The market premium for natural scientists unattractiveness conforms not only to the common stereotype of the natural scientist but also to a belief that the more unattractive of them engage in higher quality work

“Beauty” premium for social scientists but “unattractiveness” premium for natural scientists in the public speaking market. Weilong Bi, Ho Fai Chan & Benno Torgler. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume 7, Article number: 118. Oct 7 2020. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-020-00608-6

Abstract: In the face of scientists’ increasing engagement in public discourse, we examine whether facial attractiveness affects their market value (i.e., audience willingness to pay). For a sample of scientists who participate in public speaking, we find that facial attractiveness is uncorrelated with internal academic achievements (as measured by publications and citations) and is only weakly but positively linked to attention outside of academia. Notably, we find that the effect of facial attractiveness on external influence is only robust to measures where speakers’ physical appearance is likely to be most apparent to the public, such as invitations to give TED talks or Google web page counts while the effect on the number of book publications or book awards is not significant. Our results also suggest that these relationships do not differ across scientists’ fields of research. However, we find that in terms of speaking fees, social scientists benefit substantially from being more attractive, whereas unattractiveness is a comparative advantage for natural scientists. A similar divergence in the direction of the relationship between speaking fee and facial attractiveness is also evident for nonacademic speakers from different fields: whereas those from a natural science (job) background gain from unattractiveness, those with a social science history benefit from a beauty premium. This market premium for unattractiveness conforms not only to the common stereotype of the natural scientist but also to a belief that the more unattractive of these researchers engage in higher quality work. Overall, the findings indicate that facial appearance is important in the public perception of academics and, to some extent, their dissemination of knowledge.

Discussion

Our results on the benefit of facial unattractiveness for natural scientists are consistent with the finding of a previous PNAS study indicating that less attractive researchers are judged to be better scientists (Gheorghiu et al., 2017). In this study, we complement previous evidence on individual judgments by focusing on speaking fees as a proxy for the willingness to pay for a scientist’s public engagement in the marketplace (Chan et al., 2014a, 2014b). Given that our sample consists of individuals who are active public speakers and thus judged by the public speaking portals as sufficiently attractive for a public speaking engagement, our identification of an unattractiveness premium for natural scientists is particularly interesting and the >20 percent effect for a one-unit increase in facial attractiveness (on a 10-point scale) is quite substantial. This result holds even for nonacademic speakers with a natural science background. Hence, although we do not explicitly explore stereotypes, our findings confirm the public and media stereotype of a “nerdy” or “geeky” natural scientist. Indeed, a Discover article referencing (Gheorghiu et al., 2017)’s research even notes an “ugly Einstein” effect that reflects a deeper phenomenon, a “cultural Cartesian dualism” implying that an individual can either be strong/have a beautiful body or have a brilliant mind, but not bothFootnote5. Our analysis, however, demonstrates that the reverse is true for social scientists: not only are they less affected by the unattractiveness stereotype, they may actually benefit from a beauty premium.

Why then, do we observe such “beauty” and “ugly” premiums regarding speaking fees across fields? One plausible explanation could be that facial beauty is correlated with citation-based productivity. That is, although job performance in the academic environment (e.g., research output) is clearly identifiable and thus less subject to beauty-based discrimination, facial appearance may affect publication performance if reviewers or editors know the scholar or are able to match name and image online (Dilger et al., 2015). On the other hand, the very probability of publishing—and thus of being cited—may increase due to the tendency for attractive researchers to be accepted into better graduate schools, to have access to better PhD supervisors, to be hired into higher ranked and more prestigious universities, and to have a wider social and professional network (Fidrmuc and Paphawasit, 2018). Despite the correlational nature of our findings, such difference is less likely to be explained by speakers’ (perceived) quality as an academic, as demonstrated by the null relationship between facial attractiveness and scholarly productivity or achievements in terms of publication and citation metrics among academic speakers. In other words, it is unlikely that less (more) attractive natural (social) scientists could capitalize on external prominence due to their academic success, while also controlling for scientist’s societal reputation. Interestingly, we did not find that such stereotypical bias affects scientists’ ability to generate social interest. Instead, our results indicate that facial attractiveness, regardless of their field of study, is positively correlated with measures of external influence where speakers’ physical appearance is likely to be most apparent, for example, TED talk invitations or mentions on Google web page counts. In contrast, we did not find any significant effect of facial attractiveness on external engagement, such as publishing books or its recognition in terms of nonfiction book awards. This finding corresponds, to some extent, with previous literature in which the positive effect of physical attractiveness on the perception of teaching quality or effectiveness is found to be more salient in an environment with higher physical exposure or interaction (e.g., Hamermesh and Parker, 2005; Babin et al., 2019).

There are several limitations to this study. First, while prior research has found a weak, positive, but statistically significant relationship between the Anaface attractiveness scores and human attractiveness ratings (Babin et al., 2019), we were unable to provide our own validation due to research budget constraints. Follow-up studies should consider using an independent sample to examine the robustness of the statistical relationship between human ratings and algorithm-based measures of facial attractiveness. In addition, the perception of facial attractiveness is likely to vary depending on the sample of evaluators employed. As such, one should carefully choose a sample of evaluators that represent the population of the target audience depending on the purpose of the study (e.g., high-school students, average citizens, or corporate audience). Despite the established correlations (see Supplementary Information) between the Anaface proxy and geometry-based attractiveness measures such as facial symmetry, neoclassical canons, and golden ratio, the cross-cultural validity of the latter two are problematic (Chen and Zhang, 2014; Heidekrueger et al., 2017) as they are Eurocentric constructions based on Greco-Roman and Western ideals (Bashour, 2006; Thomas and Dixon, 2016). Therefore, these measures are potentially less relevant for studies examining perceived facial attractiveness of non-Western cultures compared to facial averageness or symmetry that are biologically relevant measures of attractiveness. Such problematic proxies might be justifiable for the current context (which relied heavily on data from Western scholars), but future studies could explore the differences between those proxies by exploring a speaker pool from a non-Western culture. Lastly, there is a debate in the literature regarding the usefulness of simple citation-based metrics (such as total citation counts and h-index) as indicators of academic performance or research quality. Due to the increasing pressure to perform, such measures are potentially subject to manipulations (e.g., see the excellent discussion in Fire and Guestrin, 2019). However, these measures may also capture public perception of academic quality or achievement. We have therefore demonstrated robustness of the null relationship between facial attractiveness and scholarly achievements by using metrics that are less prone to manipulation such as variants of the h-index, which accounts for the effect of co-authors, age of the publication, and citation patterns.

It would therefore be interesting to explore other possible channels through which facial attractiveness affects the ability to thrive in the speaking market, apart from a taste-based discrimination (stereotypes) explanation. For example, whether social and natural scientists also differ in characteristics such as sociability or social intelligence and how these traits are linked to attractiveness. It may also be worth investigating whether perceived dialectic differences in natural and social sciences (Lewontin and Levins, 1998) contribute to our understanding of beauty premium differences, particularly when oral communication skills and confidence were shown as a contributor towards beauty premium in experimental labor market setting (Mobius and Rosenblat, 2006). Such insight is important given the often tenuous status of social sciences, and their perception as less solidly scientific than the natural sciences (Ecklund et al., 2018), which often forces social scientists to struggle for respect. This is despite the fact that social scientists are more actively engaged with the media, reflecting journalists’ and audiences’ selective interest in their type of research (Peters, 2013). Aspects such as perceived organizational, professional, or cultural conditions, and disciplinary socialization may also matter (Becher and Trowler, 2001), so investigating these could offer valuable insights into how appearances affect scientists’ perceived scientific communication skills, their public images, and/or the popularization of science in general.

In general, our results also add to the literature on the role played by facial attractiveness in scientific achievements by investigating the relationship using a sample of academics from different fields. Particularly, by examining a wide range of scientific productivity metrics, we find no significant effect, which is consistent across academic fields. This null relationship between facial attractiveness and citation-based performance supports the findings of Dilger et al. (2015) using Business Research scientists but differs from Fidrmuc and Paphawasit (2018), where the authors found a substantial and significant positive effect among economic scholars. Nevertheless, this difference could stem from our sample selection of academics, who may have been more established at the time they chose to engage in public speaking actively. Therefore, further research using a representative sample of scientists across fields is required in order to reach a more conclusive relationship between physical attractiveness and scientific achievements between academic disciplines.