Beauty, closely studied, seems nearly indistinguishable from quick math.

 

Men seem to prefer women with a low waist-to-hip ratio. Women prefer men with optimally long jaws. For reasons we don't entirely understand, humans find symmetrical faces consistently bewitching. A 2005 study found women can accurately guess the symmetry of a man's face just by smelling his tee-shirt. These calculations are made with breathtaking speed. We decide whether we like a face in no more than 13 milliseconds, according to a 2005 study. (That's 30x faster than an average blink.)

 

The quick math of judging beauty has long-term consequences for the judged. Attractive people simply have an easier time with life. As the Association for Psychological Science aptly sums up:

 

Mothers give more affection to attractive babies. Teachers favor more attractive students and judge them as smarter. Attractive adults get paid more for their work and have better success in dating and mating. And juries are less likely to find attractive people guilty and recommend lighter punishments when they do.

 

As we've reported, the workplace offers a heavily concentrated dose of beauty biases. Consider:

 

Attractive CEOs raise their company's stock price when they first appear on television, according to a working paper by Joseph T. Halford and Hung-Chia Hsu at the University of Wisconsin.

 

Taller people are richer. In fact, every inch between 5'7'' and 6 feet is "worth" about 2 percent more in average annual earnings.

 

Being better looking than at least 67 percent of your peers is worth about $230,000 over your lifetime.

 

Having blond hair is worth as much as a year of school—for women.

 

Being an obese white woman is particularly punishing for your potential lifetime earnings.

 

Some of these findings struck me as sadly intuitive and others as surprising. But I was particularly intrigued by a study out this week purporting to show that men with fat faces—ahem, "greater facial width-to-height ratios"—hold an advantage in negotiations with other men.

 

A team of researchers from the University of California-Riverside, London Business School, and Columbia University found that moon-headed guys were "less cooperative negotiators compared to men with smaller facial ratios," and that "this lack of cooperation allows them] to claim more value when negotiating with other men." Interestingly, the effect is invisible when negotiating with women and these big-heads were deemed "less likely to reach an agreement in a negotiation that required cooperation to reach a creative, integrative solution."

 

Speaking as a shortish, youngish-looking man with a thin face, I'm keenly interested in an explanation for these biases that obliterates their logic. Unfortunately for my purposes, follow-up studies on the link between height and income have found another variable in play, which is intelligence: People who are notably taller than their peers around the age of 16 also tend to be smarter. Similarly, there is some evidence that men with big heads are biologically predisposed to the sort of bullishness that makes them effective negotiators when they're surrounded by pencil-necks.

 

But many beauty biases at the office are no more than mental short cuts. The same way that shoppers are constantly hunting for clues that certain products are a good deal because we don't know the true value of anything (look at that discount! it's so much cheaper than that similar-looking thing!), managers and employees, who can't fully know the true potential of their peers, are bound to use short cuts to guess who's competent. Comely women and confident men might not exude PowerPoint skills in their waist-to-hip or facial width-to-height ratios, but comeliness and confidence are easy clues to pick up, which means they begin to inform our opinion of people before we're even aware that we're forming an opinion. After all, the first draft of our first impressions are sealed after as little as 13 milliseconds. Once you realize that, it's amazing we're not even more biased.

 

拥有美貌的人，不管你是经过细致研究还是粗略一看，他都是那么美。

 

男人似乎更喜欢细腰丰臀的女人，而女人则偏爱下巴长而有型的男人。我们不能全然得知其中缘由，但人们一直都认为左右脸对称协调的人最为迷人。2005年有一项调查显示，女人可以单凭男人T恤上的气味精准判断这个男人脸部的对称性。统计结果以极快的速度被计算出来。根据2005年调查结果，我们仅需13毫秒便可判定自己是否喜欢某人（比普通眨一次眼快30倍）。

 

判断美丑的简单运算法对被评判的人有长期的影响。有魅力的人就是能够更轻松享受人生。心理科学协会（Association for Psychological Science）的总结可谓恰如其分：

 

萌宝宝更得母亲疼爱；外形阳光的学生更受老师喜欢，还被认为更聪明；有魅力的成年人拿更多的工资、在恋爱和婚姻中也更加顺遂；长相讨好的犯罪嫌疑人更容易被陪审团认定无罪，即使真的有罪，也会受到较轻刑罚。

 

正如已经提到过的，职场很大程度上是个以相貌论英雄的地方。请思考以下几点：

 

威斯康星大学的徐宏嘉（音）和乔瑟夫•T•哈尔福德的工作报告显示，富有魅力的CEO能在首次电视露面时助力公司提升股价。

 

“高”人自有厚禄。事实上，身高1.83cm的人能比1.70cm的人多出10%的平均年收入。

 

只要你比67%的同龄人好看，那你这辈子等于多赚了23万美金。

 

女人拥有金发相当于在校学习一年的价值。

 

对于白人女人来说，过度肥胖尤其使她们这辈子能赚的钱大打折扣。

 

这些研究结果有的在意料之中，有的则让人吃惊。不过这周有一项研究特别有意思，讲到脸比较肥大——呃，“富贵饱满”——的人，在协商谈判的时候具有优势。

 

加州大学河滨分校和伦敦商学院、哥伦比亚大学共同派遣专员组成了一个研究小组，他们发现脸型圆胖的人“在谈判中比脸型瘦长的人较顽强不肯妥协”，而这种“不肯妥协的气势让他们在谈判中争取更多利益”。有趣的是，如果谈判对象换成女人，这种效应便趋隐形，那些肥头大耳的人会被认为是“不容易与其在谈判桌上达成统一的人，他们太缺乏合作精神，很难和他们一起找到个有创见的综合性解决方案”。

 

我作为一个个子短小，外表显嫩，脸型瘦小的男人，我特别希望这些抹灭正常逻辑的外表偏见能得到一个合理解释。但很不幸的，事与愿违，接下去的关于身高与收入之间关系的研究中，我们发现还有一个变量也在起作用，那就是智商：16岁时个子明显比同龄人高的人，他们的智商也会偏高。同样的，有证据显示，大脑袋的人从生理上就更加无畏自信，当周边都是细脖子小脸的人的时候，他们能摇身一变成为谈判能手。

 

但是很多职场中的外貌偏见只是大脑力求方便走的一个捷径。这就好像去逛街，不知道某样东西的实际价值的时候，买东西的人就会不停寻找这个东西值得购买的证据（快看这个折扣！和其他差不多的比起来要便宜多了！）。公司经理和职员不能充分了解周边伙伴的的真实潜力，就会用简单直接的方法来判断谁更有能力。虽然细腰丰臀的美女和自信十足、脸型富贵饱满的男人不能说明其PPT的功力，但是美貌和自信都是极易获取的信息，这意味着在我们意识到自己形成某一观点之前，这些信息已经直接参与了观点的形成。毕竟我们对事物第一印象的产生只需13毫秒。一旦你认识到这个，你会惊奇自己的偏见不过就这么一点。