Behavior/Humans

Attractive Men and Women Get the Best Jobs

How much is emotion involved in this?

By Stefan Anitei, Science Editor

7th of December 2007, 08:56 GMT

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Being attractive works beyond the sexual level. A new research, published in "Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences", connected the attractiveness level of the interviewees with the results of a job interview, specifically the offers from high and low status job packages.

"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." wrote the authors, Carl Senior and Michael J.R. Butler.

In a mock job negotiation scenario, the researchers put men and women interviewers to look at pictures of attractive or less attractive men and women job applicants.

Female interviewers were found to allocate more high status job packages to the attractive looking male interviewees, than to the average looking men.

In the case of women interviewers, they also offered greater job packages to attractive men than to attractive women. Moreover, they offered greater job packages to average looking men, than to average looking women.

In the case of men interviewers, they offered the same job packages to attractive applicants, no matter their sex, but their overall offer was lower, no matter the sex of the applicant.

Still, the electrodermal response (EDR), a psycho-physiological response emerging when emotions determine a preferential decision, revealed that men had offered low status job packages to the attractive female applicants based on emotion, not on interpersonal attraction.

Women did not display variances in EDR, pointing that their bias happened at a cognitive level. This is the first time that EDR has been used for determining the role of beauty and sex during job interviews.

"From a business point-of-view, there is a need for leaders/managers to be aware of their assumptions in decision-making processes, be they strategic or operational, and that they may be prone to emotion and bias," wrote the authors.

TAGS:

emotion | job | attractive

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