靠臉吃飯？相貌如何決定你的職場前景

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.

擁有美貌的人，不管你是經(jīng)過細(xì)致研究還是粗略一看，他都是那么美。

男人似乎更喜歡細(xì)腰豐臀的女人，而女人則偏愛下巴長而有型的男人。我們不能全然得知其中緣由，但人們一直都認(rèn)為左右臉對稱協(xié)調(diào)的人最為迷人。2005年有一項調(diào)查顯示，女人可以單憑男人T恤上的氣味精準(zhǔn)判斷這個男人臉部的對稱性。統(tǒng)計結(jié)果以極快的速度被計算出來。根據(jù)2005年調(diào)查結(jié)果，我們僅需13毫秒便可判定自己是否喜歡某人(比普通眨一次眼快30倍)。

判斷美丑的簡單運算法對被評判的人有長期的影響。有魅力的人就是能夠更輕松享受人生。心理科學(xué)協(xié)會(Association for Psychological Science)的總結(jié)可謂恰如其分：

萌寶寶更得母親疼愛;外形陽光的學(xué)生更受老師喜歡，還被認(rèn)為更聰明;有魅力的成年人拿更多的工資、在戀愛和婚姻中也更加順?biāo)?長相討好的犯罪嫌疑人更容易被陪審團(tuán)認(rèn)定無罪，即使真的有罪，也會受到較輕刑罰。

正如已經(jīng)提到過的，職場很大程度上是個以相貌論英雄的地方。請思考以下幾點：

威斯康星大學(xué)的徐宏嘉(音)和喬瑟夫•T•哈爾福德的工作報告顯示，富有魅力的CEO能在首次電視露面時助力公司提升股價。

“高”人自有厚祿。事實上，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%的同齡人好看，那你這輩子等于多賺了23萬美金。

女人擁有金發(fā)相當(dāng)于在校學(xué)習(xí)一年的價值。

對于白人女人來說，過度肥胖尤其使她們這輩子能賺的錢大打折扣。

這些研究結(jié)果有的在意料之中，有的則讓人吃驚。不過這周有一項研究特別有意思，講到臉比較肥大——呃，“富貴飽滿”——的人，在協(xié)商談判的時候具有優(yōu)勢。

加州大學(xué)河濱分校和倫敦商學(xué)院、哥倫比亞大學(xué)共同派遣專員組成了一個研究小組，他們發(fā)現(xiàn)臉型圓胖的人“在談判中比臉型瘦長的人較頑強不肯妥協(xié)”，而這種“不肯妥協(xié)的氣勢讓他們在談判中爭取更多利益”。有趣的是，如果談判對象換成女人，這種效應(yīng)便趨隱形，那些肥頭大耳的人會被認(rèn)為是“不容易與其在談判桌上達(dá)成統(tǒng)一的人，他們太缺乏合作精神，很難和他們一起找到個有創(chuàng)見的綜合性解決方案”。

我作為一個個子短小，外表顯嫩，臉型瘦小的男人，我特別希望這些抹滅正常邏輯的外表偏見能得到一個合理解釋。但很不幸的，事與愿違，接下去的關(guān)于身高與收入之間關(guān)系的研究中，我們發(fā)現(xiàn)還有一個變量也在起作用，那就是智商：16歲時個子明顯比同齡人高的人，他們的智商也會偏高。同樣的，有證據(jù)顯示，大腦袋的人從生理上就更加無畏自信，當(dāng)周邊都是細(xì)脖子小臉的人的時候，他們能搖身一變成為談判能手。

但是很多職場中的外貌偏見只是大腦力求方便走的一個捷徑。這就好像去逛街，不知道某樣?xùn)|西的實際價值的時候，買東西的人就會不停尋找這個東西值得購買的證據(jù)(快看這個折扣!和其他差不多的比起來要便宜多了!)。公司經(jīng)理和職員不能充分了解周邊伙伴的的真實潛力，就會用簡單直接的方法來判斷誰更有能力。雖然細(xì)腰豐臀的美女和自信十足、臉型富貴飽滿的男人不能說明其PPT的功力，但是美貌和自信都是極易獲取的信息，這意味著在我們意識到自己形成某一觀點之前，這些信息已經(jīng)直接參與了觀點的形成。畢竟我們對事物第一印象的產(chǎn)生只需13毫秒。一旦你認(rèn)識到這個，你會驚奇自己的偏見不過就這么一點。