A simple implication of sexual selection is that there should be a correlation between features that attract us sexually and characteristics that make our offspring more fit. Here is an article that studies the link between physical attraction and success in sport.
The better an American football player, the more attractive he is, concludes a team led by Justin Park at the University of Bristol, UK. Park’s team had women rate the attractiveness of National Football League (NFL) quarterbacks: all were elite players, but the best were rated as more desirable.
Meanwhile, a survey of more than a thousand New Scientist Twitter followers reveals a similar trend for professional men’s tennis players.
Neither Park nor New Scientist argue that good looks promote good play. Rather, the same genetic variations could influence both traits.
“Athletic prowess may be a sexually selected trait that signals genetic quality,” Park says. So the same genetic factors that contribute to a handsome mug may also offer a slight competitive advantage to professional athletes.
Studies like this are prone to endogeneity problems because success also feeds back on physical attraction. At the extreme, we know who Roger Federer is and that gets in the way of judging his attractiveness directly. More subtly, if you show me pictures of two anonymous athletes, the one who is more successful has probably also trained better, eaten better, been raised differently and these are all endogenous characteristics that affect attractiveness directly. Knowing that they correlate with success doesn’t tell us whether “success genes” have physically attractive manifestations.
One way to improve the study would be to look at adopted children. Show subjects pictures of the athletes’ biological parents and ask the subjects to rate the attractiveness of the parents. Then correlate the responses with the performance of the children. If these children were raised by randomly selected parents (obviously that is not exactly the case) then we would be picking up the effect of exogenous sources of physical attractiveness passed on only through the genes of the parents.
And why stop with success in sport. Physical attractiveness should be correlated with intelligence, social mobility, etc.
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December 3, 2009 at 9:08 am
Drew Conway
Along these lines, interesting paper posted today at SSRN on “babyfacedness” and electoral success.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1488372
December 4, 2009 at 1:15 am
Economists Do It With Models
There’s a decent amount of evidence on this subject. For example:
“Why Beauty Matters”
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~oreo/teaching/labour_undergrad/lecture16/mobius%20rosenblat%20mimeo%2003.pdf
“We decompose the beauty premium in an experimental labor market
where `employers’ pay wages to `workers’ who perform a maze-solving task. This task requires a true skill which we show to be unaffected by physical attractiveness. We find a sizable beauty premium but no evidence for direct taste-based discrimination. Instead, we can identify three indirect transmission channels. (1) Physically-attractive workers are more confident which helps them to obtain higher wages. This effect explains about 20 percent of the beauty premium. (2) Physically-attractive workers are (wrongly) considered more able by employers. This direct stereotype e®ect is responsible for about 30 percent of the premium. (3) Physically-attractive workers have certain skills (such as communication and social skills) which raise their wages when they interact verbally with employers. This indirect stereotype effect contributes to the remaining 50 percent of the beauty premium.”
Or perhaps you would like to talk about how tall people are more successful…
From http://www.economics.harvard.edu/files/faculty/40_Optimal_Taxation_of_Height.pdf
“Judge and Cable (2004) report that an individual who is 72 in. tall could be expected to earn $5,525 [in 2002 dollars] more per year than someone who is 65 in. tall, even after controlling for gender, weight, and age. Persico, Postlewaite, and Silverman (2004) nd similar results and report that “among adult white men in the United States, every additional inch of height as an adult is associated with a 1.8 percent increase in wages.” Case and Paxson (2006) write that “For both men and women…an additional inch of height [is] associated with a one to two percent increase in earnings.”
November 4, 2010 at 12:03 am
Thoughts Left Lying Around « Cheap Talk
[...] with blue eyes more successful? Many studies of the effects of physical attractiveness have endogeneity problems. But given the randomness of eye color (conditional on parents with recessive genes), siblings [...]