Physically attractive attorneys tend to have greater success in federal court
psypost.org
psypost.org
I find it fascinating that people seem to care so little about this particular bias when compared to other types of discrimination.
>Plot summary
The novelette examines the cultural effects of a noninvasive medical procedure that induces a visual agnosia toward physical beauty. The story is told as a series of interviews about a reversible procedure called calliagnosia, which eliminates a person's ability to perceive physical beauty. The story's central character is Tamera Lyons, a first-year student who grew up with calliagnosia but wants to experience life without it.
Story: https://waldyrious.neocities.org/ted_chiang/liking-what-you-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liking_What_You_See:_A_Documen....
this is a pet peeve of mine. I remember back around the time that the paper(s) were published establishing that facial symmetry played a big role in attractiveness. Before that time, nobody ever said, "oh, how attractive, look at that facial symmetry", because the point was that we are not consciously aware of what makes somebody attractive, it's our (metaphorical) lizard brain making those judgements, like the way we can generally tell M/F for people very far away. (and to add on, before this it was a quite popular "psychology experiment" to show two pictures of people, their left and mirrored left, and their right and mirrored right, to demonstrate that our faces are not symetric. One usually looked like a brooding criminal, and the other a beatific calm)
so, announcing whether you find somebody attractive or not is a far more authentic piece of information than your judgement of how symmetric their face is. Symmetry is far from the only input, and it's not conscious, it's only part of the wiring of the brain.
It is interesting to learn that the brain has wiring for unconscious symmetry measurement.
Now, I do wonder if, developmentally, the conditions that allow facial symmetry to develop somehow also allow higher IQ wiring to develop, or something hand wavey like that.
I must also mention that we aren't perfectly symmetric anymore. The most obvious difference is the heart, but the brain is no longer functionally symmetric anymore, either.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect
Most common manifestation of this is that attractive people are perceived to be more intelligent, morally good, etc.
Attractive women are 'hit' by this particularly hard - all those guys trying to get them to bed, get another score, the curve is exponential with beauty. Women usually hit on guys they like with much more subtlety, and stop when told directly immediately. Men, often not so much, even these days.
One of my ex-gf (pretty, smart, rich, very hard working commodity trader) told me on a bad day its about 30 unknown guys who try to strike conversation out of blue, 'go to coffee', etc. She was so tired of this since she saw every possible pick up line, every situation they tried to create, every expensive cocktail sent her way.
Its extremely hard for women to not get spoiled by such constant attack, imagine this constantly from teen years, it drills into your personality.
Those who persist despite this are really awesome, driven and very strong internally, or broken beyond repair in some way. My ex was a mix of both. Good luck to her wherever she ended up.
Yes, its mostly fault of us guys, even if only all those before you.
that when she ages out of it she'll look at her craggy face in the mirror and breathe a sigh of relief? very likely not.
not criticizing her or the men hitting on her, we are animals who try to spread our genes, and we like being found attractive as much as we like finding attractive. It creates a bit of a prison for us, it's impossible to be free of the side effects.
A friend of mine expressed relief when she reached her 30s. She still looks good but isn't treated like a piece of meat by men literally every single day any more.
How is it guys' fault for wanting to strike up conversation with females they find attractive?
If you always avoid doing this on the excuse that "oh well, she's probably already had 30 guys hit her up today, I should just not even try", you'll die alone and write yourself out of the gene pool.
Persist at what?
People who bring more love, positive vibes, and value to others without resting on privilege or manipulation and don't snub people through unreasonable snap prejudices are the cool ones. That's worth a million times more than looks or wealth.
Bill Bradley's Life on the Run discusses this. Bradley was the
* #1 high school basketball player in the country
* #1 college basketball player in the country at Princeton
* Rhodes Scholar
* NBA player
* US Senator
* ran for President
From high school on, Bradley avoided the many, many women who wanted to date him just because he was a celebrity. In Life on the Run, written during his NBA career, he wrote about how such experiences gave him an understanding of what life is like for beautiful women: "the unnaturalness of being a sex object".
I'm no expert in morals, so I won't comment on that.
But wrong or not I'm pretty sure it's a useful tool in assessing people. Not assessing their innate "good given looks" of course, but to look really good you have to put effort into it. Real effort - studying fashion trends, purchasing decisions, time spent on personal grooming. Time spent doing that is time they could have doesn't dining other things, like learning their craft. Go too far the other way to the extent of ignoring personal hygiene and it shows a lack of respect for their fellow workers.
I've never interviewed anyone who deviated too far from the norms, so they are fairly well known and respected. Still, it's not difficult to imagine an attire that would get a near automatic reject. It would trigger questions that help me understand why they chose to look so different from the norms, like cultural background and family background - things I normally wouldn't spend any time on.
But even past a baseline of putting some effort into looks, there is still some difference between how good different people look. Judging based on that is stupid (because it's not actually correlative with anything) and immoral (same reason).
Not just attractiveness bias, but having been on juries, all sorts of biases people have come out, age, sex, appearance matching their perceived gender, sexuality, the list goes on.
Humans are really not great when it comes to stuff like this. Hell, we can't even stop eating so much sugar and buying cheap plastic crap to throw away. We shouldn't be trusted with anything.
Although the overall conclusion is not surprising, it is at least modestly surprising that professional judges (as opposed to jurors) are swayed by looks.
On the other hand, it's possible that there is a correlation between the best attorneys and the most attractive attorneys (because they were given many opportunities coming up through the ranks), and what is being measured in this study is actually the correlation between high-skill attorneys and winning outcomes.
I doubt that at the Supreme Court level there is any difference.
Is it that the speed at which we evolve to become more attractive is superseeded by our ability to become better at discriminating for attractiveness?
But separately, it's not clear that attractiveness is hereditary in the same way that height, for example, is. If two tall people have kids, they will almost certainly be tall. It's also incredibly unlikely that two short people will not have kids that are tall.
With attractiveness, heterogeneity between generations is much more common. I know some very attractive people who have not-very-attractive offspring, and vice versa. It depends on how the features of the two parents mix together.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-law-and-c...
[1] - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...
https://www.ft.com/content/4d3b1346-2c5b-11e5-8613-e7aedbb7b...
We just don’t notice the relatively uglier people.
Just look at Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk before and after they became wealthy, they're better looking despite being 10-20 years older.
Basically, higher IQ can help you build wealth, and higher wealth can help you become better looking, but high IQ is not directly responsible for better looks.
Steroids help you quickly and easily become muscular, you'll still be ugly, but jacked.
As for the rest, did Mr. Bezos get a foot taller and a full head of hair when I wasn’t paying attention?
He does look healthier and happier than he did in the past though, so good for him.
Not always Mr. Swollen.
Just going to the gym and doing random exercises might sometimes make your posture and pain worse.
That's where profesional medical help comes in, as in x-rays, doctors, physiotherapists and massage, correction surgery and implants, etc.
Also, it's relevant that Bezos is one of the guys blowing money on life extension tech. So I think there's 0 chance he sees anabolics (or other enhancements) as a good risk:reward when he certainly fantasizes about there being a possibility of life extension happening within his lifetime.
I doubt this is really true, you're just seeing the results of frequently getting photographed/recorded in staged managed situations by professional photographers, probably with makeup. That's also something that happens more often when you're wealthy.
That's not as easy as that.
Having dealt in your formative childhood years with poor health due to poor medical care where doctors just pump you with antibiotics and fuck you up, poor dentists and orthodontists who make your conditions worse, living in loud polluted neighborhoods where you're not getting quality air and sleep, not getting proper nutrition as a kid due to poverty, getting bullied and harassed every day leading to constant stress and anxiety, etc, all these impact your looks from your early life and are not in your direct control as you make it be, and won't easily get remedied no matter how much you brush your teeth, eat well and work out in adulthood.
Is that true? Are there studies showing that?
IMHO sort of but when you massively overdo it like some you start looking pretty freakish. Also I don't think there is any evidence Bezos had any plastic surgery done? He probably just got a better stylist. Must OTH.. well...
Sometimes when try to draw the casual graph, you find that it’s fully connected. There are all sorts of reasons for connections. It would be unusual for a correlation to be exactly zero.
But because people vary, it doesn’t mean that this sort of reasoning works well for individuals.
For these high-stakes situations, we could benefit from an algorithm that turns everybody into a nondescript face attached to an autogenerated, toneless voice.
You don't technically need AI for that, text chat is enough, but text chat is far slower than voice conversations, and people seem to prefer video in many contexts.
With some exceptions physical attractiveness always adds to the chances.
Thank you for attending my TED Talk, now feel free to spend that research money on curing cancer instead of studying obvious things humans knew for hundreds of years.
Some Youtube personalities have been able to succeed despite not being very physically attractive, e.g. Sabine Hossenfelder (sp.), or not even showing their face at all (e.g. Perun) They are just know WTH they are talking about and present it in relatable/funny way.
If skill and attractiveness are unrelated but there’s a filter process at some point that only lets people through if they’re hot OR talented, you’ll see a negative relationship between skill and attractiveness after the filter.
the prosecutor example is interesting because it suggests that either thats not happening
This is a false dichotomy. We can and indeed should study medicine and psychology, among countless other subjects. The author of the article isn't a medical researcher and wouldn't be able to cure cancer regardless of whether he received research money for that. Moreover, the article gives no indication that it was funded by any grants. Professors publish articles as part of their regular jobs. Unless you're proposing that universities abolish all departments except medical research?
I'd guess that it's probably cheaper to prevent cancer than to cure cancer. One way to help prevent cancer is to successfully sue and/or prosecute companies who introduce cancer-causing substances into the air, water, food, and other parts of our environment. Thus, I'd say that the factors resulting in courtroom success are relevant to the fight against cancer.
Doesn’t follow, and I’m sure you’re not proposing that funds/time/attention spent in one place can be double spent in another. It’s reasonable to criticize a waste of resources since there’s always a real opportunity cost
I don't believe it's a waste of resources.
> there’s always a real opportunity cost
Pitting cancer research vs. psychology research is a false dichotomy. (And again, the article author didn't appear to receive any extra funding for this research aside from his regular professorial salary.) Society spends vast sums of money on a vast number of things. If you want to talk about a waste of resources, I could list a million things that are worse than this research, not just worse as in less useful, but worse as in actively harmful to society.
The thing that comes to mind is the “manufactured ewaste” that people buy on AliExpress and Wish.com and Temu. The products on there are enticingly cheap, but are often so crappy that they rarely even get a single use, and end up in a landfill.
Plastic waste is bad, but I am even more concerned with potential problems with lithium batteries piling up in landfills, not even considering the potential ethical issues with mining the resources for the battery.
It’s one thing to me if the device you are actually using was made with dubious labor, it’s another if it’s a device that will immediately become waste.
I get that as a process science and the pursuit of knowledge require us to prove some “obvious“ things because hey, it might not be as obvious as you think and you might learn something. But with that attitude how do you even want to establish the boundaries or the agenda of what we ought to research?
I don't have an example off the top of my head. This isn't an issue that I track or have a particular concern with.
> But with that attitude how do you even want to establish the boundaries or the agenda of what we ought to research?
I would generally leave those judgments to the academic community, who I don't consider infallible by any means but do consider significantly less fallible in their judgments of the value of academic work than, say, anonymous commenters on Hacker News.
Yes, attractive people generally have an easier time in life, we all know that, this is surprising to nobody, but at the same time, it probably doesn’t affect every field equally. Being attractive probably matters an awful lot in the modeling industry, but probably matters less in the tech support industry. This doesn’t mean that it matters 100% in modeling or 0% in tech support.
Also, I mean, how much money is spent on truly useless stuff? I spent multiple years working for the marketing tech team of a company. Wall Street traders contribute a lot less to the world than medical researchers but get paid an order of magnitude more. It’s hardly like this is the low hanging fruit in fund-reallocation.
The halo effect exists because it’s a somewhat valid heuristic.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisherian_runaway and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexy_son_hypothesis.
>The first measure introduced an objective counterpart to human ratings by employing a machine learning algorithm developed by Megvii (Face++ Beauty Score).
Apparently obfuscating a subjective variable makes it objective in soft science research.
I lose interest immediately after that.
Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work
That and the % of poor and minority men in prison.
> My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like.
- The Conscience of a Hacker (http://phrack.org/issues/7/3.html)
It's perfectly dystopian.
Justice is blind? LOL!
My first parent comment was to describe systematic and intentional hateful ignorance of the West and below I lay out the religious origins of this:
Western perception is especially vulnerable through image/narrative manipulations with gaslighting, labeling and ignorance being its main tool of oppression especially when told through manufactured stories from a religious authority traditionally apt at targeting groups that rejects its main state religion (ex. Jews persecuted in Catholic Europe) which uses fear and idolation to further cement others as undesirables/dangerous/lesser.
The rest of the world see the cumulation of such lazy thinking in Western political spectrums, both believing they are better than the rest of the world, supported by populist foreign & domestic policies through slogans and manufactured merit warps its subjects that simply cannot see past the illusion. Societies gets complex before entering decline and we are finally seeing this play out even in institutions that we all agreed would be free from these biases for a fair trial.
Western exceptionalism is crumbling.
From the article:
> "Attorneys who are considered more physically attractive are more likely to win their cases and receive favorable votes from judges, according to new research published in the Journal of Law and Courts. This advantage holds even when taking into account other important factors like race or the attorney’s experience."
> "This “treatment” variable (attractiveness) allowed for the isolation of its effect from other confounding variables such as attorney experience, ideological alignment, and financial resources."
> "These findings were robust, holding true across various measures of attractiveness and even when accounting for traditional factors known to influence courtroom success, such as experience, ideology, and financial resources."
> "Female attorneys with higher attractiveness scores appeared to receive a greater advantage, especially when arguing before male judges. But otherwise, there was little evidence that race or gender significantly influenced the attractiveness advantage."
> “To some extent I was surprised that the results were consistent regardless of the race and gender of the judges, attorneys, and survey respondents involved in my study,” Waterbury said. “There was some suggestion in my review of previous research that race and gender effects would impact attractiveness ratings and thus impact the relationship between attractiveness and success in court. I did not find strong evidence to support that expectation in my analysis."
Note that none of this says that race and gender don't matter, just that they don't seem to hugely impact the attractiveness factor.