“Beauty” premium for social scientists but “unattractiveness” premium for natural scientists in the public speaking market

Abstract

In the face of scientists’ increasing engagement in public discourse, we examine whether facial attractiveness affects their market value (i.e., audience willingness to pay). For a sample of scientists who participate in public speaking, we find that facial attractiveness is uncorrelated with internal academic achievements (as measured by publications and citations) and is only weakly but positively linked to attention outside of academia. Notably, we find that the effect of facial attractiveness on external influence is only robust to measures where speakers’ physical appearance is likely to be most apparent to the public, such as invitations to give TED talks or Google web page counts while the effect on the number of book publications or book awards is not significant. Our results also suggest that these relationships do not differ across scientists’ fields of research. However, we find that in terms of speaking fees, social scientists benefit substantially from being more attractive, whereas unattractiveness is a comparative advantage for natural scientists. A similar divergence in the direction of the relationship between speaking fee and facial attractiveness is also evident for nonacademic speakers from different fields: whereas those from a natural science (job) background gain from unattractiveness, those with a social science history benefit from a beauty premium. This market premium for unattractiveness conforms not only to the common stereotype of the natural scientist but also to a belief that the more unattractive of these researchers engage in higher quality work. Overall, the findings indicate that facial appearance is important in the public perception of academics and, to some extent, their dissemination of knowledge.

The advantages of being disadvantaged

“…Another example is related to unattractive people who exhibit increased effort to compensate for their disadvantageous appearance or benefit from associations between their disadvantage and another attribute (e.g., higher intelligence). A recent literature has, indeed, found consistent evidence in favor of the existence of a so-called ugliness premium (Bi et al, 2020;Kanazawa & Still, 2018;Peng et al, 2020). For instance, scholars found support that people considered very unattractive earn significantly more than other individuals (Kanazawa & Still, 2018) and are considered more believable with regard to their perceived competence (Peng et al, 2020).…”

In the Face of Opportunities: Facial Structures of Scientists Shape Expectations of STEM Environments

“…The faces of scientists may provide cues that shape expectations of ones' role experiences. Scientists who are perceived as attractive garner more interest in their research (Bi et al, 2020;Gheorghiu et al, 2017Gheorghiu et al, , 2020. Building upon this evidence that impressions of science relate to scientists' facial features, we ask the novel question of how the facial structure of scientists shapes expectations of experiences in STEM roles (and, in turn, interest in entering such roles).…”