Beauty Bias
Just posted a new pop-psych piece - Beauty Bias - under the Freelance heading on your right. The article deals with the idea that blondes have more fun, more pay, more leeway, and better prospects, presuming the blonde is 9 or 10 on the bombshell scale.
Boys or girls, brunette or bald, so long as you the right bone structure, the pleasing eye-nose ratio, and all the rest of the aesthetic package, you’ll be starting the race of life a few yards ahead of the pack.
Take David Hicks for example. Boxed at Guantanammo Bay for the last five years, the terror suspect has hardly enjoyed VIP priority from the Australian government. One sinister theory behind the official malaise relates to the aesthetic. Major Michael Mori, Hicks’ defence lawyer, was invited to speculate on how his client may secure an overdue extradition. Mori wryly replied, “If Hicks was from a nice suburb in Sydney…or if he was a little cuter…”
One madcap experiment, omitted in the Sunday Life piece, relates to a team of psych students mocking up hundred of bogus resumes, attaching a photo and scattering the documents all over public spaces - airports, train stations, bus depots, libraries. If the photo depicted a looker than the odds of the resume being returned to a specified PO Box were spookily higher. While the plain Janes and so-so Joes needed to fend for themselves.
On glamour’s downside, a test at the University of NSW discovered that beautiful people are not always viewed as the most trustworthy, all the more if the glamazons are smiling while the truth is being challenged. In other words, why does a looker need to try so hard (smiling on TOP of their peachy anatomy) if she’s telling the truth?
You think I’m lying to you? I suggest you get an eyeful of Beauty Bias.