Maestripieri et al. provide an excellent compendium and careful interpretation of the various explanations proposed by economists, social psychologists, and evolutionary psychologists for the beauty premium we observe in many aspects of everyday life. In particular, the authors illustrate the advantages of the evolutionary psychology theory that attractive individuals are favored for mating reasons in explaining the evidence from labor markets to loans, political elections, and economic games in the lab.
Economists, and possibly other scholars, have so far mostly ignored such an explanation and have not directly tested it in the field. The authors have the merit, among others, of stressing the importance of such an explanation, creating an opportunity for dialogue across disciplines, and spearheading more work in markets and other high-stake settings to disentangle the evolutionary explanation from the other two being proposed.
The task that Maestripieri et al. have embarked on is a difficult one. Despite growing evidence from field studies that attractive people get better treatment (Hamermesh Reference Hamermesh2011), are more likely to find jobs and be promoted (Hamermesh and Biddle Reference Hamermesh and Biddle1994), and get better terms on loans (Ravina, Reference Ravinaunder review), most of the market-based studies are designed to disentangle the taste-based discrimination explanation from the statistical discrimination/social psychology explanation that good looks are markers of productivity and good character. As such, these studies do not usually contain sufficient analyses to directly test the evolutionary explanation. For example, findings that attractiveness matters more for women than men in employment audit studies (Busetta et al. Reference Busetta, Fiorillo and Visalli2013) can in principle be reconciled with the statistical discrimination explanations of higher productivity if the jobs for which this is true are more likely to be filled by women and also happen to be jobs that require a lot of interaction with the public. Although in theory the study could have been designed to estimate the importance of mating motives in employers' decisions, not enough information was collected for this purpose. For example, the study does not provide enough information to assess the actual performance of employees with those characteristics that interacted with the employers in the past. The study also does not contain information on the sex of the employers who are more biased toward attractive candidates. Finally, getting a callback is not equivalent to landing the job, and although some employers might be motivated by mating motives when deciding whom to call back, they might act differently when making job offers having more long-lasting economic consequences for their firm.
This opens the question of the strength of the mating motive as the stakes increase. The evidence in favor of the evolutionary explanation is stronger in studies where smaller amounts of money are at stake, like for charity donations, restaurant tips, mock jury trials, and essay evaluations. In such cases, it is easier to disentangle the different explanations because more information is provided about the gender of the decision maker and the attractiveness and gender of the person being evaluated, and in many cases, the individual's actual ability is accurately measured or randomly assigned (Benson et al. Reference Benson, Karabenick and Lerner1976). However, such studies involve very low stakes and artificial settings, which might abstract from factors that in real life routinely interact with the feature being studied and change its effects.
Does the mating motive survive in settings with higher stakes, different contexts, and a more heterogeneous population? From the evidence available so far, we do not have enough information to tell. In addition, several economic studies indicate that the higher the experience and expertise of the decision maker, the less influenced he or she is by appearance (see Ravina, Reference Ravinaunder review, for an example). Whether the behavior toward attractive people is conscious or unconscious, when the stakes become bigger, the decision makers might pay more attention to other dimensions of the problem, focus more, and think their decisions over more carefully.
Finally, another important avenue of research that few studies touch upon is whether other factors and personal characteristics interact with gender to affect mating motivations. The findings in Jensen (Reference Jensen2013) that dominant males are less affected by attractiveness than weak ones constitute an example in this direction. Such analysis is important because it contributes to shedding light on the magnitude of the beauty premium in different contexts and different subjects and could possibly help distinguish among the explanations put forward in the different disciplines.
Understanding the mechanism behind the beauty premium has important implications. Depending on the causes of the positive bias toward attractive people, and the relationship between attractiveness and productivity, prosocial behaviors, and personality traits, we should either ignore the bias or make sure that our employees/decision makers are made aware or protected from it and from the “mistakes” to which it leads. Understanding the mechanism will also help us identify the people more prone to the bias, the contexts in which it is stronger, and possibly the best devices to protect the decision makers from it when the stakes are high, if they do not do so already by themselves. Finally, we might want to identify the cases in which we should encourage the bias as it leads to prosocial behaviors, higher productivity, or more happiness.
To conclude, the questions of whether the results found in lab experiments and smaller-stake settings “scale up” to real-life settings with higher stakes, different contexts, and a more heterogeneous population still stand, despite the very good job the authors did in finding studies of the effects of attractiveness in the market and in real-life settings. The analysis in the article provides a starting point and an invitation for further research on the mating explanation for the attractiveness bias, especially in market-based and real-life settings.
Maestripieri et al. provide an excellent compendium and careful interpretation of the various explanations proposed by economists, social psychologists, and evolutionary psychologists for the beauty premium we observe in many aspects of everyday life. In particular, the authors illustrate the advantages of the evolutionary psychology theory that attractive individuals are favored for mating reasons in explaining the evidence from labor markets to loans, political elections, and economic games in the lab.
Economists, and possibly other scholars, have so far mostly ignored such an explanation and have not directly tested it in the field. The authors have the merit, among others, of stressing the importance of such an explanation, creating an opportunity for dialogue across disciplines, and spearheading more work in markets and other high-stake settings to disentangle the evolutionary explanation from the other two being proposed.
The task that Maestripieri et al. have embarked on is a difficult one. Despite growing evidence from field studies that attractive people get better treatment (Hamermesh Reference Hamermesh2011), are more likely to find jobs and be promoted (Hamermesh and Biddle Reference Hamermesh and Biddle1994), and get better terms on loans (Ravina, Reference Ravinaunder review), most of the market-based studies are designed to disentangle the taste-based discrimination explanation from the statistical discrimination/social psychology explanation that good looks are markers of productivity and good character. As such, these studies do not usually contain sufficient analyses to directly test the evolutionary explanation. For example, findings that attractiveness matters more for women than men in employment audit studies (Busetta et al. Reference Busetta, Fiorillo and Visalli2013) can in principle be reconciled with the statistical discrimination explanations of higher productivity if the jobs for which this is true are more likely to be filled by women and also happen to be jobs that require a lot of interaction with the public. Although in theory the study could have been designed to estimate the importance of mating motives in employers' decisions, not enough information was collected for this purpose. For example, the study does not provide enough information to assess the actual performance of employees with those characteristics that interacted with the employers in the past. The study also does not contain information on the sex of the employers who are more biased toward attractive candidates. Finally, getting a callback is not equivalent to landing the job, and although some employers might be motivated by mating motives when deciding whom to call back, they might act differently when making job offers having more long-lasting economic consequences for their firm.
This opens the question of the strength of the mating motive as the stakes increase. The evidence in favor of the evolutionary explanation is stronger in studies where smaller amounts of money are at stake, like for charity donations, restaurant tips, mock jury trials, and essay evaluations. In such cases, it is easier to disentangle the different explanations because more information is provided about the gender of the decision maker and the attractiveness and gender of the person being evaluated, and in many cases, the individual's actual ability is accurately measured or randomly assigned (Benson et al. Reference Benson, Karabenick and Lerner1976). However, such studies involve very low stakes and artificial settings, which might abstract from factors that in real life routinely interact with the feature being studied and change its effects.
Does the mating motive survive in settings with higher stakes, different contexts, and a more heterogeneous population? From the evidence available so far, we do not have enough information to tell. In addition, several economic studies indicate that the higher the experience and expertise of the decision maker, the less influenced he or she is by appearance (see Ravina, Reference Ravinaunder review, for an example). Whether the behavior toward attractive people is conscious or unconscious, when the stakes become bigger, the decision makers might pay more attention to other dimensions of the problem, focus more, and think their decisions over more carefully.
Finally, another important avenue of research that few studies touch upon is whether other factors and personal characteristics interact with gender to affect mating motivations. The findings in Jensen (Reference Jensen2013) that dominant males are less affected by attractiveness than weak ones constitute an example in this direction. Such analysis is important because it contributes to shedding light on the magnitude of the beauty premium in different contexts and different subjects and could possibly help distinguish among the explanations put forward in the different disciplines.
Understanding the mechanism behind the beauty premium has important implications. Depending on the causes of the positive bias toward attractive people, and the relationship between attractiveness and productivity, prosocial behaviors, and personality traits, we should either ignore the bias or make sure that our employees/decision makers are made aware or protected from it and from the “mistakes” to which it leads. Understanding the mechanism will also help us identify the people more prone to the bias, the contexts in which it is stronger, and possibly the best devices to protect the decision makers from it when the stakes are high, if they do not do so already by themselves. Finally, we might want to identify the cases in which we should encourage the bias as it leads to prosocial behaviors, higher productivity, or more happiness.
To conclude, the questions of whether the results found in lab experiments and smaller-stake settings “scale up” to real-life settings with higher stakes, different contexts, and a more heterogeneous population still stand, despite the very good job the authors did in finding studies of the effects of attractiveness in the market and in real-life settings. The analysis in the article provides a starting point and an invitation for further research on the mating explanation for the attractiveness bias, especially in market-based and real-life settings.