Beautiful men, women have higher IQs

http://www.nydailynews.com/lifestyle/2011/01/16/2011-01-16_beautiful_men_women_have_high_iqs_too_study.html#ixzz1BOSV0FCc

by mikecane • 16 years ago

41 39 16 years ago

nydailynews.com

thrill• 16 years ago

We're amazingly modest too.

stonemetal2• 16 years ago

Is it just me or does that title not parse at all. It should be something like "Beautiful men and women are more likely to have higher IQs"

corin_• 16 years ago

Yeah, you can say "more likely to be smart" but not "more likely to be smarter", that's the grammatical problem.

Guess it was written by an ugly person :/

petercooper• 16 years ago

Yeah, though the unterminated list is a frequent pattern in headlines (especially in newspapers or other very "journalisty" areas). Say, something like: "Ruby, Python, C All On The Up" I find it a bit archaic now - it has a certain early 20th century air to it.

Two real examples:

"Apple, Microsoft Are Megabrand Kingpins in Social Radar Index" - http://adage.com/article?article_id=139386

"Twitter, Facebook are victims of 'single, massively coordinated attack'" - http://venturebeat.com/2009/08/06/twitter-facebook-victims-o...

stonemetal2• 16 years ago

Actually it looks like they wrote the title twice then dropped both copies in the blender to come up with something unique. "Beautiful men, women are more likely to have higher IQs" or "Beautiful men, women are smarter too" either of those I might have misinterpreted but understood, but the resulting title smoothie is just not coherent.

Now on about the actual topic. Could this be an instance of correlation and not causation? Exercise is good for the brain. Exercise makes you look better. Therefore people who exercise both look better and are smarter on average.

TomOfTTB• 16 years ago

Two thoughts popped into my head after reading this.

1. Beautiful people tend to have more confidence. If you recall from grade school there's an old rule about multiple choice tests which says "if you don't know for sure go with your first instinct". People with an abundance of confidence do this naturally while those without confidence will often talk themselves out of the right answer.

2. Beautiful people get more attention. For better or worse a beautiful person probably drew the attention of their instructors since it's human nature to be drawn to attractiveness. This means a more personalized education which in turn should translate into a slightly higher IQ.

Given the difference recorded here is only between 5% and 6% I could see small factors (like the ones listed above) being the cause of such a phenomenon

JoachimSchipper• 16 years ago

There's also a link between IQ and diet, and, obviously, diet and beauty (healthy people look better; eating too many Big Macs will make you fat, and thereby less attractive to most.)

bugsy• 16 years ago

"Given that both intelligence and physical attractiveness are highly heritable"

Larry Summers, and others, have gotten into trouble when he said there was a genetic component to intellectual capability and interest.

I guess as long as the claim is very generic, our culture will let it slide.

dansingerman• 16 years ago

That's as may be, but (anecodatal unscientific opinion coming up) I think there is a correlation between being attractive, and not being very interesting; beautiful people don't usually have to try so hard in life, so they may not develop the more interesting personality traits those who have to try harder acquire)

I like to think that anyway. Makes the World seem fairer.

cafard• 16 years ago

Anyone else find the publication odd?

john_horton• 16 years ago

1) I'd take these findings with a big grain of salt:

http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/kana...

2) I'd be very cautious about interpreting causality, even if the results are true. Beauty is influenced by environmental factors (diet, exercise, health care etc.) that are correlated with parental and own-income. Some of these same factors also influence intelligence. There's a decent chance this research boils down to "being poor sucks."

Retric• 16 years ago

IQ also correlates with diet, exercise, and health care.

PS: It's not that these things boost IQ or Beauty. Instead it's their lack is what reduces attractiveness and IQ. Basically, take an IQ test while tired, sick, and starving and you will do worse. Also, the average young, healthy, and physically fit person is reasonably attractive.

mauriciob• 16 years ago

I won't believe in those findings until I see a correlation of beauty/IQ and family income.

I've never seen a person that grew in a rich family be downright ugly.

pygy_• 16 years ago

Cross-breeding in European nobles can produce people that are, by birth, both atrocious and rich.

Otherwise, you'right, for obvious evolutionary reasons.

phillco• 16 years ago

I don't know why this is such a surprise. This was all explained in the first chapter of Brave New World.

gjm11• 16 years ago

Dupe of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2115403 (URL differs only in that this one has a random-looking fragment ID appended; (1) isn't HN supposed to check for that, and (2) why did you do that, mikecane?).

What I said there:

Actual article is at http://personal.lse.ac.uk/KANAZAWA/pdfs/I2011.pdf.

They used two populations with different measurements of attractiveness and of intelligence, and analysed them separately.

In the first population they got results that suggest on the order of 11-14 IQ points per standard deviation in attractiveness.

In the second, 2 IQ points per standard deviation.

The first population was of children in the UK. Their measure of "attractiveness": the children were assessed at ages 7 and 11, by their teachers, as one of "attractive", "unattractive", "underfed or undernourished", "abnormal feature", and "scruffy or slovenly & dirty". I kid you not. You may, if your own intelligence happens to be reasonable, be able to think of one or two problems with assessing "attractiveness" in this way when you're looking for correlations with intelligence.

(One more detail: attractiveness was treated as a binary variable in Kanazawa's study, with a child being reckoned "attractive" if put into the "attractive" category both at age 7 and at age 11. More than 60% of children were reckoned "attractive" by this criterion. Draw your own conclusions.)

The second population was of US high school pupils. They were reassessed about 7-8 years later, at age 18-28. (How were any of them 28 at that point? I don't know.)

The NY Daily News story says:

> The study indicated attractive men have IQs that are 13.6 points above the average, while beautiful women are 11.4 points higher than average.

which is simply rubbish: those figures are from the first population only (and the second gives much, much weaker results), they concern children of age 7 or 11 and not "men" or "women", and they're really measuring all kinds of things other than attractiveness.

mikecane2• 16 years ago

>>>why did you do that, mikecane?

It wasn't on purpose! I count on the filter here to save me from posting things already up. The NYDN must take the blame here for giving me the URL that it did.

sorbus• 16 years ago

> The NYDN must take the blame here for giving me the URL that it did.

Nope, you get the blame for not editing the junk out of the URL; the filter here isn't especially smart, and merely adding a # to the end of a URL makes it think it's different. Know the limitations of the technology you use, and change your behaviors appropriately (or change the technology).

EDIT: I see that at least five people disagree with me. My reasoning is mostly related to the fact that, when I submit articles, I get the URLs from an RSS reader, which invariably means that there's a huge amount of junk at the end. So I edit it down to the smallest URL that works (sometimes stopping several times to make sure that the URL still works), because that's the polite thing to do (both to people opening the article and to the filter). Shifting the blame for not doing so to the entity provide you with the URL isn't, in my mind, the correct thing to do. Others may disagree with me.

maxklein• 16 years ago

Is this not blazingly obvious? There is no such thing as inherent beauty in the world - there is just the human perception of beauty. And we find other humans beautiful, not for some random reason, but because they will make better and fitter mates. That's what beauty in human beings is.

And being more intelligent is indeed a part of being better and fitter.

Beauty is a way for your body to broadcast its fitness. And there is no reason to think that it would broadcast only physical fitness, and totally ignore any form of mental fitness, even though it's mental fitness that has been responsible for most societal advances in recent years, AND personal advances.

bad_user• 16 years ago

Except beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

I like women with nice boobs / ass and don't mind them having a couple of pounds extra; but the media / teens today prefer anorexics. I also know a couple of women that prefer skinny / waxed males (metrosexuals), although the stereotype for attractive males has included for centuries muscles and a reasonable amount of body hair.

CWuestefeld2• 16 years ago

You're focusing on too narrow a definition of beauty. There's lots more in there: skin texture, facial structure, proportions of various features, proportions of sizes of body parts, yadda yadda.

I'm perfectly OK with assuming for now that there are subtle cues that I'm not conscious of, but some instinctive things are tweaking my more overt reactions.

Tarski• 16 years ago

I agree with your first line.

I'm sceptical as to how scientific this study can be, when as you say "beauty is in the eye of the beholder". A measure of beauty changes over time and from culture to culture. I'm sure, if you selected a different data set of beautiful people you could prove the exact opposite.

roc2• 16 years ago

Or it's a social effect of the educational process. IIRC teachers, coaches, mentors -- all have long been shown to give disproportionate attention, encouragement and preference to good-looking students.

It would be surprising to me if all that extra attention wasn't having a positive effect on all aspects of their lives.

marvin• 16 years ago

This can't be the case in this study, since the effect was only pronounced in the youngest group that was tested.

trebor• 16 years ago

The original intent of the IQ test, as stated by the inventor of it:

    Our purpose is to be able to measure the intellectual
    capacity of a child who is brought to us in order to
    know whether he is normal or retarded. ... We do not
    attempt to establish or prepare a prognosis and we
    leave unanswered the question of whether this
    retardation is curable, or even improveable. We shall
    limit ourselves to ascertaining the truth in regard
    to his present mental state. 
 
    — Alfred Binet
 
    *Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon (1873-1961, French
    psychologist) 'New Methods for the Diagnosis of the
    Intellectual Level of Subnormals' (1905), in The
    Development of Intelligence in Children, trans.
    Elizabeth Kite (1916), 37.*

That attractive people are "more likely to be normal than abnormal" isn't a huge surprise, and yet isn't hugely significant. Especially when those attractive "intelligent" people do some very retarded things with their lives.

grammaton• 16 years ago

I'm surprised no one has pointed out how subjective the term "beauty" is. How, exactly, did they measure this?

Or, is it just possible that smart really is sexy? :)

haploid• 16 years ago

Here's an unpopular, but scientifically verified thought:

Beauty isn't all that subjective.

Things like waist/hip ratio( 0.7 for females, 0.95 for males ), facial symmetry, skin smoothness, have all been subjects of bias-controlled studies in which the overwhelming evidence is that human beings have biologically predetermined ideas of attractiveness.

That's not to say there are not significant subjective aspects, but the research is rather clear on at least some aspects.

tokenadult• 16 years ago

Yet another news story for which it's good to point to Peter Norvig's article on interpreting research findings.

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

The finding in the submitted link needs a lot more definition and replication to be credible.

For readers who are interested in IQ research, I've found a bibliography on Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Intellige...

that links to a lot of high-quality reliable secondary sources on the latest issues in intelligence research.

zitstif2• 16 years ago

One other consideration: I recall a 20/20 special years ago that showed how superficial society can be. They did a test where they had one 'unattractive' person on the side of the road who had no gas and needed help. Needless to say, they never received any help in comparison to the 'attractive' person who was put in the same situation.

The point that I'm making is that, maybe the reason why 'attractive' people may have a higher IQ, is that they are more likely to receive help from others based solely on their appearance.

Another point I would like to add: Maybe 'attractive' people feel the need to increase their intelligence, due to the stereotype that 'attractive' people don't need to have intelligence and can just rely upon their looks to get them through life.

byrneseyeview2• 16 years ago

You don't need to put 'attractive' in quotes, here. Attractiveness is a real thing; assessments of beauty strongly correlate with one another. And you're talking about an example where one group of people literally attracted other people. So there's no sense in which they weren't attractive.

IQ is pretty stable over a lifetime. It would be extraordinary for "help from others" to have a long-term influence; only diet and head injuries seem to affect IQ in a permanent way.

zitstif2• 16 years ago

I would need to put the term in quotes if I'm planning on using the term in an unusual manner.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Quotation_mar...

I put the term in single quotes due to the fact that 'attractive' can be an ambiguous and subjective term.

I'm aware that 'Attractiveness is a real thing'.

ggordan• 16 years ago

Isn't attraction relative?

byrneseyeview2• 16 years ago

No. There are differences of opinion, but if you show people a group of e.g. 8's on Hotornot, and a group of 2's on Hotornot, I doubt that anyone will have trouble figuring out which is which.

CallMeV• 16 years ago

Unfortunately, the title also infers the converse: that, by the standards set by those conducting the experiment, ugly men and women have lower IQs.

This raises the question of what people call "beautiful," "attractive," "ugly" and "unattractive" respectively: purely subjective measures which do not take into account the fact that some of the wealthiest, most successful and smartest people in the world look physically ugly, scrawny, geeky or otherwise "unattractive" by the standards the experimenters seem to have set.

Consider Bill Gates, Gandhi, Einstein, Steve Buscemi, Mick Jagger and Donald Trump. Each a genius in their respective fields, yet hardly the most perfect-looking physical specimens.

Enough evidence exists of the existence of physically unattractive, socially intelligent people with high IQs to provide sufficient data to refute the argument above.

Those conducting the experiment simply appear to have begun with an assumption and then selected only evidence which confirms the assumption, ignoring counterindicative data.

I really would not take the findings of this experiment seriously without some form of verification - for instance, a repetition of the experiment by another team in another part of the US, perhaps repetition of the experiment with other nationalities and so on.

Tycho• 16 years ago

Well, surely if you accept the evolutionary premises that a) women seek men who are successful

    b) men seek women who are beautiful

    c) intelligence leads to greater success

    d) intelligence is genetic/hereditary (to some extent)

then this is an inevitable outcome. That more physically beautiful people tend to be more naturally intelligent, due to sexual selection / natural selection / evolution.

(I didn't come up with this myself, I read a psychology paper that pointed this out some years ago. Can't find citation though)

smoyer• 16 years ago

Looking for a cofounder ... please send photo?

Beautiful men, women have higher IQs

Related Stories