Do Good-Looking People Earn More
The claim that good-looking people earn more is repeated without a source in a popular psychology book. Four studies, a survey, an experiment pool, a wage experiment and a CV field test, put figures on it and disagree about women.
Answer to the question
Do good-looking people earn more money?
On average yes, by less than folklore suggests. In US survey data, plainness carried a pay penalty of 5 to 10 per cent, with the premium for beauty slightly smaller. In a controlled wage experiment the premium appeared only when employers could see or hear the worker, and a CV field experiment found photographs helped men but not women.
Key takeaways
- Hamermesh and Biddle (1994) used interviewers' ratings of appearance from three surveys. The penalty for plainness was 5 to 10 per cent, the premium for beauty slightly smaller, and men's looks mattered at least as much as women's.
- Hosoda and colleagues (2003) pooled experiments on job outcomes and found a weighted mean effect of 0.37 favouring attractive individuals. It was the same for men and women, and professionals were as susceptible as students.
- Mobius and Rosenblat (2006) ran a wage market of 330 participants on a maze task that beauty did not predict. The premium was about 2 per cent on a résumé alone, not significant, and about 17 per cent face to face.
- Ruffle and Shtudiner (2015) sent 5,312 CVs to 2,656 openings. Attractive men received nearly double the callbacks of plain-looking men, and women with no photograph did better than women with either kind of photograph.
- Langlois and colleagues (2000) ran eleven meta-analyses and found that raters agree on who is attractive, within and across cultures. Furnham's list of what attractive people receive carries no effect size for any item.
In The New Psychology, Adrian Furnham calls it "one of the most ubiquitous findings in the psychological literature" that beauty matters, and lists what good-looking people receive: personal space, won arguments, confided secrets, forgiveness, better jobs and higher incomes. The list sits inside his essay on cosmetic surgery and attaches no effect size to any item. Income is the entry with a price on it, and economists have measured it directly. Their figures are smaller than the list suggests, and for women the picture is less simple.
Do Surveys and Pooled Experiments Agree?
The belief behind the list is old. Karen Dion and her co-authors published "What is beautiful is good" in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1972, and Alice Eagly and colleagues pooled the studies that followed in 1991. They found the assumption strongest for judgements of social skill, moderate for intelligence and adjustment, and close to zero for integrity and concern for others. How far that halo spreads is the subject of How Far the Halo Effect Spreads. What follows asks whether it reaches a payslip.
Labour-market data supplied the first test. In a 1994 paper in the American Economic Review, Daniel Hamermesh and Jeff Biddle used interviewers' ratings of physical appearance from three surveys. With demographic and labour-market characteristics held constant, plain people earned less than people of average looks, who earned less than good-looking people. The penalty for plainness was 5 to 10 per cent. The premium for beauty was slightly smaller, and men's looks mattered at least as much as women's.
The same paper found that good-looking people tend to enter occupations where looks may be more productive. Even so, the effect of looks was mostly independent of occupation, which the authors read as evidence of employer discrimination and not of a better match between looks and jobs.
A survey rating cannot show what an employer was thinking. Experiments can, by varying how attractive a person is and measuring what follows. Judith Langlois and colleagues ran eleven meta-analyses for a 2000 paper in Psychological Bulletin. Raters agreed about who is attractive, within and across cultures, and attractive children and adults were judged and treated more positively. Good-looking people were judged and treated better by acquaintances as well as strangers, which weakens the idea that the bias belongs only to first meetings.
A 2003 meta-analysis in Personnel Psychology, by Megumi Hosoda and colleagues, confined itself to experiments on job-related outcomes. Attractive individuals fared better, by a small to moderate margin. The bias did not differ between studies that gave little job-relevant information about the applicant and studies that gave a lot. Professionals were as susceptible as college students, and attractiveness mattered as much for men as for women. The authors also noted that the bias appeared to have declined in recent years.
Research repeatedly demonstrates a positive correlation between physical attractiveness and treatment from others.
Can Looks Raise Pay When They Add No Output?
One experiment built a labour market in which beauty had no bearing on the work. At the Universidad Nacional de Tucumán in Argentina, Markus Mobius and Tanya Rosenblat ran 33 sessions with 330 participants, half as workers and half as employers. Workers solved mazes on a computer, and employers set their wages. Fifty high-school students rated each worker's facial photograph from plain to above-average beautiful. Beauty did not predict how many mazes a worker solved.
That design answers an objection the surveys cannot. If good-looking people earned more because they were better at the job, wages would follow output. Here output was measured, beauty did not predict it, and good-looking people were paid more regardless.
Employers saw different things in different sessions: a résumé alone, a photograph, a phone interview, photograph and phone together, or a face-to-face interview. With the résumé alone, a worker rated one standard deviation more beautiful earned about 2 per cent more, which was statistically indistinguishable from nothing. With a photograph, a phone call or both, the premium was 12 to 13 per cent. Face to face, it was about 17 per cent.
The authors' 2006 paper in the American Economic Review identifies three channels. Attractive workers were more confident, and confidence raised wages. At the same confidence level, employers wrongly judged attractive workers to be more able. And after controlling for confidence, attractive workers' communication and social skills raised their wages in the exchange with the employer. The phone condition matters here, because employers who could not see the worker still paid more. How a short meeting settles an impression is the subject of The First Ninety Seconds Decide the Room.
Why Did a Photograph Help Men and Hurt Women?
Real advertisements gave a different test. Bradley Ruffle and Ze'ev Shtudiner sent 5,312 CVs, in pairs, to 2,656 advertised job openings in Israel between July 2008 and January 2010. In each pair one CV had no photograph, and the other was nearly identical but carried the photograph of an attractive or a plain-looking man or woman. Their 2015 paper in Management Science reports that attractive men received significantly more callbacks than men with no photograph or with a plain-looking one, nearly double the rate of the plain-looking men.
Women fared differently. Women with no photograph received more callbacks than women with either kind of photograph, attractive or plain. The authors say their evidence points to female jealousy of attractive women in the workplace as a primary reason for the penalty.
On women, then, the sources point different ways. Hamermesh and Biddle found that men's looks mattered at least as much as women's, Hosoda and colleagues found attractiveness mattered as much for women as for men, and Ruffle and Shtudiner found that a photograph lowered women's callbacks. They measure different points in the process: earnings reported in a survey, ratings of applicants in experiments, and responses to real advertisements.
What Does a Claim About the Premium Have to Name?
| Study | What was measured | Result for good-looking people |
|---|---|---|
| Hamermesh and Biddle (1994) | Survey earnings, appearance rated by interviewers | Plainness penalty of 5 to 10 per cent, beauty premium slightly smaller |
| Hosoda and colleagues (2003) | Experiments on job-related outcomes | Small to moderate advantage, similar for men and women |
| Mobius and Rosenblat (2006) | Wages set in a maze-task market | No premium on a résumé alone, about 17 per cent face to face |
| Ruffle and Shtudiner (2015) | Callbacks to real job advertisements | More for men with an attractive photograph, fewer for women with any photograph |
Furnham's list is right about direction and silent about size, and size is what changes between studies. A claim that good-looking people earn more has to say which study it means. The 5 to 10 per cent figure comes from survey earnings. The 12 to 17 per cent figure comes from a laboratory market of 330 people and a task on which looks had no bearing. Neither is a callback rate, and the callback study found the sign reversed for women.
The same separation applies to products sold on appearance, a case taken up in Why Pretty Things Seem to Work Better. A claim about a premium is a claim about a stage, a rater and a sex, and the studies above each fix a different combination.
Where an employer held only a résumé, the premium for looks was about 2 per cent and not statistically different from nothing; with a photograph or a voice it was 12 to 13 per cent, in the room about 17 per cent, and on real advertisements a photograph lowered callbacks for women while raising them for men.
Common questions
Do good-looking people earn more money?
On average yes, by less than folklore suggests. In US survey data, plainness carried a pay penalty of 5 to 10 per cent, with the premium for beauty slightly smaller. In a controlled wage experiment the premium appeared only when employers could see or hear the worker, and a field experiment with CVs found photographs helped men but not women.
Is the beauty premium bigger for men or women?
It depends on the study. Hamermesh and Biddle found that men's looks mattered at least as much as women's. Hosoda and colleagues found attractiveness mattered as much for men as for women in experiments. Ruffle and Shtudiner found an attractive photograph raised callbacks for men and that any photograph lowered them for women.
Does the beauty premium come from better performance?
In the one experiment built to test it, no. Mobius and Rosenblat chose a maze task on which beauty did not predict output, and attractive workers still earned more, through confidence, employers' mistaken judgements of ability, and communication skills.
Sources
Furnham, A. (2024). The New Psychology: The 50 Newest Concepts That Are Shaping How We Live and Work. Bloomsbury Business. Essay on cosmetic surgery, pp. 41-45.
Dion, K., Berscheid, E., & Walster, E. (1972). 'What is beautiful is good.' Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 24(3), 285-290. doi:10.1037/h0033731.
Eagly, A. H., Ashmore, R. D., Makhijani, M. G., & Longo, L. C. (1991). 'What is beautiful is good, but...: a meta-analytic review of research on the physical attractiveness stereotype.' Psychological Bulletin, 110(1), 109-128. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.110.1.109.
Hamermesh, D. S., & Biddle, J. E. (1994). 'Beauty and the labor market.' American Economic Review, 84(5), 1174-1194.
Langlois, J. H., Kalakanis, L., Rubenstein, A. J., Larson, A., Hallam, M., & Smoot, M. (2000). 'Maxims or myths of beauty? A meta-analytic and theoretical review.' Psychological Bulletin, 126(3), 390-423.
Hosoda, M., Stone-Romero, E. F., & Coats, G. (2003). 'The effects of physical attractiveness on job-related outcomes: A meta-analysis of experimental studies.' Personnel Psychology, 56(2), 431-462.
Mobius, M. M., & Rosenblat, T. S. (2006). 'Why beauty matters.' American Economic Review, 96(1), 222-235.
Ruffle, B. J., & Shtudiner, Z. (2015). 'Are good-looking people more employable?' Management Science, 61(8), 1760-1776.