It’s a harsh fact of life that good looking people, of both sexes, have better lives than moosey peers. They earn more money, have more partners and in many surveys have the cheek to record higher overall happiness scores. Beauty then is not in fact just skin deep, it ripples through a personality too.
Why should this be the case though? A widely held view is that it’s the process of others with imperfect information making subconscious back-of-envelope calculations where looks equals competence. That would be wrong (and can and has also been proved) but it’s what people do anyhow.
The paper highlighted this week though takes the above assumption apart using a novel dataset; Chinese Communist Party provincial Party Secretaries. Huh?
Leng Ling, Danglun Lo and Guomon She from the Georgia College and State University, the Zhongshan University and the HKUST Department of Accounting respectively looked at data on 981 local leaders from 1999 to 2013 to see how ‘beauty’ affected their careers. This is a useful group because from a very early age everything is known about them. Seniors making selections then for promotion shouldn’t suffer the lack of data problem that’s believed to cause looks driving success outcomes observed elsewhere.
However, they seem to make the same ‘mistake’ of preferring good lookers. A competent and a good looking Party Secretary have around the same chance for promotion but a good looking duffer is demoted less than you would expect. Also a good looking average performer can do better than a peer with the same competence.
The researchers point out that this undermines the notion that the undemocratic Chinese system is superior to the Western based popularity-contest-model because it’s based on quantifiable merit.
Mostly it is; except on the more than rare occasions where it’s quantifiably, according to this research anyhow, not.
The paper in full can be accessed via this link Judging a Book by It’s Cover
Happy Sunday.