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Why Are Smart People Usually Ugly?
An answer to the Explainer's 2011 Question of the Year.
Jean-Paul Sartre and Socrates were known for their
brains and not their looks—at least not the good kind.
Illlustration by
Charlie Powell.
It's been a few
weeks since we posted the questions that the Explainer was either unwilling
or unable to answer in 2011. Among this year's batch of imponderables were
inquiries like, Are the blind sleepy all the time? and Does anyone ever get a
sex change back? We asked our readers to pick the question that most deserved
an answer in the Explainer column. Some 10,000 of you were able to register a
vote, and the winning question is presented below. But first, the runners-up:
In third place,
with 6.6 percent of the total votes, a bit of speculative evolutionary
biology: Let's say that a meteor never hits the earth, and dinosaurs continue
evolving over all the years human beings have grown into what we are today.
What would they be like?
In second place,
with 7.5 percent, an inquiry into pharmacokinetics: Why does it take 45
minutes for the pharmacy to get your prescription ready—even when no one else
is waiting?
And in first
place, with the support of 9.4 percent of our readers, the winner by a
landslide and Explainer Question of the Year for 2011:
Why are smart
people usually ugly? I get this isn't always the case, but there does seem to
be a correlation. Attractiveness doesn't predict intelligence (not all ugly
people are smart), but it seems like intelligence can be a good predictor for
attractiveness (smart people are usually on the ugly side). Keep in mind, I
have nothing against people who are really brilliant, I've just always wondered.
The answer:
They’re not.
Oh, how the
Explainer loves a false premise. When it comes time to assemble the year-end
list, he'll always give extra credit to questions that are predicated on
blatant untruths. In 2010, for example, someone wanted to know why athletes
never sneeze. In 2009, a reader asked, Why is it always funny to put
something on your head as a pretend hat? But this year's winning question
isn't merely ill-posed; it gets the truth exactly backward.
The idea that an
ugly face might hide a subtle mind has attracted scientific inquiries for
many years. At first, scientists wanted to know whether it was possible to
read someone's intelligence from the shape of his face. In 1918, a researcher
in Ohio showed a dozen photographic portraits of well-dressed children to a
group of physicians and teachers, and asked the adults to rank the kids from
smartest to dumbest. A couple of years later, a Pittsburgh psychologist ran a
similar experiment using headshots of 69 employees from a department store. In
both studies, seemingly naive guesses were compared to actual test scores to
see if they were ever accurate.*
Many such
studies followed, and with consistent results: You can learn something about
how smart someone is just by looking at a picture. But scientists couldn't
figure out where that information might have been hiding in the photographs.
The Ohio researcher said that some of his subjects were "greatly
influenced by the pleasant appearance or smile, but for some the smile
denotes intelligence and for others it denotes feeble-mindedness." The
author of the follow-up in Pittsburgh wondered if the secret of intelligence
might not be lurking in "the lustre of the eye."
While some
researchers pondered this question, a Columbia University psychologist named
Edward Thorndike made another, related discovery. In 1920, Thorndike
published his theory of the "halo effect," according to which
subjects, when asked to describe someone's various qualities, tend to
"[suffuse] ratings of special features with a halo belonging to the
individual as a whole." If they were describing the person's physique,
for example, along with his bearing, intelligence, and tact, they would
assign high or low ratings across the board. Later studies confirmed that the
halo effect could arise from a simple photograph: If someone looks handsome,
people tend to assume that he's smarter, more sociable, and better-adjusted,
too.
Now there were
two findings: First, scientists knew that it was possible to gauge someone's
intelligence just by sizing him up; second, they knew that people tend to
assume that beauty and brains go together. So they asked the next question:
Could it be that good-looking people really are more intelligent?
Here the data
were less clear, but several reviews of the literature have concluded that
there is indeed a small, positive relationship between beauty and brains.
Most recently, the evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa pulled huge
datasets from two sources—the National Child Development Study in the United
Kingdom (including 17,000 people born in 1958), and the National Longitudinal
Study of Adolescent Health in the United States (including 21,000 people born
around 1980)—both of which included ratings of physical attractiveness and
scores on standard intelligence tests. When Kanazawa analyzed the numbers, he
found the two were related: In the U.K., for example, attractive children
have an additional 12.4 points of IQ, on average. The relationship held even
when he controlled for family background, race, and body size.
From this,
Kanazawa concluded that the famous halo effect is not a cognitive illusion,
as so many academics had assumed, but rather an accurate reading of the
world: We assume that beautiful people are smart, he argues, because they
are.
The story does
have some caveats and complications. First, a few other studies have come up
with different results. A recent look at yearbook photos from a Wisconsin
high school in 1957 found no link between IQ and attractiveness among the
boys, but a positive correlation for the girls. Another researcher, Leslie
Zebrowitz of Brandeis University, noticed that the looks-smarts relationship
applies only to the ugly side of the spectrum. It's not that beautiful people
are especially smart, she says, so much as that ugly people are especially
dumb. Then there's the fact of Kanazawa's having gotten into trouble last
spring for asserting—using the same dataset and similar methods to those
described above—that African-American women are objectively "far less
attractive" than whites, Asians, or Native Americans. (He later
acknowledged some flaws in his analysis.)
So, getting back
to the original question, the bulk of the evidence suggests that smart people
are not "usually ugly." In fact, the opposite seems to be true:
Either smart people are more beautiful than average, or dumb people are more
ugly (or both). And while no facial features within the normal range could
ever be that useful as a predictor of intelligence, people can perform better
than you’d expect from random chance using nothing more than a head shot.
All of which
leaves one great, unanswered question. If smart people tend to be
good-looking, that might explain the halo effect. But what led our questioner
to get things backward and assume that smart people were ugly? And why are
there so many like-minded others, asking the same question—or its
inverse—around the Internet? (Here's one, and one more.) Aren't we all
familiar with the archetypical nerd, who is both ugly and smart? At the
opposite end, what about all those beautiful, airheaded women and beefy,
brainless men we see on television? Could the person who wrote in with the
2011 Question of the Year be succumbing to a bias that hasn't yet been
documented in the lab—a sort of halo effect in reverse, a "horns effect,"
perhaps?
Ugly geniuses
aren't uncommon in history, of course, and while these anecdotes tell us
nothing about the population as a whole, the memory of people who were
famously hideous and brilliant might have an outsize influence on our
judgments. Jean-Paul Sartre, for example, was short, bespectacled, and
wall-eyed. ("I cannot even decide whether [my face] is handsome or
ugly," says one of his characters in Nausea. "I think it is ugly because
I have been told so.") Ancient sources tell us that the great
philosopher Socrates had thinning hair, flared nostrils, widely-spaced eyes,
a thick neck, slobby shoulders, and a pot belly. Ludwig van Beethoven was
ugly and smelled bad; Abraham Lincoln's face struck the poet Walt Whitman as
being "so awful ugly it becomes beautiful."
In addition,
Kanazawa points out that a closer look at the data reveals an interesting
fact: The very ugliest people in his dataset are dumber on average, but they
also tend to be the most diverse when it comes to intelligence. That means
that if you're at the low end of the spectrum for looks, you're more likely
than anyone else to be at one extreme end for IQ (either very dumb or very
smart). If that's the case, then it might provide another reason why Sartre
and Socrates types stick out in our minds. We know (consciously or not) that
ugly people tend to be a little dim; but at the same time, there are more
brilliant brutes running around than we might expect.
For his part,
Kanazawa rejects the notion of the horns effect—he doesn't believe the
smart-and-ugly stereotype exists at all. (Indeed, it has never been shown in
the lab.) Instead, he says, we may be assuming that smart people are nerdy,
and that nerdy people tend to lack social skills. Since people with social
skills are attractive, there could be an indirect link between at least one
kind of "attractiveness" and intelligence. But if you're looking at
pure "beauty," as measured by rating photographs or measured facial
features, then intelligence and looks go hand-in-hand.
Bonus Explainer:
Why might intelligence and looks go hand-in-hand? There are a few different
theories. First, it might be that some common genetic factor produces both
smarts and beauty. Or maybe there's a combination of genes that make people
both dumb and ugly. Kanazawa thinks it's the former, arguing that intelligent
men have tended to rise to the top of the social hierarchy and select
beautiful women as their mates. Their offspring, contra George Bernard Shaw's
supposed quip, would have had both traits together.
Another theory
holds that certain environmental factors in the womb or just after birth can
produce both facial disfigurements and cognitive impairments on one side, or
facial symmetry and high intelligence on the other. A third suggests that
attractive children are treated better, and receive more attention from their
caretakers and teachers, which helps to nurture a sharper mind. It's also
possible that smart people are better able to take care of themselves and
their looks.
Explainer thanks
Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics, Joshua Knobe of Yale
University, Alina Simone, author of You Must Go and Win, and Leslie Zebrowitz
of Brandeis University.
* * *
Good news: After
years of hiding out in the Explainatorium like a banished superhero,
answering submitted questions from deep inside the fortress, the Explainer
has decided to soar out into the world, pen in hand, to spread peace and
understanding among the column's faithful.
And so we
present a new, occasional feature on Slate: the Explainer House Call. Do you
have a family disagreement over some fact or pseudo-fact? Are you stuck in an
endless argument with an annoying co-worker or a friend? Have your attempts
to Google your way out of it only pushed you both into the filter bubbles of
the Internet? Worry no more: The Explainer will be your arbiter and your
savior, an avenging angel of argument, slinging thunderbolts of pure reason
and drenching your squabbles in the heavy rain of explanation.
How does one
qualify for this personal Explainer service? To get a house call, and have
the Explainer resolve your special beef in Slate, you must first gain the
support of your peers. What factual matter has been driving you and your friend/spouse/coworker
bonkers in recent weeks? Post a short summary on or with the hashtag
#ExplainerHouseCall. Then we'll ask the members of Explainer Nation to vote
for the dispute that's most deserving of the Explainer's attention. (Winners: Please note that the
Explainer will not actually visit your house.)
Correction, Jan. 12, 2012: The original overstated the magnitude of the results of the Ohio and Pittsburgh studies. |
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Monday, January 16, 2012
Views: Why Are SMart People Usually Ugly?
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