As far as the whole personality thing goes, and speaking in huge generalities, attractive people, as has been stated, are percieved as more competant, intellegent, whatever. So attractive people are treated with a little more warmth and friendliness than the unattractive. This treatment makes the attractive people friendlier themselves- more outgoing, quicker to smile. Unattractive people, used to rejection, may view with the world with suspicion.
The disparity between the ways the haves and the have-nots are treated may in itself lead to significant personality differences. The more attractive may develop more winsome personalities. Because they face less rejection, they may be less bitter and more trusting, so they will even develop stronger characters.
I think the point is clear but I’ll spell it out for you. No one in their right mind should knowingly hire a less competant lawyer, doctor, or financial advisor because he/or she happened to be a little prettier. Is your health or wealth worth a couple minutes of checking out some girls ass? That’s what strip clubs are for.
People are also human though. For relatively mindless service jobs where the most important thing is happy customers, looks are more important. I’m sure most of us have gone back to a particular bar or restaruant just because it has a nice looking waitress. When I’m shopping for a shirt, I’d rather have the 6’ pretty blond help me than the gay dude. I’m pretty sure that a lot of hiring managers also hire based on looks, after all, there didn’t seemed to be too many grotesques working at the World Financial Center.
I think it works both ways though. I think attractive women (or men for that matter) are not viewed as particularly bright. I’ll use my own example from before - I have no idea if Denise Richards is intelligent or not. I just sort of assumed that a woman like her could only be a nuclear scientist in a Bond movie. And I’ll admit that when I mean a coworker who is very pretty, I’ll generally assume that she’s probably just there as eye candy and will generally be useless to the team.
Why don’t all executive officers and partners look like models? IMHO, looks can get you the job and maybe even help you keep it but most jobs require more than looks alone. Once a person reaches a level where they are expected to lead, they generally need a little more than just a pretty face.
Hey…common babe! Don’t be like that!
[TOUCHES ARM SUGGESTIVELY]
I think that the arguement is that if all things were equal, would you hire an competent ugly doctor or a competent beautiful doctor?
I’d hire the ugly one. The looks would just hamper the doctors credibility with the other doctors. None of the other workers would get distracted by the doctors looks.
Any person who exhibits any experience in getting by with their looks is highly suspect with me for their qualifications. I rely on skill and creativity and using physical appearance as a means to an end is using the wrong skills and creativity. Poeple who use looks are judge by looks are shallow. They dont go deeper into the person to evaluate them for the situation. If attractiveness and pretty things are essential for your narmal day activities, might I suggest art, or flowers or a gay interior decorator. Giving people a break based on looks alone is as patently wrong as judging a person by their skin color or cultural heritage. Lookism’s advantage is as slight as beauty is deep.
Instead, why don’t you eschew opening with insults and fallacies and act like a grown-up?
How is beauty a function of non-beautiful things? You can’t just say that and then leave me hanging! To do so would be cruel! I couldn’t even guess how many times I’ve heard it said that we need ugly/pain/poverty/etc. to appreciate beauty/pleasure/wealth/etc. Yet I’ve never seen a reason to accept this as true, and the evidence I’ve seen seems to suggest otherwise. I don’t see how The Nug Gatherers has suddenly become more beautiful because I did a search and found Mao.
Respectfully, I must disagree on that one. The issue is that a “set” of people are creating value and it seems to me that since they are doing so they should be compensated for it. If we could eliminate lookism, which as a less than attractive person I’m all for, we would be receiving the benefits of the eye candy while the providers of said candy are providing it for free. The welfare benefits of a person’s good looks are being unfairly distributed: they are all going to everyone but her (in a lookism-free world). While a strictly objective measure of beauty isn’t feasible even in theory, I’m skeptical that anyone would seriously suggest that each culture and time period doesn’t have its own standard of beauty. If that is true, then, in theory, in a lookism-free world we could dole out a few extra bucks to a person based on her looks (I’m choosing “her” just because I generally use the female pronoun when the subject’s gender is arbitrary). But since that ain’t gonna happen, isn’t lookism a way to redistribute some of those welfare benefits that the beautiful person unjustly misses out on?
Now some may say that it is wrong to pick a mechanic on looks. I’m not suggesting that we pick our mechanics on looks. When we choose a mechanic, we do based on a menu of options. Honestly, if you had to choose between Mechanic A, who is highly skilled but an absolute prick, or Mechanic B, who is slightly less qualified than Mechanic A but is a nice person, which one would you choose? Are you really going to choose a mechanic who is rude and treats you like shit when you could get service that probably isn’t much worse and be treated respectfully and nicely? How about Mechanic C, who is 75 miles away, vs. Mechanic D who is 20 miles away but not quite as good as C? How about Mechanic E who has a filthy waiting room, unsanitary bathroom, pick-up/drop-off service vs. Mechanic F who does but is slightly less skilled? I’m skeptical that there are any but a very few who base decisions on the narrowest of criteria. If location and personal service have nothing to do with the mechanic’s ability, then why should that have any impact on whether or not we choose her?
Positively correlated. If a group of people is randomly assigned to the personality judge group with an eye toward ensuring that any stastical significance that arises is valid, then you’re off to a pretty good start, no? If there are things like good or bad personalities, then why wouldn’t they be testable in some way?
I can’t say; however, we do it all the time. Not first the discussion about the location of the mechanic. Where she located relative to you (i.e. any random person) is essentially random and out of her control. Does it therefore follow that it is not sensible to make location part of the decision of which mechanic to go to?
Second, all men may be created equal, but they sure as hell aren’t born into equal circumstances and with equal genetic attributes. We pat ourselves on the back for our free will, but that’s a load of shit. If that olympic athelete had different parents, a different mix of the parent’s genetics, or a different home to grow up in, then it is quite possible that she wouldn’t be winning that gold medal.
Or how about personality? Do a greater or lesser degree we all have to deal with bureaucrats. Some of us fare better because of our personalities, some worse. But do we have any real say in what personality we end up having? I’ve heard of the “nature-nurture” debate, but never the “nature-nurture-personal fiat” debate.
The pleasure that beauty brings us is real. To claim otherwise requires one to explain the beautiful faces on the covers of women’s magazines every month. Or why attractive stage actors are preferred to unattractive ones. And so on. We reward people for dumb luck. Do you think George W. picked his family? Why is attractiveness a measure that brings real value but is yet an unacceptable standard for rewarding people?
My wife and I run a business (Social Services field) with 65 employees, 61 female, 4 male. Besides my wife, only two of the employees are “beautiful”, but all 65 know how to do the job with little or no difficulty. We’ve had our share of beautiful applicants, but experience and knowledge divides the employed from the unemployed (or remaining employed elsewhere). We don’t have time to coddle beautiful substandard employees. I’ve had other beautiful employees that had attendance problems or less than acceptable paperwork, but we don’t (and can’t) cut them any preferential slack, so they get the hint eventually and leave.
[confession]There is this one bank employee who is flat out stunning and is an assistant manager, and dresses perfectly to accent her body and her angelic face. I have to make sure that I DON’T hire her! I like to look, but I muuuussssssssst reeeeeeeeeeesssssssiisstt…she would be my downfall. Don’t worry guys, I already told my wife about her for my/our own long term sake.[/confession]
It is an intuitive fact that people with a proper set of physical attributes or an attractive personality in reality have a higher statistical chance of becoming “happy”, isn’t it?
These are some inherent injusticies in life and I always found it one major flaw of marxist theory that it does nothing towards redistributing neither physical appearance nor charm.
When I was 24 years old and doing a little runway modeling, I did really well selling women’s shoes. I sold a lot of shoes. I got treated really well. I had on average one woman a week asking me out.
Now that I’m 38 and bald, I work in an office full of geeks doing tech suport. I get about 3 women a year asking me out.
I think lookism is real and I’m glad that I had my 15 minutes. I really feel for those who don’t. It is such a wonderful self-esteem boost to be desired and appreciated physically.
The “unfair welfare” analogy is quite faulty as the “pretty” people are providing the “service” of providing someone nice to look at simply becase they exist, and makes about as much sense as me charging farmers for using the CO2 I exhale to help their crops grow. This is in reference to the “pretty people” out on the street, not models who are more than generously compensated. As for the analogy of the olympic athelete, such people have to do a bit more than simply bat their eyes to gain benifts from their natural abilities. They work their butts off, literally.
Now, exactly how does one disprove a claim of statistical probability with one case study?
A nice humanistic thought, and personally i’m not all that interested in physical appearances. Good philosophy to live by.
But this line of reasoning also confuses the reality of some people being born with appearances that severely handicaps their chances of being happy. If you’re ugly and revolting enough then a large portion of the world won’t wanna hang out with you. Fact. Sad.
You said intuitive fact not statistical probability. I will have to ask you for the cite if you say beautiful people are happier than those who are not beautiful, because I do remember a survey that showed quite the opposite.
How many people are ugly and revolting enuf that a large portion of the world wont want to hang around them? I’m sure there are extremes that exemplify both but neither are a statistical majority.
Read the very next three sentences in the paragraph, which were not hidden in any way but which you neglected to quote, or, apparantly, read.
If they want compensation from their beauty, it is their obligation to arrange things so that this is possible. If they give their beauty away for free, this seriously reduces the chance that others will compensate them for it. Not my fault, not my problem.
Also, do you have any comment on the cost-benefit argument I presented? Do you think it’s possible that beautiful people could provide a benefit but that they also have a cost, at that, at least in theory, this cost could outweigh or equal the benefits?
