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" America has no law preventing companies from using attractiveness as a hiring criteria, regardless of whether the job is exotic dancer, salesman, or software

by crag 13y ago

" America has no law preventing companies from using attractiveness as a hiring criteria, regardless of whether the job is exotic dancer, salesman, or software engineer. It’s pretty much okay from a legal standpoint to discriminate based on looks in America." My problem with this is beauty is in the eye of the beholder. So having laws preventing companies hiring based on looks is ridiculous. I mean, how would you know what anyone thought during the hiring process? I doubt anyone would say "you're ugly as shit so we aren't hiring you". Not to mention, what you consider "ugly" I might not.

jiggy2011 13y ago
It's only subjective to a point. There are many things that are almost uniformly considered attractive by the majority of the population. There was an AMA from somebody who did research on this on reddit a while back. http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1cstrm/i_did_research_on_facial_attractiveness_for_years/ http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1cstrm/i_did_research_... It says in there that it's usually around 30-40% subjective.
- cadlin 13y ago
  I looked through that thread and what struck me was how small the body of research the guy draws from is. Maybe he is only citing a small sample of the research, but there seems to be a lot of conclusions drawn from very few studies. Especially on something as subjective and political as human attraction. The top answer in the reddit thread discusses this (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1689917/pdf/10380676.pdf http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1689917/pdf/1038...) study. It says that women prefer the odor of more attractive men. The conclusions from that study are based on the odors of 6(!) different men. And the t-shirt the men wore to capture the odor are washed, frozen, and then heated in a bottle. The women then smell the bottle and make their judgement. The study doesn't bother to explain why these actions don't change the odor of the t-shirt (which they might not, but that doesn't seem obvious to me). There are other problems with the study, but I'll stop there. I understand that all fields of science have to start somewhere, but this seems closer to phrenology than particle physics.

by crag 13y ago

jiggy2011 13y ago

It's only subjective to a point. There are many things that are almost uniformly considered attractive by the majority of the population. There was an AMA from somebody who did research on this on reddit a while back. http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1cstrm/i_did_research_on_facial_attractiveness_for_years/ http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1cstrm/i_did_research_... It says in there that it's usually around 30-40% subjective.

cadlin 13y ago
I looked through that thread and what struck me was how small the body of research the guy draws from is. Maybe he is only citing a small sample of the research, but there seems to be a lot of conclusions drawn from very few studies. Especially on something as subjective and political as human attraction. The top answer in the reddit thread discusses this (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1689917/pdf/10380676.pdf http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1689917/pdf/1038...) study. It says that women prefer the odor of more attractive men. The conclusions from that study are based on the odors of 6(!) different men. And the t-shirt the men wore to capture the odor are washed, frozen, and then heated in a bottle. The women then smell the bottle and make their judgement. The study doesn't bother to explain why these actions don't change the odor of the t-shirt (which they might not, but that doesn't seem obvious to me). There are other problems with the study, but I'll stop there. I understand that all fields of science have to start somewhere, but this seems closer to phrenology than particle physics.