Wow - I’ll take that as a compliment. 
Bolding mine.
Actually, that’s exactly what I meant. I believe I referred to beauty as “currency” in that same post. But like **CarlyJay ** said, my point is that everyone uses whatever advantages they have, and that attractive people are no more (or less!) likely to use theirs *unethically * than smart or rich people are.
Begrudging other people their advantages is understandable, but it’s also a waste of time and energy that makes us bitter. And gives us wrinkles. 
What are you on about.
I talked about some very clear scientific studies showing that pretty people club together to exclude others and then postulated that this extends into interpersonal relationships. I never said I discriminated against anyone. I would promote someone who is “pretty” if they were the right person to do the job. I could not expect the same from a pretty person. They are more likely to promote another, less qualified, pretty person.
I fail to understand why reporting statistics should be considered prejudiced.
I’ll be honest with you, I’m still waiting to see those “statistics”. I’ve scoured this thread and all I could find was your post that had one site, which led me to a publicity page for some book by some psychologist.
I’m afraid it takes more than one random guy doing a few studies and writing a book about it to make that a reliable “statistic”.
Show me some kind of reliable evidence that beautiful people are proportionately less ethical, as a whole, than average people (or vice-versa! Let’s mix it up!) and I’ll start listening. But as it stands now, you’re grasping somewhat desperately at straws.
The assumption that I find most problematic by the “pro-prejudice” side is that all super hot people know that they are super hot. Isn’t it possible that a lot of extremely attractive people out there don’t spend a lot of time thinking about how much more attractive they are than everyone else? In fact, I could see the opposite of that happening. A good many attractive women, for whatever reason, have a poor self-image, and live thinking they are fat when they are not or believing their breasts are too small, etc. So other women look at them and secretly hate them for being beautiful, when in reality the women they hate don’t even think they are all that.
Not all attractive women use their looks to get things. Rationally, you can know that you’re attractive enough to do that kind of thing. But if the belief is not there, you’re not going to be brave enough to use your looks as currency. It’s possible that many super hot folks have ugly duckling syndrome and don’t really believe they are super hot. So how can you distrust them as a group?
Alright, here is a quick collection. This is just without access to the library where I did my MPA work. If I had access to that I could give you about 100 Journal cites just in the last few years.
http://pdftohtml.markoer.org/pdf2html.php?url=http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/apcity/unpan007385.pdf
“Experienced Hong Kong HRM specialists exhibited an attractiveness bias in the screening of applicants as they made short-listing decisions for a management trainee position in a HR department. The perceived attractiveness of applicants had a higher predictive value than other selection criteria.”
http://pdftohtml.markoer.org/pdf2html.php?url=http://www.obesityresearch.org/cgi/reprint/9/12/788.pdf
“There is a clear and consistent scientific literature show-
ing pervasive bias against overweight people. It is logical
that the bias begets discrimination. There is now sufficient
evidence of discrimination to suggest it may be powerful
and occurs across important areas of living.”
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-9602(199805)103%3A6<1565%3APAOASI>2.0.CO%3B2-Q
“. . . subjects who rate themselves as highly attractive are more likely to cooperate wiht others they see as also highly attractive. Subjects expect others whom they see as attractive to cooperate more often.”
http://www.plastic.com/article.html;sid=05/04/11/15130022
“To some degree, it’s that the [boss] is drawn to certain characteristics, and they tend to put more weight on that. What can happen, unfortunately, is that they miss more important job-related traits. It hurts employment in the long-run because there are talented people out there who are not tall, blond, slender and attractive.”
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-8282(199412)84%3A5<1174%3ABATLM>2.0.CO%3B2-A
“Plain people earn less than average-looking people, who earn less than the good-looking. The plainness penalty is 5-10 percent, slightly larger than the beauty premium. Effects for men are at least as great as for women. Unattractive women have lower labor-force participation rates and marry men with less human capital. Better-looking people sort into occupations where beauty may be more productive; but the impact of individuals’ looks is mostly independent of occupation, suggesting the existence of pure employer discrimination.”
I looked at your cites and most of them were arguing was that attractive people have better opportunities in the work place. Only one was involved in the cooperation of attractive versus unattractive people.
Here’s there relevant:
That says all people do that, not just the attractive ones.
Not everyone who sees themselves as attractive actually is rated as attractive by other people. People who see themselves attractive might have higher levels of self-esteem so they could be more open in body gestures and facial expressions.
I have two bosses. One is very beautiful, the other is rather plain. Unfortunately, their personalities are very similar to their looks. A person might assume that my coworkers and I love my beautiful boss more because she is beautiful, but she gives off a lot of social cues which leave an individual feeling more at ease around her. Her eyes light up and she greets everyone warmly when they walk into work, she always has a huge smile on her face, laughs easily at other people’s jokes, and gives cues that suggest she is actually interested in whatever others have to say. I think perceived attractiveness has a lot to do with how one carries oneself. If I took a picture of my beautiful boss, she’d probably be rated a 7 or 8 but if I introduced you, I’m sure you’d give her a 9 or 10, everyone who knows her in person rates her very highly. I know when I had very low self-esteem, I was constantly harassed and picked on. I was teased to the point where I stopped caring about what other people thought of me. Once I gained self-confidence, my perceived attractiveness changed dramatically. In this experiment, self-confidence could cause these effects rather than level of physical attractiveness.
Furthermore, from one of your own cites:
That’s a lot of sources that tell me that, indeed, there is discrimination in this world based on attractiveness. That’s common sense. Of course there is. I never said there wasn’t.
Where in any of those reports does it say that attractiveness is directly proportionate to ethics?
Where does it say that attractive people are more likely to cheat on their partners?
Where does it say that attractive people are more likely to discriminate than unattractive people?
I’m sorry, your statistics have nothing to do with the OP or the thread in general.
So at what point do we start trading pictures? GRIN
No, they almost universally say that those who have the power to hire or promote have this bias.
It’s self perpetuating. Pretty people get promoted to a level where they are making the personnel decisions. Then they hire and promote other pretty people.
You make the absurd supposition that the decision makers are similar to the population as a whole. This is ridiculous. The whole point is that this group is largely made up of pretty people because they tend to get promoted more often .
You may want to go back and restudy your statistics a little. If pretty people tend to get promoted more often, it follows that the group promoted has a larger concentration of pretty people than the population as a whole, but not that the group promoted is almost entirely pretty people.
… so then, the “casting couch” is still an option?
Um, statistics showing a preference for aesthetically pleasing folk among the beautiful and the plain alike shows nothing more than, well… an innate preference for what we find aesthetically pleasing. I’d be surprised if it were otherwise. Now how do we contort this into a justification for thinking beautiful looking people are lazy, untrustworthy, or somehow less worthy than plain people. Can someone help me out?
Seems to me this is the gift they enjoy. It wouldn’t be much of a gift if people preferred what they found aesthetically displeasing. Enjoying your gift of looks, intelligence, or charisma is not unethical, is it?
I would not say that “super-hot” people are necessarily more untrustworthy than anyone else. However, it would be foolish to think thay are not offered more tempation and incentive to be untrustworthy than an average-looking person. It’s like when a highly skilled professional in a hot occupation is innundated by calls and offers from headhunters to abandon their current job, offers that would never come to an average office drone. Sure, they may be no more or less likely to take one of those offers, but the fact remains they get more opportunities. And of course you hear a lot more about the antics of the super-hot spouse swappers (Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt) than the super-hot devoted and faithful couples (Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward).
As previously dicussed, they likely get more unsolicited attention, yes. But this has nothing to do with whether they are more or less likely to cheat/remain faithful. Would an unattractive person be more likely to cheat on their partner because another person’s sexual attention would be an ego boost to them more so than it would be to an attractive person? I’m going to say an emphatic no. Regardless of the frequency of unsolicited propositions, regardless of whether they are constantly ogled or whether being ogled is a delicious novelty, I think it all comes down to the fact that your level of attractiveness has nothing whatsoever to do with your set of morals and ethics.
The only reason for this is that scandal makes better news. You hear just as often about ugly people who are scandalous (think Tori Spelling!). Perhaps you’re confused because often the spouse-swappers in the tabloids are beautiful. Don’t forget, they’re also celebrities. They’re in the business of being beautiful. And they have a zillion dollars to spend on a zillion different plastic surgeons to make it so. Regardless, the level of attractiveness isn’t why you hear more about it; it’s the fact that boring, scandal-free couples just don’t sell as many magazines.
Well, I know it’s been a while, but Woody Allen just ain’t a hottie. And I would say he’s one of the most notorious spouse-swappers of the century.
I don’t think beauty has much of anything to do with morals. Frankly, a lot of the posts in this thread sound like sour-grapes. “Oh boo hoo - that pretty person gets all the breaks!” Ignoring the fact that the pretty person may also be smarter, better educated, have better social skills, etc.
When a plain person gets ahead, it’s assumed that they have smarts or are a hard worker. If a pretty person gets ahead it’s assumed that they are getting preferential treatment because they’re pretty.
There are a lot of really…dumb posts in this thread.
Utter silliness. If I intend to act on a temptation, I need exactly one opportunity. If I do not intend to act on a temptation, it is not going to matter if I have one or a hundred and one opportunities. This is like saying I might intend to be honest, but put me in front of something of high enough value, and surely I can’t help but steal it. Horseshit.
Oooo - I just love it when you talk all forceful like that. Rrrrowrr!
Come now, are you saying that an average guy or gal who encounters a half a million dollars in a basement is just as likely to return it to its absenteel owner as a man who finds five dollars there? Obviously, some things are intrinsically more tempting than others. Laura Bush would offer me very little in the way of temptation. Vida Guerra … whole different story.
You’re one of them, aren’t you?