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Beauty Isn’t Always Better

According to common wisdom, beautiful people tend to have a lot more luck in the work world.


Research has shown people deemed attractive get paid more, receive better job evaluations and are generally more employable. It’s even been shown that good-looking CEOs bring better stock returns for their companies.

However, recent research by Chun Zhang, assistant professor of marketing, and her colleagues shows some evidence that this “beauty premium” may be wearing off.

“In television commercials, for example, retailers and other companies are increasingly using real people — with all their physical flaws — rather than photoshopped models to give their brands an ‘authentic’ feel,” said Zhang.

Zhang and colleagues set out to investigate how beauty impacts employees’ interactions with customers.

In their first study, 309 college students read about dining at a restaurant. They then looked at an image of their waiter. The image depicted a male or female whose facial features were edited to depict high or low levels of attractiveness, based on prior research defining beauty.

Participants rated the attractiveness of the server and how “psychologically close” they felt to him or her. Participants also graded customer satisfaction, the service quality and the likability of the waiter on a scale from low to high.

“We found that how close a consumer felt toward the waiter correlated with how they rated the quality of service they received,” explained Zhang. “That is, if they felt distance from the waiter, they were more likely to give him or her poor marks. Furthermore, we found that people who thought the server was attractive but were themselves not good-looking — using our objective beauty assessment — were more likely to feel distance.”

This finding led the researchers to more questions: Was the distance participants felt due to each person’s self-perceptions — or an objective measure?

To explore this question, the researchers studied 237 people who were waiting to board a flight in Guangzhou, China. The participants read a scenario about receiving a meal or other service from a flight attendant while aboard the plane and viewed a picture of the employee. Just as in the first study, participants randomly viewed either “attractive” or “unattractive” flight attendants.

The participants then rated the attractiveness of the attendant as well as themselves, and indicated whether they believe there’s a connection between beauty and skill. They also rated the service received.

The findings showed that participants who saw themselves as less good-looking felt more distance from an attractive flight attendant. They were also more likely to perceive the service as lower quality. Participants who said there isn’t a connection between beauty and skill also tended to assess attractive employees’ service as low quality.

In a third study, the researchers surveyed consumers at a shopping mall who had just had a face-to-face encounter with a service employee. This study further confirmed the results of the first two.

“In each study, we found a clear connection between beautiful workers and unpleasant customer experiences for people who are less attractive,” explained Zhang. “In a world that admires and hires beautiful people, our research suggests there’s a potential downside, at least in the service sector.”

This article is adapted from a piece that originally appeared in The Conversation.