Résumé

A large body of literature suggests that physical attractiveness shapes social and economic outcomes across a wide range of domains, from hiring decisions and wages to legal sentences and political elections, a phenomenon known as the “Beauty Premium”. I will first present findings from a systematic review, which documents significant methodological limitations in this literature, particularly around the measurement and manipulation of physical attractiveness as an independent variable. Drawing on knowledge from other behavioural sciences, I will then argue that beauty is a multidimensional construct, and that properly testing the Beauty Premium requires new experimental paradigms that carefully disentangle its various dimensions.

I will then present a programme of research in progress applying these insights to one specific labour market outcome: the role of physical attractiveness in hiring decisions. This work is at an early stage, and I would very much welcome feedback and potential collaborators.

Finally, I will present work on appearance-based judgements in political contexts. Using a noise-based reverse correlation design (a psychophysics method that visualises the mental image a person associates with a given category), we elicited mental representations of the faces of Democratic and Republican voters from a sample of 1,000 US partisans, then had a separate sample of 2,725 raters evaluate those images across ten dimensions, including attractiveness, trustworthiness, dominance, and age. Our results reveal strong ingroup projection: partisans on both sides hold similarly positive mental representations of copartisans. Evidence for shared partisan stereotypes is more limited: while Republican faces are perceived as older, less smiling, and more dominant regardless of the rater’s own partisanship, partisans do not converge on a common representation of what a typical Democrat or Republican looks like. These findings have implications for our understanding of affective polarisation, appearance-based biases, and the formation of stereotypes.

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