Looking good gets you a better job

looking-good-gets-you-a-better-job

If like me you were brought up in a fairly protestant work ethic sort of culture, you might well regard concern for one’s appearance as a superficial sort of thing. Grooming oneself might seem a form of vanity. Well maybe it is – but it turns out that potential employers don’t see it that way. A recent report in the Annals of the New York Acadamy of sciences suggests that looking good gets you a better job.

Carl Senior and Michael Butler, the co-authors of the study, said: “When someone is viewed as attractive, they are often assumed to have a number of positive social traits and greater intelligence.”

“This is known as the ‘halo effect’ and it has previously been shown to affect the outcome of job interviews.”

And yes, the results applied to males as well as females.

Time to get out the moisturiser guys……

This latest research is consistent with a lot of earlier work on the benefit of looking good. Having an attractive face pays. Facially attractive people have more of an interpersonal orientation, are happier and experience less stress in their lives. (Jackson 1992, Umberson and Hughes 1987). Not surprisingly they date more frequently.(Brehm 1985).

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