It does pay to look your best at work

Wellington -: Beautiful people tend to bring in more money for their companies and are therefore seen as more valuable employees and harder workers, researchers say.           

According Dario Maestripieri from the University of Chicago, a door-to-door insurance salesman is better able to sell to customers who find him attractive because the customers will be more likely to buy if they think it will increase their chances to have sex with him.

Maestripieri calls this principle “the pleasure of dealing with good-looking people.”

“Good-looking people are more appealing as potential sex partners and so other people choose to interact with them, to spend time near them, talk with them, buy insurance from them, and hire them as employees,” Stuff.co.nz quoted Maestripieri as saying.

However, Daniel Hamermesh from the University of Texas at Austin and author of the book ‘Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People Are More Successful’ believes that it’s not just the sex appeal that makes attractive people more successful.

He writes that attractive people tend to have desirable personality traits, like higher self-confidence-likely a direct result of their good looks-that appeal to employers.

“Beauty may just reflect self-esteem. Perhaps people’s self-confidence manifests itself in their behaviour, so that their looks are rated more highly, and their self-esteem makes them more desirable and higher-paid employees,” Hamermesh writes.

“Another possibility is that beauty and the attractiveness of one’s personality are positively related, and that it is the general sparkle of one’s personality, not one’s beauty, that increases earnings,” he wrote.

Researchers at Rice University and the University of Houston also conducted a study on beauty’s effect on success.

They limited their study to how facial appearance affects excellence in a job interview. The study found that people with facial blemishes and “disfigurements” like birthmarks, scars, blemishes were more likely to be rated poorly by their interviewers.

The interviewers tended to recall less information about these candidates thereby negatively impacting their evaluations.

“The more the interviewers attended to stigmatised features on the face, the less they remembered about the candidate’s interview content, and the less memory they had about the content led to decreases in ratings of the applicant,” Juan Madera from the University of Houston and co-author of the study, said.

The study has been published in Psychology Today.