你可能会认为长相英俊帅气的男人在生活中有着天生的优势。但一项新的研究表明，美貌并不总是放之四海而皆准的标杆，至少在找工作时，美貌并不一定能帮得上忙。

 

'It's not always an advantage to be pretty,' says Marko Pitesa, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland. 'It can backfire if you are perceived as a threat.'

 

Interestingly, in Pitesa's study, it was male attractiveness in particular, rather than female beauty, that made the most difference.

 

If the interviewer expected to work with the candidate as part of a team, then he preferred good-looking men.

 

However, if the interviewer saw the candidate as a potential competitor, the interviewer discriminated² in favour of unattractive men.

 

In the first experiment, 241 adults were asked to evaluate fictional³ job candidates based on fake qualifications and experience, in an online setting.

 

Men evaluated men and women evaluated women. Interviewers were primed to either think of the candidate as a future co-operator or competitor, and they were given a computer-generated headshot that was either attractive or unattractive.

 

'Kind of attractive and average, maybe slightly below average,' Pitesa clarifies - no supermodels.

 

A second experiment involved 92 people in a lab. They were asked to evaluate future competitors or partners in a quiz game, based on credentials⁴ that included sample quiz answers, and they saw similar headshots.

 

The patterns of discrimination based on perceived self-interest was the same.

 

Another test opened up to include men interviewing women and women interviewing men.

 

There was still a preference to cooperate with the attractive man and compete against the unattractive man.

 

A final experiment used photographs of actual European business school students, vetted⁵ for attractiveness, and found the same pattern.

 

The results suggest that interviewers were not blinded by beauty, and instead calculated which candidate would further their own career.

 

'The dominant⁶ theoretical perspective in the social sciences for several decades has been that biases⁷ and discrimination are caused by irrational⁸ prejudice,' Pitesa says.

 

'The way we explain it here, pretty men just seem more competent, so it is actually subjectively⁹ rational to discriminate¹ for or against them.'

 

On a deeper level, she adds, the behaviour remains¹⁰ irrational, since there's no evidence that a real link exists between looks and competence¹¹.

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