Page 392 - The Social Animal

374 The Social Animal

did not fade over time as employers got to know them. Rather, they
continued to out-earn their less handsome counterparts over the en-
tire 10-year period. For women, being attractive did not affect their
starting salaries, but it did begin to influence salaries after they had
been on the job a while and continued to the conclusion of the study.
The researchers had rated “attractiveness” on a 5-point scale, and
they calculated that each point on the scale was worth about $2,150.
Thus, theoretically, if you underwent plastic surgery and it improved
your looks from a rating of 2 to a rating of 4, it would be worth ex-
actly $4,300 per year!
Beauty is a two-way street. In an experiment I performed with
Harold Sigall, a woman was made to appear either physically attrac-
tive or unattractive. 39 We accomplished this by taking a naturally
beautiful woman and, in the unattractive condition, providing her
with baggy, unflattering clothing, fitting her with a frizzy blond wig
that did not quite match her skin coloring, and making her complex-
ion look oily and unhealthy. Then, posing as a graduate student in
clinical psychology, she interviewed several college men. At the close
of the interview, she gave each student her own clinical evaluation of
him. Half of the students received highly favorable evaluations and
half received unfavorable evaluations. We found that, when the eval-
uator looked unattractive, the men didn’t seem to care much whether
they received a good evaluation or a poor one from her; in both sit-
uations, they liked her a fair amount. When she was beautiful, how-
ever, they liked her a great deal when she gave them a favorable
evaluation but, when she gave them an unfavorable evaluation, they
disliked her more than in any of the other conditions. Interestingly
enough, although the men who were evaluated negatively by the at-
tractive woman said they didn’t like her, they did express a great de-
sire to return to interact with her in a future experiment. Our guess
was that the negative evaluations from the beautiful woman were so
important to the men that they wanted the opportunity to return so
as to induce her to change her mind about them.
In a subsequent experiment, Harold Sigall and Nancy Ostrove
showed that people tend to favor a beautiful woman unless they sus-
pect her of misusing her beauty. Both male and female college stu-
40
dents were asked to read an account of a criminal case in which the
defendant was clearly guilty of a crime. Each participant then “sen-
tenced” the defendant to a prison term he or she considered appro-