Study Says If You're Pretty, Men Will Tolerate This Trait From You

While you may think you'd never allow anyone to step all over you, even you can surprise (and disappoint) yourself.    

According to a study conducted by researchers at Zhejiang University’s School of Management in China, people are prone to accepting someone's "unfairness" if that someone is an attractive model. Men seem to be the most culpable of this self-demeaning behavior. 

In the study, 21 Chinese men between the ages of 18 and 26 looked at 300 photos of Chinese women's faces. One group of men rated the attractiveness of these women's faces prior to this part of the experiment.

The researchers told the second group to decide whether they’d like to accept an offer from each woman to split an amount of money. During the test, the men's brain activity and reaction time were monitored for each transaction.

The surprising results showed that men were more willing to accept an unfair deal from an attractive woman than with an unattractive one. When the offer from an attractive woman was fair, they were quick to accept the deal, but when the offer was unfair, they were slow to accept.

During these transactions, the men's brains were more active when they dealt with a good-looking woman, rather than with a less-attractive woman.

The researchers couldn't understand why the men had this behavior, but they believe it's an unconscious effort to be on the good side of women, even if there's no way they'd ever meet or interact in real life.

More work definitely has to be done in this study, as its focus was on men over women, and doesn't represent the general public.

But the study does remain beneficial; it adds to a long list of research done on people's perceptions of attractiveness called the "beauty premium" and the "plain penalty." Together, they show it's possible that people are much nicer to, and willing to know more about, good-looking people to benefit from the interaction or relationship.

This is reflected in our modern world, in everything from celebrity gossip to the likelihood of being hired and promoted.

Hopefully, once we can fully understand why so many people have a beauty bias, we can work to get rid of such a discriminatory mentality. Kindness and justice should never be determined by what you look like; rather, by how kind and just we are to each other.