The effect of physical traits on the perception of scientists

A couple of months ago, I posted about the beauty premium for economists. One of my students then pointed me to this Miami Herald article on good-looking scientists. It refers to this 2017 article (open access) by Ana Gheorghiu, Mitchell Callan (both University of Essex), and William Skylark (University of Cambridge), published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They investigated whether appearances affect science communication for biological sciences and physics, across a number of studies.

In the first two studies, Gheorghiu et al. looked at how perceived social traits (e.g. how 'competent' a person looks, how 'moral' or trustworthy they look, and how 'sociable' or likeable they look) and attractiveness affected the general public's perceptions of the quality of the scientists' work and interest in the research. They found that:

People were more interested in learning about the work of scientists who were physically attractive and who appeared competent and moral, with only a weak positive effect of apparent sociability...

Judgments of whether a scientist does high-quality work were positively associated with his or her apparent competence and morality, but negatively related to both attractiveness and perceived sociability.

In sum, scientists who appear competent, moral, and attractive are more likely to garner interest in their work; those who appear competent and moral but who are relatively unattractive and apparently unsociable create a stronger impression of doing high-quality research.

The other studies built on these initial results, but I don't think they added much to the headline result, which is that the public is more interested in hearing about the research of attractive scientists, but had less confidence in the quality of that work. That suggests a couple of implications to me. First, to the extent that interest in research from the general public drives support for research, funding, or promotions, that would tend to lead to a positive beauty premium for scientists (as was found for economists).  On the other hand, negative perceptions of competence for more attractive scientists would suggest a negative beauty premium. Given that the beauty premium is a fairly robust result in labour economics, that would suggest that perhaps the general public's interest is more important than competence. However, that seems rather unlikely, as it is other scientists, and academic administrators, who ultimately determine the success of an individual scientist.

That brings me to my second implication. This research doesn't currently link well to the existing literature on beauty premiums (and, to be fair, that wasn't its primary purpose). The general public's perceptions of science and science communicators is important, but the career success of a scientist depends on the perceptions of other scientists, not necessarily the perceptions of the general public (which might be just as well, given the results of this study). So, it would be interesting to follow this study up by looking at how scientists (or academic administrators) perceive the competence (especially) of scientists, having been shown their picture. Linking from this work to the beauty premium literature would be a really interesting extension of the work.

[HT: Isla, from my ECONS101 class]