What do ugly people do

And a few months ago, after more than four decades of checking the mirror daily for zits, I noticed that my right ear lobe is shorter than my left. How do you miss something like that? And yet I judge myself to be not unattractive. So I decided to use these findings to critically analyze my own mug.

We judge a face within a fraction of a second, just as you have already judged mine. Scientists have tried to quantify universal hotness by showing photos of faces to college students and taking measurements of those consistently identified as handsome or cute. And yet decades of studies have put this notion to rest: No matter what our race, sexual orientation, social class, age, or gender, we generally agree on which faces are more attractive than others.

The uneven lobes are the least of my worries. With a sigh, Johnny Perez rises from his plastic chair, unfolds his lanky frame and extends his wingspan until the tips of his middle fingers graze the walls. Fortunately for the slightly unbalanced, we also gravitate toward faces whose measurements are closest to the mathematical average. In a classic study, volunteers looked at composite faces whose features were averaged from many other faces—average nose, average eyes, etc.

The more faces that were added to the composites, the more attractive the volunteers found them to be. I checked, but my generous nose and supersized ears are bugs, not features. Nancy Etcoff, an evolutionary psychologist at Harvard Medical School and author of Survival of the Prettiest , has argued that women use cosmetics to mimic such supernormal features. S o where does that leave me? From those winning portraits, Leyvand and his colleagues measured 84 points on each face outlining, for example, the eyebrows, eyes, lips, nose, and facial boundary to create an artificial intelligence that consistently rated attractiveness similarly to the average human rater.

During beautification, the algorithm considers edges based on those measurements and makes adjustments accordingly. With enough Photoshopping—or plastic surgery—just about anyone can probably be made to resemble a Hollywood star. So even if my nose-to-eyes-to-lips-to-cheekbone ratios are outliers, I can still explain how I managed to reproduce. First, the beard. Does the beard help?

Scientifically, the jury is out. If you could get a good whiff of my perspiration, and you are a heterosexual woman, you may well find me hotter. Next: baldness. I probably would have scored better in your eye, oh beholder, if I had shaved my head before the photo shoot, but I wanted this to be realistic. Clearly, male-pattern baldness holds no advantage. A Japanese study published in , for example, concluded attractive young men are less likely, relative to women, older men or less-good-looking men, to co-operate for shared financial benefit.

The researchers tested participants with one-on-one money-exchange games, in which mutual generosity could yield modest reward for both partners, yet required trust to benefit both parties. The paper, published in Evolution and Human Behavior , found that young, attractive men skewed heavily to the selfish side, receiving more money on average and giving back less. Based on findings of previous studies, the researchers ventured that confidence in their appearance, or their capacity to obtain resources, enabled attractive young men to share less and take greater risks.

In other words, they press their evolutionary advantage. The impact on election outcomes varies from contest to contest.

But it seems clear the beautiful-is-good stereotype operates on voters as surely as it does on lovers and money-givers. Our own Prime Minister may be a case in point. In February , 16 months before the start of the recent election campaign, public opinion polls in Canada took a curious turn. During the following year, his leadership positives never appreciably declined. His pleasing physical presentation became his most noticeable feature, filling the conversation void left by the absence of reliable information about his trustworthiness.

On Oct. Shortly after, he and his wife appeared on the pages of Vogue magazine. Last March, Daniel Stockemer, a political studies professor at the University of Ottawa, published the latest in a series of studies that use images of candidates in U.

In a second trial, mock voters were given additional information about the political experience and competence of candidates, including brief career histories. In these cases, appearance played no discernible role in vote choices. Competency trumped good looks. How the beauty premium might affect contests at the leadership level is less clear, Stockemer says.

Yet all of these positive feelings developed, because he seemed like a nice, good-looking guy you could trust. The question is whether that trust is well-placed. For comely spouses and business professionals, as surely as for appealing politicians, here lies the risk. Tony Blair was arguably the most pleasant-looking British prime minister in living memory. John Edwards, a blue-eyed former U. The punitive sentiment registers more plainly at the private level. Variations on the aforementioned money-exchange experiment found participants of both sexes returned less money to attractive givers they felt had been ungenerous than they did to unattractive givers.

We called this a beauty penalty. Wilson, who conducted his study on students at three U. It developed over years of thinking, teasing, talking, friendship, bullying and love. These are some things I figured out along the way. Ugliness is not the absence of beauty. Ugliness is its own, wonderful thing. Defining ugliness only in opposition to beauty narrows our sense of normal.

A quick look at history shows that defining beauty in one particular way is just another fashion choice — apt to change with the seasons.

Appearance is linked to identity and self-worth. Acknowledging the breadth of differences in appearances helps us acknowledge differences between people. We can acknowledge differences in appearance without attaching value to them. What we actually need to do is to remove the association between appearance and the set of characteristics assigned to it. Even our fairytales do it. But just because someone is attractive, it does not automatically follow that they are nice or smart.

Just because someone may be less attractive, they are not automatically mean or stupid.