Physical attractiveness bias in the legal system (2017)

https://www.thelawproject.com.au/insights/attractiveness-bias-in-the-legal-system

405 385 6 years ago

thelawproject.com.au

wenc• 6 years ago

Really hate to be the overanalyzer here, but just wondering how is physical attractiveness defined in these studies?

And was charisma considered as a variable?

(I'm just thinking of the courtroom scene in "My Cousin Vinny". Joe Pesci is not conventionally good looking but has a personality that is very persuasive)

19962• 6 years ago

There are many scientific studies.

For all the variables, check table 1 of the following for "Zero-order Pearson’s correlations between facial appearance and health, with the corresponding p-values and sample sizes":

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5290736/

If you want more example for a given variable, for example the effect of adiposity (we know it's quadratic), read one of the original papers:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6308207/

All this is well known now, as the first study was about 22 years ago:

Perrett, D. I., Lee, K. J., Penton-Voak, I., Rowland, D., Yoshikawa, S., Burt, D. M., … Akamatsu, S. (1998). Effects of sexual dimorphism on facial attractiveness. Nature, 394(6696), 884–887. doi:10.1038/29772

HenryKissinger2• 6 years ago

What about tech? Are physically attractive software engineers more likely to receive jobs and promotions than engineers of equivalent skills and experience?

jpxw• 6 years ago

Almost certainly yes, unless tech is different from the job market at large.

An interesting point on attractiveness in the job market is that people who are extremely unattractive tend to also perform very well. It’s mildly unattractive people who do the worst. My pet theory is extremely unattractive people have to work their asses off to make enough money to be sexually competitive in any way.

biggestdecision• 6 years ago

Exceptions stand out from the crowd, good and bad. If you are a competent dev, nobody cares about that if no one notices you.

If people notice you, they'll next notice if you are competent or not.

sukilot15• 6 years ago

How do you know the perform very well?

I'd guess extremely unattractive people don't find sexual mates regardless of wealth.

typingmonkey• 6 years ago

Good questions, I would like to see some data for that. I assume it is like a reverse bias where someone who looks like garbage is expected to be a good programmer.

mc323• 6 years ago

Honestly I don’t see a profession where people considered attractive in that location would do worse than their unattractive peers, all other things being equal.

HenryKissinger2• 6 years ago

Unattractive programmers spending more time honing their skills than taking care of their appearance?

montenegrohugo2• 6 years ago

Circus freaks.

cl0ckt0wer• 6 years ago

It seems yes, being attractive will work in your favor in a wide variety of situations.

https://www.hofstra.edu/pdf/orsp_shahani-denning_spring03.pd...

StLCylone• 6 years ago

Sadly, it likely helps in compensation and promotion opportunities.

belval• 6 years ago

Probably, but this is a rabbit hole all in itself. All aspects of life are dictated by others' perception of us, our work and our personality being signals just as appearance is.

In an ideal world, we could simply uncheck these biases and do blind promotions and detach a person's work output from his or her face, but it doesn't work like that. Even worse attractiveness is subjective and thus hard to control for. You can usually identify racism because the person will have traits that puts him/her in that category. It's much harder for subjective beauty.

TLDR: Probably yes, but don't expect it to go away anytime soon.

modeless2• 6 years ago

Wow, a huge effect on sentencing (fine amounts, prison term lengths) but no effect on conviction rate? That seems hard to believe.

If true, it means that this bias could be fairly straightforward to correct in theory, though in practice I doubt people would accept the necessity or fairness of such corrections.

TallGuyShort• 6 years ago

I'm surprised too, but conviction does seem to be the more objective part. Sentencing can vary on the attitude, etc. and is inherently more subjective in practice IMO.

tristor• 6 years ago

With the exception of mandatory minimums, sentencing usually is broadly subjective with judges having significant leeway. In contrast, convictions are based on juries who are provided strict instructions on how they must arrive at a verdict. Swaying the judge can you get you lighter sentencing but has no impact on the verdict.

modeless2• 6 years ago

Of course that's how it works in theory. I'm just surprised (and encouraged) to find that it appears to be true in practice.

happytoexplain• 6 years ago

I'm aware of this distinction, and yet I too am a little surprised, only because I'm so used to seeing people manage to convince themselves against fairly objective truths in the name of following their emotions.

sukilot15• 6 years ago

But why aren't juries swayed by the lawyers and defendants?

I'd guess it's because conviction is binary, so there's very little signal for "guilty vs very guilty", "innocent vs maybe innocent"

montenegrohugo2• 6 years ago

This is an unfortunate reality in most aspects of life. Physical attractiveness _does_ matter, and has many advantages. Whether in job interviews, relationships (non-romantic ones too!), performance assessments or even the judiciary system: attractive people are seen more favorably.

YetAnotherNick4• 6 years ago

Ask any girl and they will say that people who wants to be friends with them greatly depends on the current attractiveness of her. I think it is less true for males, but nonetheless I feel like there is correlation.

joncrane3• 6 years ago

I think males are subjected to the same appearance biases, but it's not necessarily pure attractiveness. Height and size, for example.

sukilot15• 6 years ago

Women notice it more because women have much higher day to day variance in current attractiveness, due to makeup and fashion.

jtsiskin• 6 years ago

I would love to see a double blind study on attractiveness and job interviews, but this would be pretty hard to do (facial prosthetics?) Response rate of identical resumes with different portrait photos attached would be interesting.

Can we make attractiveness a protected class?

hn_throwaway_992• 6 years ago

I recall seeing an experiment shown on a news program with 2 different teachers in a young (like 1st grade or so) class. One of the teachers (they were actually both actors) was conventionally very attractive, the other very plain (I always thought "How's that for an acting job: yay, I got the role of ugly teacher.")

The thing is, with kids that young, they were very transparent about their feelings toward the attractive teacher "She's so pretty! She's so nice! I really liked her." It was classic halo effect stuff.

hn_throwaway_992• 6 years ago

Honestly, I almost wish they would stop releasing these studies, it's like "I get it, if you're ugly, not only is it harder to get a date, but you'll get paid less, be less likely to get promoted, get rated as less productive/smart/etc., and if you get caught doing a crime you'll get a much longer jail sentence."

Thanks, being ugly sucks, we know.

echelon2• 6 years ago

Physical bias is inherent in everything. All human interaction.

Being "beautiful" or "ugly" can be a pro, it can be a con, it can lead to jealousy. Awkwardness, feeling low self-esteem, confidence, tension, etc. A lot of it is subjective.

We're animals, and we often forget that fact. We try to normalize as much as possible to remove these biases (thankfully), but it's completely impossible to remove outright.

I'm waiting for the day we have Matrix-like capabilities and can change our avatar on a whim. :)

amelius• 6 years ago

Totally true, but physical bias should not be a factor in the legal system.

echelon2• 6 years ago

The only way to completely remove it is to present and rule on cases blind.

But even then, a lot depends on judges' and juries' emotional variance throughout the day. Did they have a meal that gave them indigestion?

It's imperfect.

benhoyt• 6 years ago

I was interested to see the section, "A lawyer's physical attractiveness" -- it reminded me of a few years ago when my wife was supporting a friend during a messy divorce by being present in court with her. Both parties' lawyers were women, but the husband (who had a lot more money) had hired a very sharp, very expensive, dressed-to-the-nines Manhattan lawyer. But the wife's lawyer was a relatively inexpensive lawyer from Long Island, comparatively unattractive and frumpily dressed. Obviously it helped that the Manhattan lawyer was very quick on her feet, but my wife commented at the time that "even from the way she was dressed, the Long Island lawyer didn't have a chance". It makes me sad how much of an influence money and appearances are in the justice system. Maybe all the lawyers and jurors should be literally blindfolded, like Lady Justice.

thegjp210• 6 years ago

I would imagine there's a strong causal link between competence and being "dressed-to-the-nines"/"very sharp". Maybe signals of fitness and fitness here are to an extent the same thing.

drchickensalad• 6 years ago

I have seen a strong inverse correlation in my (anecdotal and quite brief) professional life :|

totetsu3• 6 years ago

This discussion is reminding me of the Japanese judge who posted his "fitness" underpants selfies to twitter. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/06/28/national/tokyo-...

staticautomatic• 6 years ago

A) You can dress to the nines without spending a fortune

B) Dressing to the nines can work against you as a lawyer or litigant

Source: I study jurors and coach trial lawyers for a living, among other things.

rschneid• 6 years ago

Since you study this stuff, do you mind sharing a description of the kinds of situations in which the 'sharp appearance' or related type of tactic has a negative effect?

wisty• 6 years ago

Maybe the clothes aren't there for the judge or jury, but for the clients.

If a lawyer dresses to the nines and wins the case, the client will feel justified in paying their fees.

badrabbit4• 6 years ago

Who cares? It's not right!

A hobo who hasn't showered in a decade should be able to argue his case, be heard and receive justice. Anything less, you're using rules to enforce a social order, the legal system has no relationship with justice if this is acceptable.

riquito• 6 years ago

Maybe all the lawyers and jurors should be literally blindfolded, like Lady Justice.

I bet lawyers would get biased depending on their voice then.

You could have their sentences read by a computer though (you could do it today too and not let the lawyer be visible)

koolba• 6 years ago

Maybe all the lawyers and jurors should be literally blindfolded, like Lady Justice.

This should be doable by requiring the entire process be done remotely. Seems like a perfect time to try it out too! Even regional accent bias[1] can be removed by requiring unformatted text responses.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accent_perception

notahacker• 6 years ago

Even regional accent bias[1] can be removed by requiring unformatted text responses.

I'm not sure replacing accent bias with spelling and grammar and familiarity-with-IM-tools bias is an improvement. And we might overestimate our ability to spot lying in person, but it's a damn sight better than our ability to gauge it based on speed and coherence in typing responses...

nostrademons2• 6 years ago

25 years of online communities provides a great testbed for this hypothesis.

Language becomes the new class marker. Even in strictly text-based media, people make snap judgments about who is worth listening to. It's based on spelling, complete sentences, punctuation, 1337speak or other dialects, even things as subtle as paragraph structure and who (and how) you cite. Back before Tinder became a thing, I knew several women (my now-wife among them) who would instantly ignore a man if he had spelling errors or improper grammar in his online dating profile.

Daniel Kahneman wrote once that if you really want an unbiased decision, you need to have a computer make it, because all humans are biased. Even then, the software ends up biased in the same way as its creators.

triceratops• 6 years ago

If we're doing that, we might as well conduct all trials by email.

chrisseaton2• 6 years ago

Obviously it helped that the Manhattan lawyer was very quick on her feet, but my wife commented at the time that "even from the way she was dressed, the Long Island lawyer didn't have a chance".

This is one of those veeery subtle class things. People don't realise how much they signal to establishment institutions that they don't belong through through things like how they dress. And because they don't realise it they don't even know they're being disadvantaged.

I've seen people turn up to social events with what is very clearly to an insider the 'wrong type' of suit (wrong fabric, wrong cut, buttoned incorrectly, wrong shirt, wrong tie, wrong type of shoes), with people silently judging them, but they would have absolutely no idea how much they stand out and how they're being disadvantaged by it.

Hard to tackle because it's all silent, the victims are oblivious, and there's not really any concrete action you can point to and criticise.

mensetmanusman• 6 years ago

This happens in all human tribes to different extents

rubber_duck3• 6 years ago

If you try to fit in as just another member of the group then you need to pick up on the group norms, but I fell like people react positively when you pull off something well.

qzw2• 6 years ago

Indeed. I always remember that when GW Bush nominated Harriet Meyers to the Supreme Court, there was quite a bit of sniggering in the media about how her outfits looked like they’re out of a Talbot’s catalog. Of course she was also woefully under-qualified for a SCOTUS appointment, but the way she dressed certainly further made her stand out as an outsider, even though she was working in the WH at the time and not exactly some random lawyer from podunk.

bsanr24• 6 years ago

How is that even a thing. I'm trying to wrap my head around how someone would even make those observations, let alone justify changing how they interact with someone because of it.

I mean, like, you would think the substance bro brings to the table would matter more than his duds 'n' presentation.

dec0dedab0de• 6 years ago

Part of why I always used to try to dress significantly different than whoever I'm going to be around. I know I'm not part of the group, so I'd rather not have the uncanny valley

gregors• 6 years ago

Inside the Mirrotocracy http://carlos.bueno.org/2014/06/mirrortocracy.html

I wonder with covid how this is being impacted?

mortenjorck• 6 years ago

I've seen people turn up to social events with what is very clearly to an insider the 'wrong type' of suit (wrong fabric, wrong cut, buttoned incorrectly, wrong shirt, wrong tie, wrong type of shoes)

I’ve been on one side of this, making half-conscious assumptions about other guests based on subtle sartorial faux-pas I’d have a tough time articulating, but this made me realize that I could just as easily be on the other side, and probably have been.

Swizec• 6 years ago

I used to wear a lot of button-down shirts because I think they look great. But for engineering interviews I'd always put on a t-shirt.

Nowadays I wear mostly t-shirts. The tech environment beat the button-down shirt out of me.

gotoeleven• 6 years ago

The great thing about dressing one or two steps above a hobo is that if anyone cares you know they're an asshole.

ramraj073• 6 years ago

I'm curious if I can short-circuit it somehow - by maybe wearing a really fancy watch or something.

fxtentacle• 6 years ago

That very much depends on the power dynamic. Dressing appropriately is - among other things - also a statement that you want to belong to this group. But if you're a startup founder meeting with lawyers, it might pay off to be "that super nerdy tech guy" instead of "the cool just-like-us banker doing tech".

GoblinSlayer• 6 years ago

This is one of those veeery subtle class things.

I saw Americans seriously arguing that ads are a legit means of brainwashing. My bet would be that she was a walking advertisement and any rentable image would fly.

willvarfar• 6 years ago

I have had the pleasure of bamboozling Americans with my ‘posh’ English accent and own style, making them make all kinds of wrong guesses about my level of privilege and background. Of course my accent isn’t what an English person would consider posh, my schooling was normal and my “style” is actually clueless tinged with apathy. Snap judgments can be really wrong.

ed_balls• 6 years ago

That's why most of the Europe has a dress code in court rooms.

austincheney• 6 years ago

Maybe all the lawyers and jurors should be literally blindfolded, like Lady Justice.

People are generally quick to complain about bias, for whatever reason, while hypocritically guilty of bias just the same. As a result most people would be incredibly unhappy in institutional conventions with bias objectively removed because the resultant outcome would be wildly different than they intuitively anticipate. The most interesting part about that is that it’s identifiable and measurable.

parsimo2010• 6 years ago

It doesn't get a ton of attention in the article, but I think this starts to explain a little of it:

"Finally, it may be possible that a third variable affects the relationship of attractiveness and criminal accusations/activities. Socioeconomic status, ethnicity, and developmental advantages (e.g., nutrition, schooling) might be such factors.[29]"

Your physical attractiveness and the way you dress can both signal information about you. Rich & powerful men with status tend to marry attractive women, even if the men are not always attractive themselves. After a couple generations, rich & powerful families with status tend to have more attractive families. They can also afford better nutrition and educational opportunities. Dressing nice and fashionably indicates that you care about your appearance. While a few people can pull off the idea of someone being such a genius that they can't be bothered to care about their appearance, the general trend is that people that can't be bothered to care about their appearance also can't be bothered to care as much about other things, like preparing for work.

It would be nice if we could get rid of any attractiveness biases. I sure would be angry if I was disadvantaged in a court case because I'm not attractive. I would be extra angry if I was disadvantaged because my lawyer wasn't attractive. I have a feeling that just blindfolding the jurors or blocking their view would cause them to miss out on other important things like being able to see faces and reactions during testimony. At least if we know about the bias we can work to fight it in other ways. Getting people to "think slow" sounds like some Malcom Gladwell popular B.S. that has probably been debunked, but it's probably better than nothing, and any lawyer can probably work at getting juries to think a little harder.

airstrike• 6 years ago

Very rarely does one find someone else commenting in a way that so perfectly mirrors one's thoughts. This is one of those instances, so thank you for posting that most eloquent insight.

jackbravo• 6 years ago

"Liking what you see: A documentary" is a short story by Ted Chiang published along side Story of your life (Arrival) that talks just about this topic. Sci-fi story about what could happen if we had the technology to remove beauty bias entirely. Well worth a read: https://afuzzyrants.wordpress.com/2017/03/08/liking-what-you...

bsanr24• 6 years ago

After a couple generations, rich & powerful families with status tend to have more attractive families.

IIRC this is a common misconception. The son of a traditionally handsome man isn't necessarily going to get all of the traditionally handsome male features from his dad; he might get some of his traditionally beautiful mother's traditionally beautiful female features. Genetics is a crapshoot like that.

gruez• 6 years ago

After a couple generations, rich & powerful families with status tend to have more attractive families.

...unless they inbreed (which a lot of european royalty did), in which case it works in reverse. Also, income mobility probably prevents this from having significant effects. According to [1] if your father is in the top pentile, you only have a 36% chance of remaining in the top pentile. Repeat this over 5 generations, and you only have a 0.6% chance of staying in the top pentile.

[1] https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/02_econ... page 4, table 1

gbrown• 6 years ago

I have a feeling that just blindfolding the jurors or blocking their view would cause them to miss out on other important things like being able to see faces and reactions during testimony

Honestly, that might be an advantage too. Humans think they’re good at these things, but this sort of judgement gives plenty of opportunity for more bias to creep in.

WalterBright2• 6 years ago

When I was involved in a lawsuit, my lawyer commented that both parties were the same race, sex, and socioeconomic status, so the judge would most likely rule on the actual merits of the case.

boring_twenties2• 6 years ago

I had kind of the opposite experience. I showed up to a court date where dozens of other people were being charged with the same thing. Their lawyers all had Brioni suits and haircuts that looked like they cost more than my smartphone. Every single one of them was just pleading guilty to the original charges! Shit dawg, you coulda done that for free!

Meanwhile, my own attorney looked not too far from what you'd expect to see if someone had entered a garbage dumpster circa 1969, and emerged the mourning of the court date. And to this day, I have never been convicted of any crimes.

sullyj3• 6 years ago

Maybe the difference was that they did the crimes and you didn't.

schemy3• 6 years ago

Just copy blind auditions orchestras do.

Everything is done by typed text, with no humans visible. Jurors just sit isolated in a booth reading the text, or have the same person read out all the text to them.

Lawyers would be against it, but everyone would benefit from a society that decides guilt based on how convincing an argument is and not how convincing the person saying the argument is.

"Look at that man, he is guilty." Is not very convincing when the person who is supposedly guilty has never been seen.

thephyber• 6 years ago

The conversion of {speech, body language} to {text, nothing} is pretty severe when you're on a jury trying to establish if the person on the stand is credible.

virtuous_signal2• 6 years ago

Sounds nice in theory, but the whole idea behind the right to face your accuser is that people depend on their senses to judge if someone's lying or not by how he/she reacts to the confrontation.

keenmaster• 6 years ago

Tonal variation, speech cadence, hand gestures, and facial expressions sometimes communicate as much as what you actually say. That is probably important in a court environment. I would love to see your idea tested though.

oh-4-fucks-sake2• 6 years ago

Growing up the software dev son of a trial defense attorney, he was always pushing all these tips, tricks, and dogmas about how this-and-that needs polished and what kind of saddle soap to use and collar stays and these brands of shoes and shirts and how much starch and tie colors and what different cuff styles signal. I could never drive it into his head/make-him-believe that in my field "yeah, presentation counts, but like 3% of how much it counts in yours".

quacked2• 6 years ago

Do you think that all of his tricks actually worked, or was he pushing what he wanted to be right? To really know if specific brands of shoes or shirts really worked, you'd need to do some pretty advanced blind testing, that also might be unethical (would you want your lawyer to wear a pair of shoes he thinks might impact your case negatively?)

1vuio0pswjnm7• 6 years ago

Horsehair wigs and gowns might help mask some of that "physical attractiveness". The US chose to abandon that tradition but it's still alive in some jurisdictions.

abhgh2• 6 years ago

I have a funny story of the opposite happening to me. This is when I was leading a small team that developed specialized Machine Learning modules for clients. So we have this in-person client meeting (they had decided to travel down to our office), where someone from project management decided to represent the technical crowd i.e. us and the other devs. Since he has done this before he is dressed impeccably in formals, is his charming self, etc. While the meeting is on, and we backstage folks are at work, I suddenly get a ping from him asking to walk into the meeting to explain a specific module. I'm not cleanly shaved, and frankly, shabbily dressed - because well, I had been told I would not be needed in the meeting. So I walk in, describe what they wanted to know in about 2 min, which was no different from what the other guy had said, and they were suddenly convinced!

The phenomena might be general - looking good is one big part of it, but people in certain roles/work functions are expected to have a certain appearance.

jkhaui• 6 years ago

Good on you, but this doesn't prove anything imo. People are almost always positively biased toward attractive faces due to the halo effect. Biologically/psychologically this is a result of one's facial bone structure, skin, and bodyfat levels.

So being shabbily dressed and having stubble is mostly irrelevant here. Maybe you were just much better looking than the other (poor) bloke.

LdSGSgvupDV• 6 years ago

Maybe we should try anonymous remote court?

HPsquared• 6 years ago

If blindfolded, people would probably judge a bit based on the voice instead.

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 6 years ago

A huge confounding factor is that socio-economic status and life history can significantly affect attractiveness.

For example, in the US at least, a lot of people consider having nice, straight teeth attractive. But getting there requires good dental care and perhaps orthodontics such as braces which can be expensive. Thus, not only are straight teeth attractive, they can be a signal of socio-economic status.

Another thing is that life situations alter attractiveness. For example, I have seen people who were attractive once, but after a few years of using meth, they would not be described as attractive by a lot of people.

Also, in at least one of the studies, photos of the criminal were used to judge attractiveness. These may have been mugshots. However, how someone looks on mugshots can be significantly different if one has been living on the street for sometime vs living in a wealthy home, and their lawyer arranged their client to turn themselves in to the police.

mikece• 6 years ago

This reminds me of a study of cases where judges pre-screened cases looking at the evidence and charges without ever seeing the defendant or demographics about them and predicted the outcome. Their expected verdicts and sentencing was far more uniform and accurate (taking appeals into account) than the in-person trials that followed.

ekianjo• 6 years ago

The bias does not exist only in the legal system...

site-packages1• 6 years ago

No one made the claim that it did exist only in the legal system. This article is just about bias in the legal system.

gamegoblin2• 6 years ago

"Liking What You See: A Documentary" is an excellent short story by Ted Chiang (these days best known for the story behind the film "Arrival") about this topic.

In the story, a highly-targeted brain treatment exists that can make it so that one is unable to perceive physical attractiveness. The story explores the ethics of such a treatment.

Here is a pdf, but if you like it, I highly recommend supporting the author and getting both of his collections, "Stories of Your Life and Others" and "Exhalation". You won't regret it.

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:vSPLnv...

gonehome• 6 years ago

I love this short story, I think it's probably my favorite of his first collection. I think he does a great job of making realistic and compelling arguments for both positions and really exploring the details.

loosetypes• 6 years ago

Thanks for noting this.

I enjoyed Exhalation but was not aware of the other collection.

greggman3• 6 years ago

Someone should write a story about speakism, judging a message based on how it's said instead of the content of the message. They can posit some AI that extracts the facts from each person's message and removes how it was expressed. This would be see to help people who are not proficient in the local language, people who have accents that are perceived as less intelligent/trustworthy, people who deliver their message in harsh ways (Linus was apparently an example)

gamegoblin2• 6 years ago

That exact topic actually comes up in the story I linked.

SPOILERS BELOW (though knowing doesn't really detract from the story)

In the story, one of the central discussions is the debate to make the procedure mandatory for students at a college campus. The procedure is non-invasive and reversible, similar tot an MRI or something.

Fearing that this sort of public debate will spread, a cosmetics lobbying firm (who wants to maintain the status quo) publishes a video with a persuasive counter-argument.

It is later revealed that the video had been manipulated by software "capable of fine-tuning paralinguistic cues in order to maximize the emotional response evoked in viewers. This dramatically increases the effectiveness of recorded presentations."

Some people get a further brain tweak to mitigate this effect.

aminozuur• 6 years ago

This reminds me of another study that showed that "90% of CEOs are of above average height." (source below)

I also wonder if the WFH revolution will reduce the advantage a tall, handsome guy has over a more productive, short guy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Height_discrimination

AnthonyMouse7• 6 years ago

Interestingly if you account for height discrimination, it causes women to be over-represented in management roles, implying that what's normally ascribed to sex discrimination is really height discrimination and the sex discrimination, if anything, goes the other way. A 5'6" man is less likely to be in management than a 5'6" woman.

It also implies that if we solved height discrimination there would be a lot more female CEOs.

jariel6• 6 years ago

" A 5'6" man is less likely to be in management than a 5'6" woman."

Maybe a better way to put it, an 'average height female is more likely to be in management than a below-average height male'.

croissants2• 6 years ago

Interestingly if you account for height discrimination, it causes women to be over-represented in management roles

Source? I've wondered about this but am not aware of any actual studies.

ve554• 6 years ago

This reminds me when I once remarked that Elon Musk's various procedures to change his appearance likely were an ROI of >1,000x for him and have probably increased his net worth by billions if not tens of billions of dollars, just by making him seem more attractive.

It's unfortunate that appearances are always so important, but it's definitely ingrained deeply into reality. Also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect

19962• 6 years ago

It's unfortunate

Saying that is normative, not descriptive, especially if you recognize the phenomenon is real.

Anyway, what is it unfortunate?

Hackers hack. Finding an investment with a 1,000x ROI is a great hack.

ve554• 6 years ago

I was referring to the general concept (e.g. think of OP's link), not Musk in particular. Edited for clarification, thanks

stevewodil2• 6 years ago

Steve Jobs wasn't really conventionally attractive (and to my knowledge didn't get any cosmetic surgeries) and still managed to make billions and a massive impact on the world.

Additionally I wonder what bald Elon looks like. Jeff Bezos put on some muscle and looks a lot better afterwards despite losing his hair

elmomle• 6 years ago

I'd beg to differ--I'd say he was maybe _the_ original sexy young tech startup founder, and his appearance was integral to his success as a marketer, leader, etc.. A lot of his early publicity shots are smoldering, e.g.: https://manwithoutqualities.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/stev...

He was also 6'2".

the_af• 6 years ago

Steve Jobs wasn't exactly unattractive, though. He looks above average/handsome to me.

Firebrand• 6 years ago

One wonders how much wealthier Bezos would be if he had the same procedures done.

ve554• 6 years ago

He definitely started eating and exercising better. I personally think he looks great for his role.

garbagetime2• 6 years ago

Firstly, I think Bezos has done quite a bit in an effort to look better.

Secondly, I think Elon's role is a lot more outward-facing than Bezos's role, and that would probably have been the case even if Bezos was more attractive, so I doubt the procedures would have had as much an effect on Bezos's success as they may have on Musk's.

daenz• 6 years ago

Bezos is probably on some high quality, doctor prescribed performance enhancing drugs. He's jacked, compared to what the lanky physique he used to have.

tootahe452• 6 years ago

Not much since he's 5'7.

But he would be hated a lot less, IMO.

mrfusion• 6 years ago

You mean his hair?

ve554• 6 years ago

That's one of the more notable ones, but I do think he had some other things done as well

strikelaserclaw• 6 years ago

bill gates, mark zuckerburg strongly disagree with that hypothesis. I think maybe in tech, looking the part is even better than being conventionally handsome.

sukilot15• 6 years ago

Most of tech's critical dealmaking is not done face to face.

Both Gates and Zuck had substantial backing from their parents from the start.

Bill Gates was given a huge gift horse via nepotism, in the IBM DOS contract.

Zuck isn't a bad looking fellow.

tomp2• 6 years ago

Interesting... because I think that Musk is one of the worst public speakers. But, that doesn’t matter, because what he has to say is so damn important.

Since I saw his presentation on Starship, I have started considering the “polish” of a presentation, and the “skill” of public speaking, to be a negative signal (the speaker wants us to focus on the form, instead of on the content).

dencodev2• 6 years ago

Part of the reason I find Musk endearing (I know, controversial opinion in these parts) is that he doesn't come across as fake. Every time I hear a different CEO give a speech I think to myself how many speech classes they've taken, how often they rehearsed this, and that a big component of their job is just acting to project a good image. And they're getting paid tens or hundreds of millions of dollars for that.

Musk often just says what comes to mind. He clearly doesn't often rehearse or sometimes even prepare. He comes across as human and relatable. Not just some dude in a suit that has a team of secretaries of lawyers and hasn't had to flush his own toilet in 20 years.

tootahe452• 6 years ago

Its been interesting to me how people hate Bezos so much but love Musk, when Bezos has almost certainly provided more value to the average American's life [up until this point at least]. People like Zuck and Bezos can't get away with the smallest mistakes without being grilled yet Musk got away with some crazy things. One huge difference is how Musk is unapologetic and Bezos.Mark are constantly apologizing for everything, which i've been critical of. Since the Trump era I've always thought never apologizing is the way to win in the current environment, but maybe if you're good looking you just don't need to apologize?

totetsu3• 6 years ago

We could put him back the way he was. We have the deepfake technology.

ilyagr• 6 years ago

I find it surprising that, according to the article, attractiveness affects the severity of the sentence, but not whether someone is judged innocent or guilty. If the former is true, the latter seems too good to be true.

If both are true, it's fascinating. We should then research the mechanism that makes judgements more fair, and see if we can't change the way the sentence is determined to match that.

t-writescode• 6 years ago

My bet is that they didn’t test for that.

jariel6• 6 years ago

It is fascinating because the notion of guilt may be difficult to apprehend.

It could be that the investigation of guilt is very carefully pursued, with a lot of rules, a lot of evidence.

It could also be that for 'most cases' the outcome is actually fairly straight foward?

Also, once someone is found to be 'guilty' - then we are free to 'loathe and pity then'. Whereas guilt/innocence is mostly a black and white affair, subject to objective guidance ... the sentencing may not be, which is to say, it's maybe hard to reference 'what is a little and what is a lot' in any given scenario, so are bias are more likely to run free.

sukilot15• 6 years ago

Remember that by the time a case gets past indictment and plea bargain, almost every case is a conviction. Prosecutors aren't dumb. Variation in conviction is pre trial or even pre arrest, not at trial.

Hokusai• 6 years ago

Generally, attractive people are perceived as more intelligent, more socially skilled, more appealing personalities, more moral , more altruistic, more likely to succeed, more hirable as managers, and more competent.

I am always astonished by how much we humans mix how moral is someone and how horny that someone makes us.

And it works both ways. To tell someone that you are not attracted to them is perceived as a judgement of their value in society and morality. When we actually decide if we are horny for someone in just 1 second from a picture and zero knowledge about that person.

Many years ago, I worked for a company that hired the hot one instead of the competent one. And it was amazing to see the twisted justification. But, I believe that the hiring manager was not aware and was convinced that the decision was based on the bogus conclusions.

Some researchers are skeptical that real jurors will have the same biases as the studies in simulated juries.

I would expect even worse bias when you do not feel observed and you are not a student that may have knowledge about the concept of biased decisions.

dlivingston• 6 years ago

Being a human means that we are constantly at battle between the calm logic of our neocortex and the chaos of our primate origins.

It's all too common for people to forget that we are still very much sub-Saharan apes underneath our Calvin Klein suits.

Aerroon• 6 years ago

This got me wondering whether there is an opposite effect too. Do people that are very moral appear physically more attractive to us?

sukilot15• 6 years ago

People those personality you like become more attractive to you. This is well studied as well as common sense (see every happy marriage).

BurningFrog3• 6 years ago

I believe the science is, unfair as it might be, that more attractive people are, on average, more intelligent, more socially skilled, more etc than the opposite.

What we find attractive has formed through eons of evolution, and we retain the preferences of those who managed to leave more descendants.

That's not the same as being more intelligent etc, but it's not completely unrelated either.

garbagetime2• 6 years ago

Another aspect of the relationship, I'm sure, is that attractive people are better looked after. And people who are better looked after, especially at a young age, have more opportunities to learn, socially and otherwise, than people who are worse looked after.

jdm22126• 6 years ago

There's also the simple fact that attractiveness is endogenous. An intelligent, hard-working person will realize that attractive people get treated better and work to make themself attractive.

joefourier• 6 years ago

Another factor is that being more intelligent and socially skilled allows you to earn higher income, which lets you afford better clothing, stylists and healthier habits (food, exercise). And of course cosmetic surgery, for which even minor procedures can be very expensive.

cblconfederate• 6 years ago

through eons of evolution

I always wonder to what extent that attribution to slow evolutionary processes is true. There were several selective bottlenecks in our ancestry, and during historic times (from which we descend) most marriages were arranged, with attractiveness playing only a very small factor. Even in modern times, only a small percentage of the population had the luxury of breeding with a partner that we consider nowadays highly attractive.

Then there's the fact that up to 80% of marriages have been between first cousins or closer, which would would actually cause unattractive features.

So how come we think that sexual attraction is an evolutionarily shaped mechanism

There is also the feedback loop of "grooming", where, just like bees select a random bee to be groomed as a queen, humans are positively reinforcing a specific set of humans for reasons that have more to do with mass psychology than actual attraction. E.g. kings and queens are groomed as leaders and rulers, eventhough they are probably the most inbred and flawed genetic stock

IdiocyInAction• 6 years ago

The halo effect for attractive people is way higher than the actual, relatively weak correlation to measures of intelligence. So, while it's true what you're saying, it's also true that people think that attractive people are more intelligent than they really are and the second effect is stronger.

pdr2020• 6 years ago

Well that's completely wrong.

Attractiveness is a trait that signals health, not intelligence/social skill/etc.

That's why we evolved to desire attractive people.

It has nothing to do with being a marker for intelligence.

huge872• 6 years ago

I am always astonished by how much we humans mix how moral is someone and how horny that someone makes us.

Yes, it's obvious that we shouldn't base our opinions on appearance or sexual attractiveness, but it really shouldn't surprise you that that's how things usually play out. Such reactions come from a much deeper part of our biology. The fact that we can sometimes think past those reactions is much more surprising, imo.

cortesoft• 6 years ago

I am always astonished by how much we humans mix how moral is someone and how horny that someone makes us.

I don't think this is about 'horniness', or even sexual attraction to the person, because this works across gender and sexual preference lines. Straight men are biased in favor of attractive men, even though they don't sexually desire them.

It is deeper than just sexual attraction.

VoiceOfWisdom2• 6 years ago

Beautiful people are better people. https://i.pinimg.com/originals/97/9b/18/979b189377ce66559765...

notspam2413• 6 years ago

Horniness seems completely orthogonal to me to perceiving someone as "as more intelligent, more socially skilled, more appealing personalities, more moral , more altruistic, more likely to succeed, more hirable as managers, and more competent."

In fact I'd say the more horny inducing the less appealing personalities, less moral, less altruistic, less competent, etc I'd perceive someone. Not saying that's good of me but if we're saying attractiveness causes a boost well, as a man, for me, I'm generally attracted to the nice girl next door type, not the sexy temptress type. The sexy temptress type makes me horny but it doesn't remotely make me feel like I should trust her, give her more opportunities, etc... I don't think I'm alone in that. To give a more blunt example, I'm less likely perceive someone as having those positive traits who is a stripper or porn star even though they make me horny. It's the person that makes me feel like I want to spent quality time with that I'm more likely to perceive all those qualities, not the person I want a one night stand with.

mindvirus• 6 years ago

Ted Chiang (wonderfully talented sci-fi author, wrote the story Arrival was based on) wrote this great short story "Liking What You See: A Documentary" that explores a device that causes people not to see physical attractiveness, by inducing something like prosopagnosia (a medical condition where people can't recognize faces) in the wearers. It's written in short snippets of people arguing for or against device and whether it should be mandatory. It didn't consider the legal system angle though!

9nGQluzmnq3M• 6 years ago

PDF: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:vSPLnv...

MaximumYComb2• 6 years ago

This should be obvious to anyone who isn't gifted with top ~10% looks. Not just in the legal system but in the way the really attractive just have things easier. The person who just smiles and avoids trouble, etc.

aduitsis• 6 years ago

It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness. - Leo Tolstoy

nabla9• 6 years ago

Another think that affects justice system is blood sugar.

Court rulings depend partly on when the judge last had a snack https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2011/04/14/...

The paper: Extraneous factors in judicial decisions www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1018033108

viburnum• 6 years ago

I think that one was debunked, cases weren't scheduled randomly.

spyder• 6 years ago

Yes:

https://www.pnas.org/content/108/42/E833

https://daniellakens.blogspot.com/2017/07/impossibly-hungry-...

BbzzbB2• 6 years ago

Disclaimer: I've only read the 'Key takeaways' in the article.

Should we consider a system where the judge and jury do not see the defendant (and suer if applicable) in the pursuit of objectivity? I think the bias towards attractive people is quite obvious in so many spheres of life. For employment, for the way people treat you as a customer, colleague or day-to-day, for housing, etc. We are actively fighting many -ism in (rational) societies, but "unattractivism" is more taboo. I am not sure what the solution would be at societal level. My feeling is that a societal movement for this inclusion is more unlikely than the other ones, but that would require to acknowledge an implicit scale of attractiveness which is divisive in the first place (as opposed to gender, sexual orientation, ethicity, religion, etc which are either obvious or self-decided). But I could be misreading the situation obviously.

The judicial system is different, and with radically impactful consequences, you do not have to eliminate human bias (which probably isn't even possible), you just have to make the decision-maker blind just like peer-reviewed papers. While we can't really hide identity for employment or housing, but a judge and juree do not need to know the name or see the person. To go further, please could be read by impartial narrator which would also take care of emotional bias (should a good actor have a more lenient sentence?). In a way, the justice system should seek ultimate objectivity for the sake of fairness. On the flipside however, it would have a dehumanizing effect on the deciders to have zero connection with the convicted and perhaps lead to an increase in sentencing lengths, which I'm not particularly in favor of.

joncrane3• 6 years ago

I think lawyers are subject to the biases, as well. Defense lawyers probably work harder for attractive people, prosecutors are probably less cutthroat. It's an intractable problem.

BbzzbB2• 6 years ago

But judge and juree make the final decisions, and the lawyer issues run much deeper in terms of inequalities. I don't think lawyer perception of client attractiveness is the core issue in this case, they'll (naturally) mostly care about their compensation. Prosecutors having a bias plays into the other -isms as well, perhaps a blinding system could be helpful as well, although harder to enforce.

wtvanhest• 6 years ago

At a minimum, there should be a blind test jury in cases with over a 1 year penalty. Would give us useful data, and valid reason to appeal the case.

elicash2• 6 years ago

I believe I once heard that people are better able to detect lies by reading transcripts compared to watching people. They think they're getting additional information they can use to detect the lies but it ends up being misleading.

Having trouble finding a source for it, however. Anyone?

Also, plenty in the legal system is already done on the basis of transcripts. This isn't an all-or-nothing prospect.

sukilot15• 6 years ago

Interestingly someone on this thread has boldly made the opposite claim, based solely on their own preconceived notions.

chmod775• 6 years ago

This. It is much easier for deceitful people to sell you a lie face to face - because you are more focused on the person than their message.

totetsu3• 6 years ago

dehumanizing to not see them in person, and perhaps just see a photo of them somewhere outside the court.

bacheaul2• 6 years ago

I actually just finished a stint of jury duty last week and got picked for 2 trials. A couple of observations:

1. One of the trials was an underage rape case and there was essentially no physical evidence. Mainly all we had to go on was 3 police interviews (2 from the alledged victim, one from the accused). As a jury, we relied on those videos to determine who we felt was telling the truth and the trust worthiness of what they were saying. I'm not saying this was a good thing necessarily, just an observation that this is what we did. I'd like to see the results with a parallel jury that relied only on written transcripts etc.

2. The judge actually gave us guidance at the beginning of both trials that in addition to what witnesses said, how they appeared to us (their demeanour) was also evidence that we could use in assessing the trust-worthiness of what they said. My understanding was that we should use our general life experience that we had acquired in our day to day living to assess the evidence of the witness. I guess there are good sides (eg. intuition based on non-verbal communication/body language) and bad sides (eg. biases) to using this approach.

tomp2• 6 years ago

This might be a silly question, but how come there was no evidence?

I thought that the hard part with persecuting (adult) rape is that the physical act is the same as sex - so there’s no “obvious” proof that the crime even happened (like a dead body), only different interpretations of why sex happened.

That goes away if it’s statutory rape, where even just sex is evidence of crime.

dctoedt• 6 years ago

I was once excused from a jury panel in a quite-similar situation, but the alleged victim had waited months to say anything, and it was totally he-said / she-said. During voir dire, the prosecutor asked if anyone had a problem with a one-witness case. I raised my hand and said, yeah, under those circumstances there was reasonable doubt by definition. I was excused, and never heard what happened afterwards. (IAAL.)

dirtyid• 6 years ago

See or hear. Everyone, in the process from judge to representation to jurors in their own isolated rooms with proceedings transcribed and read via the same text to speech. Eliminate the theatrics.

Though it would be interesting to have a double blind of a normal case + transcript case and see the role of bias or even intuition.

therealdrag0• 6 years ago

I’ve occasionally thought about something similar for political debates/speeches since we k le how much presentation swings impressions. When really we should care about reasoning.

DC-32• 6 years ago

It's funny, in a society with an intellectual obsession with recognising and deconstructing systems of privilege, we largely overlook what is possibly the single most powerful inborn advantage one can have - attractiveness. It's rightly considered abhorrent that people could be treated unequally based on their race or gender, but I think that we are on some level accepting of the fact that attractive people have it easier in almost every field of endeavor.

at_a_remove2• 6 years ago

Someone, I think Sonja Starr, did a series of studies on racial bias on sentencing. Unsurprisingly, it existed. Here's the shocker: the male versus female bias on sentencing was enormous by comparison, using the same methodology.

I remember a very left forum in which someone bemoaned that one out of four homeless are women, and that's why we should care about homelessness.

Overall, I have begun to look at which privileges are examined and which are ignored as the real three card monte.

sukilot15• 6 years ago

I remember a very left forum in which someone bemoaned that one out of four homeless are women

That sounds like an extreme mischaracterization. The concern about homeless women is the extra suffering the endure at the hands (and other parts) of homeless (and other) men.

Much worse is the horrific (and never retracted) Washington Post article fretting that murder at work is a female epidemic because even though men are murdered _more_ often than women at work, men die so much in other ways that murders of men aren't important*.

It was absolutely gobsmacking to read the utter disregard for men's lives.

"more men are murdered on the job than women. But that's because [450%] more men are killed on the job overall."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/08/27/murde...

stoops• 6 years ago

As an individual, it's not really possible to treat everyone equally.

Do you treat people unequally if you know they are smarter? What if someone else told you they were smart? If they have a high IQ, would that matter to you? Based on which college they graduated from? If they work 16 hours a week? What about 16 hours a day?

Attractiveness is an indicator just like any other [1]. It's just a reality.

[1] https://personal.lse.ac.uk/Kanazawa/pdfs/I2011.pdf

DC-32• 6 years ago

Well, if I know they have a high IQ I might infer that they have strong mental faculties, are able to cope well with complex problems, etc. If they graduated from a good University, I might infer that they are intelligent and have a reasonable work ethic. If they work a great many hours, I may infer that they are motivated, or perhaps passionate about their job. I do not think that I can fairly infer similar things from attractiveness even if a correlation exists. There exist beautiful idiots, but essentially no idiots graduate from Cambridge or score 140 on an IQ test.

croissants2• 6 years ago

Part of the issue is that it's much easier to ask somebody about their age, gender, race, sexual orientation, etc (at least in the context of a survey or something) than it is to ask them "Are you ugly? Y/N". It's not just a category, it's a value judgment. This also drastically reduces the number of ugly advocacy groups and advocates. It's hard to push for better treatment of a group in which almost nobody wants to claim membership.

darkwater• 6 years ago

Please remind me when ugly people were forbidden to vote, for example.

One thing is an (un)conscious bias favorable towards handsome/attractive people, another is a system that historically thought that one group of people was inferior and had less rights. Obviously I'm not justifying this bias, and I think that society has an important role in reinforcing it, so we should try to stop it, especially in the justice system.

refurb2• 6 years ago

Hmmmm... physical attractiveness is highly subjective. What was the methodology for determining it? I didn't see it in the article.

And physical attractiveness can vary by setting. Dressing business professional helps attractiveness in a court room, but if you were dressed like a stripper, you might still be highly attractive, but cause a negative perception in the court room.

huge872• 6 years ago

physical attractiveness is highly subjective

There's always sociocultural dependencies and personal preferences, but beauty can certainly be quantified. Facial symmetry, body proportions, etc.

Of course beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but only up to a point. There are some markers that, when you increase or improve them, objectively increase beauty.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_attractiveness

refurb2• 6 years ago

There are trends in what is considered attractive, but I would imagine you're looking at a +/- 30% variability.

Would love to know how these studies measured it.

WatchDog• 6 years ago

It's not massively subjective. FTA:

They gathered a group of police officers and students to rate the attractiveness of over 2000 criminals. A scale of 1 - 5 was used and their ratings were mostly similar.

jariel6• 6 years ago

Welcome to the real world?

This is in everything.

That said, you don't want to be too attractive - rather, nice symmetry, good proportions, healthy looking, but generally not attractive like a model.

Height and even girth for men, but only height for women as weight is a negative for them (I'm loathed to find the source for this, sorry).

One of the only fields where 'well turned out' folks are naturally viewed with scepticism ironically is software! Either by way of reason (ie nobody who spends that much time looking good has spent enough time on algorithms!) or by jealousy (ie it's unfair that this attractive person is as smart as me!) I think we tend to love 'true geek' flair. It's probably mostly a healthy bias ...

Edit: I should add 'nice teeth'. Seriously, 'nice teeth' are the ultimate mark of class in an ostensibly classless society. Like in the UK, the oddly huge variety of accents immediately projects one's origin (and thus class, however totally unfair it seems to be that way, at very least subconsciously), 'perfect teeth' are generally uncommon in nature, more likely it means one's parents could afford the $5K in braces etc. for their kids, which is still not entirely widespread. It's not something I think we think of consciously, but my gosh 'nice teeth' make a really 'nice smile' and it has such a big social impact without us ever really realising it.

11thEarlOfMar• 6 years ago

The article mentions that felonies did not produce a sentencing bias. Perhaps this is because sentencing guidelines for more severe crimes are also more closely defined by the points of the case and judges have less latitude in sentencing. If so, could other forms of bias be mitigated by providing additional guidelines for sentencing in those cases? Do they simply suffer from lack of attention to the guidelines?

tyingq• 6 years ago

I wonder how much of it is the DA team as opposed to the judge.

tus88• 6 years ago

Correlation is not causation.

blueblimp• 6 years ago

The only section I needed to read was "causation". Essentially, there's no evidence that this is a causal effect of attractiveness on sentencing, and there are many alternative explanations available.

So do an RCT please.

cheerlessbog• 6 years ago

If you lead a tough life of crime or had an abusive childhood that led you to crime, etc - I would expect it to be hard on your body - and looks.

Whenever I see correlation assumed to be causation I like to wonder why they excluded causation in the other direction. In this case, maybe sentencing someone heavily is hard on their looks, and we know once you go to jail you’re likely to reoffend, and that continues, until you have the correlation you observe, perhaps?

rogerdickey2• 6 years ago

Wonder if this controls for severity of the crime? It could be the case that attractive people don't tend to commit crimes as serious (within each category, ie misdemeanor)

triggercut• 6 years ago

Not sure how this was done but this needs a 2017 tag. Old paper.

cmrdporcupine• 6 years ago

Makes me think of this SNL sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvgBKO7CGzY

PlugTunin• 6 years ago

This got me thinking of the connection to ageism. Sure, a younger person might be hired over an older candidate for reasons that are legitimate: maybe the more senior person wants too much money, or maybe the hiring powers-that-be want to bring in someone who can "grow with the company".

But occasionally, I suspect these reasons become convenient excuses to go with the younger, more attractive, reasonably-qualified candidate.

bambax• 6 years ago

It's kind of funny that the article, and most, if not all of the comments imply that basing sentencing on physical attractiveness is "unfair".

Yet our current society tends to consider it completely fair that success should be a function of IQ.

IQ is no less a given than face symmetry. Grit too. Nothing's "fair".

riwsky• 6 years ago

The argument isn’t that basing sentencing on physical attractiveness is unfair because attractiveness is randomly distributed (“less a given”), it’s that it’s irrelevant a priori; accordingly your argument misses the point. In contrast: IQ and grit are by definition supposed to measure those traits which are relevant to success; fwiw they are NOT considered completely fair, but that is because of the extent to which many instruments end up measuring “belonging to a certain cultural group” instead of those relevant traits.

arthens• 6 years ago

That's a weird comparison. Yes life is unfair and everyone of us is born with some genetic privileges or disadvantages. But IQ and beauty hardly sit on the same bench.

IQ has a pretty strong correlation with the quality of the work you can produce. Higher IQ is generally beneficial to the solution of any task. If you are trying to go to Mars or find a vaccine for COVID-19, you probably want very smart people in the room. Hell, you want smart people even if you are building yet another ecommerce website.

The same is hardly true for beauty. Excluding beauty-specific jobs, skills and experience should always prevail over look.

IQ: unfair to the individual, justified by society well being Beauty: unfair to the individual, no particular advantage for society

oblio• 6 years ago

This is under the assumption that that IQ is used for a noble cause :-)

collegeburner2• 6 years ago

Giving an IQ test for a job is illegal.

dragonwriter5• 6 years ago

Giving an IQ test for a job is illegal.

No, it's not. Using any criteria that creates substantial disadvantage to a protected class is illegal if you can't show a sufficiently close nexus to bona fide job requirements/performance, which happened to be found to be the case with the IQ test that was adopted as a direct replacement for overt racial discrimination in the Duke Energy case. But the legal rule that comes from that case is not “IQ tests are illegal”, and in fact IQ tests are used in a number of places in hiring (including, as became notorious in another case where the practice was upheld, being used where a score above a threshold was disqualifying in a particular police department.)

samuraijack• 6 years ago

The algorithmic questions used in software engineering interviews are just glorified IQ tests imo.

caf2• 6 years ago

It'd be no less unfair to base sentencing on IQ.

The switch you've made here is between "success" and criminal punishment.

andredz• 6 years ago

Looking for something unrelated (retcons), I somehow ended up in this TV Tropes article that contains quite a few examples relevant to this topic: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BeautyEqualsGood...

irrational3• 6 years ago

A coworker came back from jury duty. She said, “He was totally guilty.” “How do you know?” “Because his lawyer had greasy hair and shifty eyes.” “So he was guilty because his lawyer looked untrustworthy?” “Yes” “Okay...”

waterhouse2• 6 years ago

"Attractive people tend to have better physical health, better mental health, better dating experiences, earn more money, obtain higher career positions, chosen for jobs more often, promoted more often, receive better job evaluations, and chosen as business partners more often, than unattractive people."

Could some of those correlate with things relevant in court? Prior criminal history, for example? (That explicitly and deliberately does factor into sentencing, where the main difference is reported.) Are they controlled for? The article doesn't use the word "control" or "history". I only see a couple of studies about mock juries, where the subjects are merely given a photograph and a packet to read, which does control for everything (except for details that the subject's imagination is left to fill in).

dang• 6 years ago

If curious see also this similar thread from 3 weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23821125

collegeburner2• 6 years ago

Wow, after all the professional, personal, and legal information that's been related here, I feel pretty badly. Is it really that important to go get plastic surgery? I exercise and take care of myself, but have an exceptionally asymmetric face, so might it improve my prospects personally and professionally?

misanthropian006• 6 years ago

Unfortunately plastic surgery cannot usually fix things like asymmetry. Surgery is really very primitive and people like to overestimate its power. It rarely ever makes a person more attractive in reality.

jdm22126• 6 years ago

Ignore the studies and anecdata. Attractiveness is substantially a reflection of personality, so it's hard to disentangle them in studies and anecdotes.

Being unattractive can be superficial, or point to deeper issues. In general it'll hold you back to the degree that it points to deeper issues, because people mostly won't care if your face is a bit asymmetrical if they can depend on you and you are pleasant to be with.

kingkawn• 6 years ago

It’s wack as hell to go along with this kind of judgment and then just shrug and say “that’s how it is!”

sytelus• 6 years ago

These are eye opening results: minimum 2X to almost 4X increase in fine for unattractive people! In a way attractiveness plays out everywhere starting from college admissions to careers to finding mate. We don't want to admit it but then we are fighting against biology and evolution. I guess it doesn't matter what other attributes one has in long run. Evolution doesn't care anything but propagating the best genes which apparently attractiveness is a statistical proxy.

Another irony: Virtually every object of value in modern world is made by scientists and engineers but guess who is million times more worshiped, popular, paid, followed, protected and cared about: actors! Most actors simply act out a scene someone else designed, someone else shot, someone else wrote, someone else directed. None of the behind the scene people matter much or even get fraction of a credit because they are often not as attractive as these puppets to put on the screen. That's humanity for you in its raw form.

cyberdrunk• 6 years ago

Most actors simply act out a scene someone else designed, someone else shot, someone else wrote, someone else directed.

I can imagine myself designing, writing and shooting a scene, but I can't imagine acting it well (let's say on Antony Hopkins level). I have maybe the 5-10% of the expression range necessary for that. It's a talent and a skill, possibly more rare than the ones which "just" require lots of brains and an eye for aesthetics.

dragonwriter5• 6 years ago

Virtually every object of value in modern world is made by scientists and engineers but guess who is million times more worshiped, popular, paid, followed, protected and cared about: actors!

Not really. It just seems that way because of the a tiny, highly visible slice at the top of the field. The 2018 median pay for an actor was $20.43/hr, there were only 64,500 of them working in 2018, and there's about 1% projected 10 year growth in the field.

https://www.bls.gov/ooh/entertainment-and-sports/mobile/acto...

The median pay for a software developer in 2018 was $50.77/hr, there's almost 1.4 million of them, and there's 21% projected 10 year growth in the field.

https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...

None of the behind the scene people matter much or even get fraction of a credit because they are often not as attractive as these puppets to put on the screen.

Directors, Producers, Screenwriters, and Composers, among others, often are as prominently, or nearly so, credited as stars, paid quite well, and quite well known; definitely moreso than non-star actors.

And star actors very often have a much bigger impact on productions than just presenting what others have written, actively shaping their characters and often other parts of the production.

keiferski• 6 years ago

“Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.“ - Mark Twain

Mostly a joke, but also completely true. We are physical beings in a visual world. The way you present yourself matters.

stevebmark• 6 years ago

Eventually we'll have an equality movement for the very real effects attractiveness / unattractiveness have on things like job performance. It will be a more subtle equality movement than civil rights, gay rights, trans rights, but it will happen.

hedberg10• 6 years ago

Already happened. Kurt Vonnegut described it in Harrison Bergeron.

miki123211• 6 years ago

My opinions are quite controversial, but I think that for most jobs, interviews should be conducted fully in text, through a platform that doesn't reveal anything about the interviewed. This is the only way to combat this kind of bias in recruitment, where it exists too. Teaching people not to discriminate is just the beginning. Changing the system to make discrimination impossible is much, much more important.

TomMarius2• 6 years ago

How do you see cultural match and the person's mentality that way? Many brilliant engineers simply wouldn't fit into my team and would be a net negative. Most of the time it's obvious to the person being interviewed too, but how would we know if we don't talk about non-technical things or don't even see each other or talk at all?

mwcampbell• 6 years ago

Would it help if the work itself were also done fully remotely using only text? I'm with miki123211 on this.

bloak• 6 years ago

So many people in this discussion seem to think that "attractiveness" is a scalar value. This makes no sense to me. Quite apart from this being highly subjective (different people having different opinions) I couldn't even state my own opinion on something so vague. If you asked me which of two people is most "attractive", I wouldn't know what's meant. If you asked me which looks more intelligent, or more friendly, or more trustworthy, or more healthy, or more fun, I could perhaps give some kind of answer, but, seriously, what is "attractive" supposed to mean?

misanthropian006• 6 years ago

It sounds like you have a kind of impairment in this regard. Most of us don't need anyone else to define 'attractive' for us. It is something we all feel when we see a face that represents certain ideals of aesthetics. For me it is a small round flat doll-like face with large widely spaced and elongated and ideally slightly upturned eyes close to the edge of her face. When a girl has a face like that I feel a kind automatic love for her. I think that is what it really is: a kind of aesthetically based instant love. Every time you find someone attractive it is a variant of love at first sight differing only in degree.

notSupplied• 6 years ago

If you haven't read "Liking What You See", a short story by Ted Chiang, do yourself a favor and check it out. It is one of the most interesting works of fiction focused entirely on this subject. It is part of the book "Stories of Your Life and Others".

Physical attractiveness bias in the legal system (2017)

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