An old truth rediscovered

As I have long ago shown elsewhere, academic psychology just goes around in circles, continually reinventing the wheel. The latest example is the following “discovery:

“Beauty may be more than skin deep after all. New research suggests that good-looking people do better in exams and thus probably in later life, than the plain or downright ugly. In the study, better-looking students achieved superior results in both oral and written exams—the latter marked anonymously—suggesting that success is not just down to teachers favouring attractive students but to superior natural ability.

“Physical appearance has a significant and economically meaningful effect on the performance of students,” said the authors of the study, led by Giam Pietro Cipriani, associate professor of economics at the University of Verona in Italy.

The study—presented to the annual conference of the European Society for Population Economics in Verona—will reignite the debate on whether good-looking people get on in life through talent or beauty.

The authors of the study and the journalists commenting on it are scrambling for all sorts of explanations of the finding but are overlooking the one “nasty” explanation—which happens to be the true one.

Back in the 1920s, Terman & Oden did a series of studies which they called “Genetic Studies of Genius”. They took high IQ kids and tracked them for many years. What they found was that high IQ was only one aspect of a general syndrome of biological good functioning. The brain is only one part of the body and if the brain is functioning well, the rest of the body will usually be pretty good too. So high IQ kids tended to end up taller, have fewer health problems, have better social lives etc.

Cipriani has simply rediscovered that. There has long been a consensus that what we see as beautiful or attractive is a reflection of health, strength and fitness. So what Cipriani should have done is look at the IQ scores of his beautiful people. He would have found them to be somewhat brighter on average—and that explains their greater academic success.

Posted by jonjayray on Tuesday, July 11, 2006 at 04:57 AM in
Comments (3) | Tell a friend

Comments:

Posted by onetwothree on July 11, 2006, 07:59 AM | #

The correct answer is:

Successful men marry beautiful women, whose children carry on the typical traits of the successful (ie intelligence) and the beautiful, both.

Posted by martin_uk on July 11, 2006, 02:24 PM | #

Intelligent people look after themselves better. They don’t get so fat because they have more self control, they find out for themselves how to treat health issues, e.g. acne. Thick people do tend to let themselves go. I doubt that many of the hugely obese people that one sees have high IQ.

But, despite this, I have also noticed amongst my young students in the past that the brightest ones do indeed seem to genetically better endowed when it comes to many physical characteristics. Taller, more robust, more alert, and so on. In earlier times we would say that they came from “good stock”.

Posted by Alan (UK) on July 11, 2006, 04:17 PM | #

There are, of course, exceptions.
Yasser Arrafat became leader of a people. Margaret Becket is now Britains Foreign Secretary. John Prescott second in command of Britain. Not exactly THE beautiful people eh?

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