It’s all in the
smile
Want to better your lot in life? New research shows
you should be attractive and, above all, smile
by christopher ingraham
N
ew research offers good news
and bad news for the homely
among us. First, the good
news: People can’t tell how
smart you are by how good you look. The
bad news? They think they can.
As reported last month in the journal
Plos One, researchers had 40 men and 40
women take a standard intelligence test.
Then they photographed the subject’s
faces, instructing them “to adopt a
neutral, non-smiling expression and
avoid facial cosmetics, jewelry and other
decorations.”
Next, 160 strangers reviewed the
photographs. Half of the reviewers
rated the photos according to how
smart the subjects looked, while the
other half rated them according to the
subjects’ attractiveness.
The researchers found a strong relationship between how attractive people
thought a person was and assumptions
about their intelligence: The higher the
attractiveness rating, the higher the rating
for smarts. This relationship was particularly strong when the subjects were female.
But the connection between perceived
intelligence and actual intelligence was
much less clear. Indeed, there was a significant gender gap: Reviewers did pretty well
at guessing the actual intelligence of men,
but they were completely lost when trying
to identify smart women.
Researchers surmised that judging
women on their intelligence — rather
than their attractiveness — may just not
be something people practice very much:
- the washington post
“The strong halo effect of attractiveness
may thus prevent an accurate assessment
of the intelligence of women.”
But it gets weirder: When researchers
compared the attractiveness ratings for
various subjects with their IQ scores, they
found no relationship whatsoever. This
suggests that there is absolutely no connection between brains and beauty. But
assumptions about a person’s intelligence
seem to be based largely on stereotypes
related, at least in part, to notions of attractiveness.
To probe this idea further, the researchers constructed “intelligence stereotypes”
for both men and women, using the
photographs reviewers had rated by level
of intelligence.
“Our data suggest that a clear mental
image [of] how a smart face should look
does exist for both men and women within the community of human raters,” the
researchers concluded. “. . . In both sexes,
a narrower face with a thinner chin and
a larger prolonged nose characterizes the
predicted stereotype of high-intelligence,
while a rather oval and broader face with a
massive chin and a smallish nose characterizes the prediction of low-intelligence.”
These assumptions carry centuries
of cultural baggage. More to the point,
they’re simply wrong. The researchers
found no relationship between these facial
stereotypes and a person’s actual intelligence.
“Men and women with specific facial
traits were perceived as highly intelligent,”
the researchers concluded. “However,
these faces of supposed high and low
intelligence probably represent nothing
more than a cultural stereotype because
these morphological traits do not correlate
with the real intelligence of the subjects.”
It’s worth noting that the study was
conducted in the Czech Republic, which
is overwhelmingly white and troubled by
violence against the Roma minority. The
researchers say nothing about the race or
ethnicity of their subjects or the reviewers.
So where does this leave us? While it’s
comforting to know that there’s no real
connection between brains and beauty, we
nonetheless form opinions of each other
as if there were. This can have measurable,
real-world consequences.
Daniel Hamermesh, an economist at
the University of Texas at Austin, wrote
in an August 2011 New York Times op-ed
that being attractive “helps you earn more
money, find a higher-earning spouse (and
one who looks better, too!) and get better
deals on mortgages.” All told, he wrote,
the lifetime earnings difference between
people at opposite ends of the attractiveness spectrum averages out to about
$230,000, in beauty’s favor.
Finally, the research suggests one thing
everyone can do to boost others’ assessment of our intelligence: Smile more.
“There also seems to be a correlation
between semblances of emotions of joy
or anger in perceptions of high or low
intelligence in faces, respectively,” the
researchers write. “The ‘high intelligence’
faces appear to be smiling more than the
‘low intelligence’ faces.”
Spring 2014
Research Texas
17