Beautiful people make more money, have more influence, are believed more often and get handed shorter jail terms. Neither good intentions nor political correctness will prevent this. According Matthijs van Leeuwen, social psychologist at Nijmegen’s Radboud University, nobody is aware that beautiful people get preferential treatment, so it will never change.
 
At the university cafeteria, three students express no surprise:

• "I can see how people would believe beautiful people are nicer..."
• "I think it helps if you are beautiful..."
• "I think it is a fact that beautiful people get preferential treatment, just completely without thinking"

So how is beauty defined? The definitions of beauty are remarkably uniform across racial and cultural boundaries. There are just a few basic rules which apply to everyone. First off, we consider regular features to be beautiful. Secondly, an "average" face, a face in which all features are in the right ratios to each other. And finally, we like clear gender characteristics: full lips in a woman, a square jaw line in a man.   
 
Significant
Matthijs van Leeuwen wanted to show that we all, also on a subconscious level, favour beautiful people. He had his test subjects look at hundreds of photographs including ones of beautiful and ugly people. For every photograph, the test subjects had to pick either a positive or a negative word from a list.
 
For instance "calm" to describe a photograph of a windmill, or "stress" to describe a solid orange surface. The results were, as the expression goes, "significant".  
 
"When you see an attractive face, on a screen for instance, it is very difficult to immediately pick a negative word. You are much more likely to think of a positive word. So there is a kind of click in your head that automatically activates this kind of positive idea when you see a beautiful person, without you even being aware of it; you just cannot help yourself." 
 
And there is the rub: the subconscious, involuntary aspect of it. People are unaware of favouring beautiful people, so they will act on their impulses.  
 
Gender
One other noteworthy test result: gender or sexual persuasion made no difference whatsoever to the attraction beautiful people hold over us. In other words, men react just as positively to photographs of beautiful men as they do to photographs of beautiful women. And the same applies to women. Van Leeuwen and his team were facing a riddle: “I just could not believe that everybody was bisexual”.  
 
The scientist came up with a new series of tests in which the photographs of beautiful and ugly people could be either brought closer or pushed further away. And this time with a little extra thrown in for the test subjects:  

"We figured, okay, may be the results can be explained from the fact that people are not excited enough, because we know that when you stimulate sexual thoughts, people will start looking for partners. So we showed one group of test subjects erotic videos and compared the results with another group who were shown documentaries. However, there still was no difference between how men and women reacted to attractive men and women."
 
So the new tests only served to confirm the results of the first series of tests. According to Mr Van Leeuwen, the results prove that the tendency to favour beauty is deeply ingrained in the human psyche. When even sexual persuasion does not affect that, there is nothing any of us could ever do to change the situation.  
 
Tough luck
So what about the ugly people? The scientist has a very direct message for them:

"Well, tough luck. Get used to it, or try a different approach: a special style of dress or a sparkling personality. There is absolutely no point in getting angry at the rest of the world." 
 

© Radio Netherlands Worldwide