Anne Hathaway in the Devil Wears Prada

This question has plagued our society for eons. Our culture (American) is inundated with the idea of beauty over brains. Our celebrated ones, i.e. celebrities, are beautiful, rich, and glamorous; sadly, some cannot even string together a coherent sentence. Their looks are marketable, not their brains. Meanwhile, the more homely of our society are expected to have their own niche, right? They are supposed to be our scientists, our writers, our politicans – the professions that allow you to be “faceless” yet still command more money. This led me to wonder, in the average working environment, which is more important, beauty or brains?

Timothy Judge, a researcher at University of Florida, and colleagues published a study last year examining the link between attractiveness and income. The study looked at 191 men and women between the ages of 25 and 75 who were interviewed three times six months apart starting in 1995. They answered questions about their household income, education and financial stresses and evaluated how happy or disappointed they were with their achievements up to that point. They completed several intelligence and cognitive tests and had their pictures taken. Several different people on the research team rated each person’s attractiveness relative to their age and gender. The raters were men and women of varying ages. The authors then calculated an average attractiveness score for each participant based on those ratings.

The researchers found that physical attractiveness had a significant impact on how much people got paid, how educated they were, and how they evaluated themselves. Basically, people who were rated good-looking made more money, were better educated and were more confident. But the effects of a person’s intelligence on income were stronger than those of a person’s attractiveness. The results are explained as a function of the participants’ confidence. The more confident they were, the more educated they were likely to be, therefore, the more money they made. Even when intelligence is  controlled, a person’s feeling of self-worth is enhanced by how attractive they are and this, in turn, results in higher pay.

Bottom line, it really is brains over beauty. You have a better chance of making more money if you have a combination of attractiveness, confidence, and intelligence – but if you can only focus on one, let it be intelligence with confidence being a close runner-up. Looks like that Ivy League education was a better investment than those Manolo Blahniks.

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