Lookism: Physical Attractiveness and Good Looking People Essay Example

the opposite sex are made aware that an animal is ready to mate when these characteristics off fertility are displayed. In humans they are mainly the development of breasts in females and more muscle definition in males. In the animal kingdom a female bird will first inspect a nest that has been built by a male bird before actually mating with him. Humans, whether they like to admit it or not are driven by similar urges of reproduction. However in humans, our preferences do differ from one another.

Some men prefer tall and skinny women while others prefer big breasted ones with wide hips because they are seen as more capable of rearing a child. Despite all this there is one thing that adult humans, babies and animals prefer in common. That is symmetry. Symmetry has been scientifically proven to be attractive to the human eye. It has been defined as similarity between the right and left sides of the face. Starting with babies, they spend less time staring at pictures of asymmetric individuals as compared to symmetric ones.

A program called FacePrints is utilized by Victor Johnston who works at New Mexico State University. Viewers are shown facial images of variable attractiveness. The pictures are then rated on a beauty scale from one to nine. Less attractive photos are blotted out while the attractive ones are merged together. Each trial is ended when the viewer deems a composite a perfect 10. It is found that all the perfect 10s are super-symmetric. The rationale behind the preference for symmetry in humans and animals is that symmetric individuals have a higher mate-value.

Scientists believe that symmetry exudes a better

immune system. Thus, beauty is indicative of improving the likelihood that an individual's offspring will survive as it will have superior genes. According to a study at the University of Louisville, when viewers were shown pictures of different individuals ranging from Asians to Latinos to whites from 13 different countries, they all had generic preferences when rating others as attractive – they were those that had the most symmetric faces.

Sociological perspective Social scientists have termed the association of physical attractiveness with moral character as the ‘halo effect’, where according to researcher Feingold, physically unattractive people of both sexes were perceived as less sociable, dominant, sexually warm, mentally healthy, and socially skilled […] as compared to psychically attractive people (Patzer, 2008, p. 7). Therefore, good qualities are more likely to associated with ‘good looking’ people solely on the basis that attractive people are better looking and thus have a ‘halo’ of goodness surrounding their actions.

The injustice resulting from such bias is a problem for society as it gives unjust advantages to some while robbing others of equal treatment in society. Impacts of lookism Children Unfortunately lookism has also seeped its way into one of the most unconditional relationships- parenting. It was found that in certain situation parents tend to favor attractive children over unattractive children. According to Berry, newborns that are less attractive are held, spoken to or stared in their eyes for a lesser time by their mothers.

This doesn’t mean that a mother neglects her newborn but she would rather spend more time on burping or wiping her baby rather than bonding physically. Unfair judgment of students results even in the classroom. In one study, teachers

were given a report card of a 5th grade student in 400 classrooms in Missouri which contained the student’s grades, habits of work, attendance and work evaluation. The reports were identical and the only difference was the picture attached with them.

Some had a picture of an ‘attractive” student and others had a picture of an ‘unattractive’ student. The teachers were then asked to evaluate the student based on the information at hand. The experiment’s results were shocking. Despite the information being identical the students with the attractive picture were judged as being more sociable, popular and more intelligent. Surprisingly when the same experiment was conducted without usage of student images, the teachers evaluated the reports more fairly. Etcoff, 1999, p. 49).

Lookism and Jobs Pioneers of experimentation of looks based discrimination at the workplace researchers Hamermish and Biddle used three panels over a span of four years in North America where they asked the panel to rate the physical appearance of the subjects on a five point scale. The conclusion of the experiment was, “People who are better-looking receive higher pay, while bad-looking people earn less than average, other things equal” (Stalcup, 2006, p. 5).

Using similar methods Hamermish and Biddle conducted an experiment in the legal field and found that attractive lawyers were more likely to have more clients, enjoy their own private practice, work longer hours, earn a higher pay and had a greater chance to work as litigators facing judges in the courtroom. Converting the differences to dollar values, they found, “a one standard-deviation increase in average beauty is worth $3,200 to the average public-sector attorney, but $10,200 to the average private-sector attorney” (Hamermesh

; Biddle, 1998, p. 185).

These values demonstrate impacts of lookism numerically but one should be aware of the difficulties faced when trying to measure the degrees of attractiveness from one person to person. Nonetheless, statistics shows major differences in pay due to lookism. Appearance of a job applicant influences how interviewers perceive them despite the applicant’s competency. An analysis conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Saint Louis shows a ‘beauty premium’ comes with being tall, slender and attractive accounting for roughly a 5% extra in earnings compared to those people who are given a ‘plainness penalty’ of 9% reduction in wages (Berry, 2007, p. 0).

Crime Harvard professor Etcoff states, “good looking adults are more likely to get away with anything from shoplifting to cheating on exams to committing serious crimes” (Etcoff, 1999, p. 49). Its quite ironic how the justice system falls prey to injustice itself. Attractive criminals receive lower bails and lighter sentences with their punishments usually being less severe. For instance, a ‘better looking’ rapist would get a more lenient punishment than an ugly rapist for the exact same crime (Patzer, 2008). Lookism and Women.

The fact that in modern society a woman’s worth is based on her exterior beauty has caused feminists to vocalise their concern. Some feminists claim, “To situate the female body as ‘an object of vision’ is to consider this body crudely in terms of its artificiality”(Dwyer, 2004, p. 6) . This means that objectifying a woman’s body brings great danger. To be considered equal to a man a woman needs to be emancipated from her body. The issue is brought up by feminists and non-feminists alike since it

raises the question of the value of physical appearance in society and whether the only way to have a prosperous life is by being beautiful.

Plastic surgery and diseases such as anorexia and bulimia only further magnify the seriousness of the situation. In an experiment conducted by psycholgists where an attractive woman and an ‘ugly’ woman approach a phone booth asking for their dime back. The results were that 87% of the people in the booth returned the dime to the attractive lady compared to only a 64% for the unattractive female (Etcoff, 1999, p. 23). Conclusion In conclusion, society has always, and will continue to harbor a bias in favor of good looking people.

However before terming the conclusions of all the studies as concrete one should realize that according to Darwin standards of beauty vary from culture to country. Also when women were sampled for their behavior towards their babies it is unlikely that their mental/physical health along with post partum depression were taken into account. To what degree Lookism exists in our society is a debatable topic but there is no doubt of its existence and therefore we must stop it from disintegrating our values and treating each other unjustly.