an honest and almost unfakable signal of work and personal discipline, which has knock on effects to your credibility in any discussion. It may be worth asking what the quality of the assumption that we don't have control over our appearance is. Consider someone who just doesn't take care of themselves, and what beliefs and choices their consequent appearance is the effect of. There is a contra- effect as well, where in some environments, being physically repulsive is a signal of power. Government and academia spring to mind. In tech we have a natural suspicion of shiny looking sales and marketing people, but when you examine that closely, it's because they live and die based on the actual revealed desires of others, where in tech power is independent of desire, and power comes from outsmarting, defeating, and overpowering others intellectually or politically. There is a conflict addiction among "nerds," where we have to tilt at machines and objects instead of people to get our adrenal hit because other people don't really tolerate that aggressive need from others very enthusiastically. Since we prevail based on intellectual domination, we don't index on physical appearance as much, but people who prevail based on actual desire necessarily do. In the thousands of co-workers I can remember, I would say the main strategy of people who prevail in discussions, but who have neglected their physical appearance - is disagreeableness. It either originates from some quirk that causes them to miss social cues, or it was learned behaviour where they realized they didn't need to make themselves appealing if they were persistent. There is also a cliche about PhD's being like this, where a great number have been trained to be weirdly combative based on their recieved authority, while lacking the normal signifiers of success like basic physical fitness, collegiality, benevolence, charisma, wit, charm, and ultimately other people just attribute their uncanny ignobility to their institution. We have tons of data from social media sites, chat apps, and online forums where it would be plausible to rank text-based charisma (pure ideas) and physical attractiveness as judged by an algorithm, and we could find out empirically whether there is a strong correlation, but I don't think we need to. Appearance is an evolutionary strategy, and I would say, yes it is very influential because we listen to people based on it because it's a signal of how invested they likely are in certain values.