Daniel Hammermesh is a labor economist at the University of Texas at Austin and the lead author of this study. He said: "Women think beauty is essential. If they are not beautiful, they will feel bad. "
Hammermesh is the father of the famous "Beauty Economics". This research may be a dangerous task. Once, he explained that housewives are often not as beautiful as their friends in the workplace, which angered a young Mormon female audience, because many Mormon women wanted to educate their children at home in the future. He said that because beautiful women have high salaries, they would like to stay in the workplace. The 69-year-old scholar said: "I don't think it is necessary to beautify my words." In his research, he often used the score of 1-5 to evaluate his appearance level, and he gave himself a score of 3.
The pursuit of beauty has driven several huge industries. In 20 10, Americans spent $845 million on facial plastic surgery alone. But few economists pay attention to beautiful economic forces. It was not until the mid-1990s that Hamermesh and colleague Jeff Bedell of Michigan State University began to pay attention to this field. They tracked the potential impact of appearance on salary through a large number of adult examples. Like other attractive commodities, "beauty is scarce, and scarcity determines the price."
According to the data in Hammermesh's new book Beauty Pays, handsome men may get 13% more than their plain colleagues. Interestingly, the net income of beautiful women is slightly lower than that of these men, but they may use their beauty to marry men with higher income potential to make up for the gap with handsome men. Some studies show that attractive people are more likely to be employed during a recession.
The influence of "externalism" extends to some professions that seem to have nothing to do with aesthetics. Less handsome football quarterbacks get less 12% than handsome competitors. According to the number of red peppers obtained on ratemypropes-sors, the economics professor of "* * *" earned 6% more than his colleagues in the department who did not meet this standard.
Hammermesh said that it is difficult for people to improve their beauty. Even research shows that only four cents of every dollar spent on cosmetics comes back to us in the form of wages, so lipstick is simply the worst investment.
But natural beauty is not always beneficial.
A study in 2006 showed that people with poor looks may actually benefit from appearance defects. For unattractive people, people's expectations are often low, so if they exceed this low expectation, they will be rewarded. Beautiful people are often required to meet higher standards from the beginning, and if they fail, they will be "beautifully punished". * * * RickK。 Wilson, a political scientist at Rice University who participated in the study, said: "You can see examples of this situation, such as the increase in working years but no increase in wages. We really have high expectations for attractive people. But they often let our expectations fail. "
Learn some psychology
Research shows that people have a stereotype of physical attractiveness. That is, people will think that beauty is good.
This stems from the stereotype we formed when we were young. Snow White and Cinderella are both beautiful and kind. Witches and stepmother are ugly and evil at the same time.
Some studies have also pointed out that attractive people are indeed more extroverted, and their social skills are better and more popular. Perhaps this has also helped them to achieve greater success in society to some extent.
(Original translator: clarisezhou)