‘Very unattractive’ people actually earn more money than others, study finds
Scientists long believed that attractive people tended to be paid more because of what’s known as the ‘beauty premium’.
But it turns out that being ugly can actually have its benefits, according to research by the LSE.
The researchers found that ‘very unattractive’ people can actually earn more than their peers – possibly because they devote themselves to their work single-mindedly.
The researchers analysed data from a US data set involving 20,000 people that had very precise and repeated measures of physical attractiveness – the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health.
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It measured physical attractiveness of all respondents on a five-point scale at four different points in life over 13 years.
The researchers found that there seemed to be an ‘ugliness premium’ where it pays not to be good-looking.
Respondents who fell in the “very unattractive” category always earned more than those rated as merely unattractive.
Dr Alex Fredera (who was not involved in the research) wrote in BPS Digest: ‘Could this Openness-attractiveness association be an indicator that some of the very unattractive scored especially low on Openness, and were perhaps highly devoted to a specific topic area, pursuing it obsessively to the exclusion of all distractions and eventually entering the forefront of their field?
‘We know that Openness correlates negatively with the passion component of ‘Grit,’ so such effects are conceivable.’
