O Youth and Beauty: Children's Looks and Children's Cognitive Development

O Youth and Beauty: Children's Looks and Children's Cognitive Development. Daniel S. Hamermesh, Rachel A. Gordon, Robert Crosnoe. NBER Working Paper No. 26412, October 2019. https://www.nber.org/papers/w26412

Abstract: We use data from the 11 waves of the U.S. Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development 1991-2005, following children from ages 6 months through 15 years. Observers rated videos of them, obtaining measures of looks at each age. Given their family income, parents’ education, race/ethnicity and gender, being better-looking raised subsequent changes in measurements of objective learning outcomes. The gains imply a long-run impact on cognitive achievement of about 0.04 standard deviations per standard deviation of differences in looks. Similar estimates on changes in reading and arithmetic scores at ages 7, 11 and 16 in the U.K. National Child Development Survey 1958 cohort show larger effects. The extra gains persist when instrumenting children’s looks by their mother’s, and do not work through teachers’ differential treatment of better-looking children, any relation between looks and a child’s behavior, his/her victimization by bullies or self-confidence. Results from both data sets show that a substantial part of the economic returns to beauty result indirectly from its effects on educational attainment. A person whose looks are one standard deviation above average attains 0.4 years more schooling than an otherwise identical average-looking individual.

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VIII. Conclusions and Implications

We have engaged in various exercises to examine how looks affect children’s cognitive development, measured by the changes in what are mostly objective measures of a child’s or adolescent’s cognitive achievement. One data set, the longitudinal U.S. Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, followed a sample of over 1300 infants through age 15, collecting information at 11 waves based on a variety of measures of achievement, mostly objective from standardized tests. The other is the 1958 cohort of the U.K. National Child Development Study, which has followed all children born in the U.K. in a particular week up through middle age, with objective assessments of their achievement at ages 7, 11 and 16. In the SECCYD we employed contemporaries of this cohort to rate their looks based on thin slices of videos taken at each age, using averages of the normalized ratings of each child’s looks at each age. In the NCDS we use teachers’ assessments of children’s looks at ages 7 and 11.
Estimating autoregressions describing the change in cognitive achievement between waves as affected by these looks measures, and in some specifications by sets of class/income and racial/ethnic indicators, we demonstrate that looks matter—on average better-looking children show greater improvements in assessments based on objective tests. Because students who perform better in primary and secondary school are more likely to obtain additional education, these results imply that some of the labor market returns to education arise from the indirect effect of looks on educational attainment. This indirect effect is in addition to the direct effect of looks on earnings and other economic outcomes. This inference does not mean that schooling is unproductive. Rather, it implies that the benefits of schooling are tilted toward better-looking students, whose good looks lead them to greater achievements in school and to greater educational attainment than their less good-looking contemporaries.
The unanswered economic question here (and in research on beauty more generally) is: What are the welfare implications of the demonstrated impact of looks on cognitive development? On the side of teachers, do they spend more time teaching better-looking children without subtracting from time spent with less good-looking children? Or is their time merely switched from the bad- to the good-looking? The same questions apply to parents: Do parents tilt their time toward better-looking children without decreasing time spent with their less good-looking offspring; or do they spend more time with them while reducing time allocated toward less good-looking offspring? To the extent that interactions with children’s peers affect their cognitive development, the same questions might be asked about the behavior of a child’s fellow students.
In all cases, if teachers merely add to time spent with good-looking children, one might argue that this apparent discrimination is detrimental only to the extent that teachers’ and parents’ extra time might have been more productively allocated to children who would most benefit from it at the margin. If they switch time from bad- to good looking children, and assuming teachers and parents would allocate their time efficiently absent looks-based discrimination, resources are shifted inefficiently to a use that is less productive at the margin of their allocations of time.  We have explored three plausible mechanisms by which better looks might produce higher achievement—teachers’ closeness to and conflict with the student, the child’s behavior and how s/he is treated by other children, as reported by their mothers, and the child’s self-confidence. Although each was associated in expected ways with looks and gains in achievement, none greatly affected the estimated impacts of looks on cognitive development. Inferring the indirect pathways will require studies designed specifically to consider how lookism might operate from early childhood through adolescence.
Studies are needed that connect what is known from the developmental psychology literature to observational studies tracking the natural unfolding of development and that are specifically focused on looks. Existing measures of relationships, identities and discrimination can be adapted to measure how others respond to children’s looks and how youths internalize those responses, including ratings probing looks-based teasing, avoidance or attraction, and experience-sampling methods capturing how teachers may differentially respond to equally-able students with better-and worse-rated looks. If such measures were embedded into longitudinal studies with the kinds of measurements of attractiveness and standardized achievement used here, the mechanisms generating the robust associations evident here could be better understood.