In the 1970s, social psychologists conducted numerous studies analyzing physical appearance as a social variable. More recent studies in the social sciences appear to have abandoned this topic as unimportant; in any case, very few social scientific studies have been found that incorporate a measure of attractiveness into their analyses. The present study seeks to revive the emphasis on physical attractiveness as a social variable by testing the relationship between crime severity and physical attractiveness, i.e., by presenting evidence to suggest that physically unattractive men commit more serious offenses.Keywords Physical attractiveness . Unattractiveness . Mate selection . Crime Social scientists can be indifferent to the most basic things. We wonder about the causes of social phenomena, deduce or infer hypotheses, and then design elaborate tests. For example, we might wonder what causes people to marry one another. Common theories might implicate religious or social class homogamy, gender role compatibility, common educational backgrounds or racial and ethnic heritages, and on through a familiar list. And if we found a survey (or conducted one) with all these variables included, surely they would help us predict who marries whom. But if we ask Joe why he married Jane, he'd probably blurt out something like, "Oh, that Jane. She's a real looker." And Jane might say, "O-oh, Joe is s-o-o handsome."A basic fact, confirmable by the simplest of observations, is that some people are attractive and others are not.Slightly more attentive observations will also confirm that attractive and unattractive people are treated differently, and surely, over a sufficiently long run, these differences in how people are treated could have consequences for other areas of life: status attainment, mate selection, marital well-being, overall life satisfaction, development of social capital, and on through a long list. And yet when was the last time "physical attractiveness" was deployed as an explanatory variable in a social scientific study of any of these phenomena?To the extent it is studied at all, physical attractiveness has been in the domain of psychology and social psychology. As we review below, studies in these traditions have consistently shown physical attractiveness to be important. Part of the agenda in this paper is thus to urge social scientists to pay more attention to this variable. Surely, attractiveness is socially constructed (witness the vast differences across time, space and culture in what are considered to be physically attractive traits) and one with important social scientific consequences. Is it not therefore obvious that this is something the social sciences should pay more attention to?In a wild departure from sociological research norms, Richard Hamilton and James Wright (The State of the Masses, Transaction Publishers, 2007) analyzed determinants of life satisfaction in a national survey using conventional predictor variables and interviewer assessments of respondents' physical attractiveness. The st...
