Especially on social media, you may have seen comments under a photo or video, such as ‘how ugly this woman is, sharing with this type without shame’ or ‘look at the type of man, look at the woman next to you’, which judge people only by their appearance.
Unfortunately, this behavior of judging people based on their beauty is not only seen on social media. In fact, it has very serious effects in every field from business life to working life. Let’s take a look at what putting ‘beauty’ at the center can lead to.
Important note before you begin: Make sure you get the thought out of your mind: “Others may be doing it, but I wouldn’t do it anyway.” Because this is another mistake that affects your thoughts.
“Beauty is good” (or is it not?)
The sentence you see in quotation marks is a stereotypical thought that settles in people’s minds.
We will explain in more detail under the headings, but let’s give the main message. People with this mindset (which you can get without realizing it) see people who meet beauty standards one step ahead of others.
Let’s open the word beauty:
Here, the standards change from period to period as they are according to the society, and they do not include the male/female distinction.
In other words, the facial elements that society determines as beautiful, waist thinness, etc. a woman with different elements can also enter this title; likewise men.
But we can also place the beauty in different titles by looking at the subject backwards (Don’t get confused)
In this thinking, beautiful people are automatically expected to be successful and healthy.
In the same way, people who have this thought expect people who they know to be healthy and successful without seeing their faces (directly or indirectly) to comply with beauty standards. In other words, there may be a pressure on them without even realizing it.
After giving the rough idea, let’s start by looking at the place of this situation in the business world:
Since it would not be reliable to talk without concrete data here, let’s mention a few studies that we have looked at in detail.
In a study by Psychology Professor Madeline Heilman, university students are given CVs of recent graduates and asked to examine and evaluate them.
Evaluating genders according to occupations seen by society as male or female jobs, students rated CVs of beautiful people (with photos), as expected, with higher grades.
But this was the case only for men:
Men who were evaluated as beautiful were deemed suitable for both lines of work. But beautiful women had an advantage in jobs that were seen as only suitable for women.
The reason for this is simple. It was believed that women who were seen as beautiful were thought to have more feminine characteristics, so they would be inadequate in jobs that required masculinity. Note that this is a 1979 study.
So why can’t we just accept this as true?
Because this study was done in a laboratory setting, the people observed may have been particularly impartial because they were aware of the consequences of this experiment.
This situation began to be known as the “Beauty is beastly” effect.
Due to this effect, there is a possibility that things will affect beautiful people badly. To see this, we took a look at a study by Psychology Professor Comila Shahani-Denning.
In the aforementioned study, Shahani; they work with observers to deal with employees who are seen as attractive, unattractive, and average, and they are asked to discipline them.
As a result, beautiful people are held more accountable when they make mistakes. For unattractive people, these mistakes are considered just ‘bad luck’. In other words, we can say that the effect we are talking about is reversed here.
So which one should we believe? Is beauty good or bad at work?
Shahani’s data from different studies supports the advantage of nice people in the workplace.
When we look at the beauty is beastly effect, we see that such effective results cannot be obtained from different studies. At least that’s the case with recruiting.
Finally, something we can discuss:
What methods can employers use to make sure candidates are not biased towards beauty in the selection of recruiters?
This was the case with recruitment. So how is the situation in the judiciary?
Here we take a look at John E. Stewart’s 1980 research paper focusing on the effects of attraction in judgment.
In the study here, observers attended certain hearings and evaluated the attractiveness of the accused.
After reviewing the 67 defendants with varying attractiveness values and their sentences, it was seen that the attractive people were sentenced to a shorter period of time than the others.
Of course, gender can also play a role in this case:
The 2009 study by Angela Ahola and Åke Hellström sheds light on this issue. In the said study, photographs of people with various degrees of beauty and crimes they may have committed are given to the observed group.
As a result, it is seen that there is a slightly softer attitude towards women. But let’s point out that this is only against beautiful women. Such a situation was not observed in men.
For an example of this, you can take a look at the Casey Anthony case.
As we know in education, your appearance doesn’t matter. At least we know that pretty/handsome people don’t fill papers faster:
But according to certain studies, the ‘expectation’ for beautiful people is higher than for others.
Don’t think of it as putting pressure on those people, because that’s something we’re keeping out of it. Here, the idea that “he must be smart, he must be smart” is formed in the mind rather. But this is not even noticed.
In this context, teachers can automatically expect better results from their relatively beautiful students:
In addition, there are situations such as those students seeing their future as bright and thinking that they will develop qualities such as leadership.
This expectation may create a special interest in those students, which may lead them to be more successful. But can we say that they are successful because they are beautiful or handsome?
Of course we can’t say, but there is no room for stereotypical sentences in science:
That’s why there have been many studies on whether real success (rather than what is expected from outside) has anything to do with beauty.
When we look at the work by Dorian G. Mitchem, we can see that good grades are automatically expected from people who look good.
But when it comes to tangible data, Mitchem shows, along with many other researchers, that beauty is not linked to academic success.
It was seen that the closest factors related to academic success were regularity, meticulousness and hard work.
So when we look at studies on education, what does all this mean?
We said that beauty misleads people in predicting academic success. Simply, if this disappears, more accurate predictions will be made.
Of course, this situation is not that easy to get rid of. It requires controlled objectivity.
What exactly is attractive when looking at the face?
If one of the two people who come to the job interview and offer the same things has a sleepy facial expression and his general cleaning is not as good as the other, it may seem like he is inferior to him due to an illusion of beauty.
More importantly, since well-groomed and sleepless faces are thought to indicate health and order, these faces fit well with beauty standards, so to speak.
But do beautiful-looking faces really indicate health and order?
S. Michael Kalick of the University of Massachusetts Department of Psychology focused on this in one of his studies.
As a result of his study, he found that such estimates made according to the appearance of the people actually preceded the ‘actual’ health estimate.
Of course, let’s open parenthesis here and state that unconscious facial expressions or other facial expressions that can change according to time are excluded. After all, we all look paler when we’re sick.
In this study, on the other hand, healthy individuals who are not sick are included and estimates are made accordingly.
If it goes like this, and people who look ‘beautiful’ are chosen all the time, ‘overgeneralization’ can occur after a while:
This means that when you go to a job interview where you meet every need, you may not get the job just because your appearance does not match the beauty requirements of that period.
In other words, at that point, a standard is formed and the need of the job is moved out of the expertise and into the view, even if no one notices it.
Of course, this doesn’t mean “choose people who aren’t pretty”. The important thing is to remain unbiased and focus on objective data. You can also share your thoughts in the comment section.
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