Gymcelled
Genetically shackled to hell
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- Jul 15, 2019
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We use unique data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study to document an economically and statistically significant positive correlation between the facial attractiveness of men in their senior year in high school and their labor market earnings when they are in their mid-30s and early-50s. There does not appear to be any link between facial attractiveness and direct measures of cognitive skills, such as IQ or high school class rank, or between facial attractiveness and measures of health, including mortality and self-reported health status. While attractiveness is positively related to participation in high school sports and other activities, these experiences do not affect the size of the attractiveness premium in earnings. Attractiveness is also strongly, significantly correlated with proxy measures of confidence and two of the “big five” personality traits: extroversion and the absence of neuroticism. But even after including a lengthy set of characteristics, including IQ, high school experiences, proxy measures for confidence and personality, and family background and additional respondent characteristics in an empirical model of earnings, the attractiveness premium is present in the respondents’ early-50s. Our findings are consistent with attractiveness being an enduringly valuable labor market characteristic.
We conclude that attractiveness appears to be an intrinsically productive attribute in the workforce, distinct from skills acquired in high school, personality traits, and cognitive ability. Consistent with this interpretation, the premium for facial attractiveness does not diminish significantly with tenure on the job. If beauty were simply a noisy signal of unobservable productive characteristics, the correlation between facial attractiveness and earnings should diminish with job tenure
Some other interesting paragraphs referencing other studies
The most detailed inquiry into the source of the beauty premium comes from Mobius and Rosenblat (2006), who find a sizeable beauty premium in an experimental labor market. In their experiment, the “visual interaction channel,” where attractive people are perceived as being more productive, and an “oral interaction channel,” where attractive people receive a wage premium based solely on an anonymous telephone interview, each account for 40 percent of the pay differential. The remaining 20 percent is attributed to higher confidence of attractive people: the attractive simply believe they are more productive than others even when, as a group, they are not.
The visual interaction channel described by Mobius and Rosenblat is consistent with Jackson et al. (1995) and many other studies in psychology that suggest attractive people will be viewed as being more competent than those with average looks. Moreover, this effect will be stronger when a direct measure of competence is absent than when it is present.
What is striking about the Mobius and Rosenblat results is that attractive people were no more productive than others – the task being compensated was solving a maze – but beauty was rewarded by 12 to 17 percent higher compensation for a one-standard deviation increase in attractiveness. Thus, Mobius and Rosenblat point to statistical discrimination that is unrelated to true productivity to explain the attractiveness premium
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