I’ve been pondering the same question as the OP lately. While I mostly agree with the point of view that being attractive helps you in life I think if you wanted to do a study about it, you’d run into several problems:
For example: Do you define “ugly” by an objective point of view, like letting people rate pictures and then choosing your subjects according to that? Problem: you might get somebody “objectively” considered ugly who doesn’t think they are … hence acting differently.
Do you ergo take people who consider themselves to be ugly? But they might be treated differently just because they have a depressive outlook on life. They might just have given up on their appearance at all. What about people who consider themselves ugly but objectively (see above) aren’t?
Do you take into consideration people’s past? Some might have had “defining” moments like when classmates picked on them and considered themselves “ugly” afterwards. (see above)
What about their disposition? How do you measure that? You might be able to gauge society’s reaction to a person (i.e. opening doors, helping with bags etc.), but you’ll never know why exactly people react to a certain person a certain way. You’d have to have two people with exactly the same personality but different appearances to figure that out scientifically.
There probably are many more points I can’t think of at the moment but what I’m trying to say is that all the factors here are terribly convoluted.
You do whatever you can to ensure that the people rating the attractiveness of the study’s subjects are a reasonable cross-section of society, since the study is about the subjects’ world-view is shaped by external perceptions of them. There will be outliers in the data … there are outliers in any data.
In some cases, these will simply be outliers, serving mainly to prove that one cannot apply statistical data to individuals and that life is basically about choices. In the selection of subjects for the experiment, you don’t pay any attention to what they think of their own looks … but you would include questions probing their self image in your questionaire to see how well the “ratings” matched and whether, for instance, ugly woman who are cheerfully self-confident about their looks have a world-view similar to the pretty ones. As has been noted above, confidence is a wonderful thing!
Not for purposes of subject selection, though you do probe for this in the questionaire. Additionally, I suggest that the “best” data would come from women in the 25-35 age bracket … high-school social life can be kinda wierd and there will be a number of “ugly ducklings” as well, while college is also a somewhat artificial environment.
Well, that’s social science for you! Even if you come up with wonderful data, if it’s given to two sociologists with different axes to grind, you’ll get two completely different papers. I’ll want to see the data!
You’re right…one can always nitpick things to death. You’d probably be best off doing a couple of studies concentrating on one aspect of the subject at a time. It would be interesting to see the data in any case… There are probably people working on it right as we speak
and there will be a number of “ugly ducklings” as well, while college is also a somewhat artificial environment.