Feeling Beautiful During Puberty Could Be More Important Than Remaining That Way | Big Think.

So we have lots of physical characteristics; beauty is one of them. And the question is: what is the beauty premium? What do people that are more beautiful get away with than other people, or do they? And the answer is yes, they do. There are all kinds of reasons for that.

Some of the reasons have, of course, to do with the dating or marriage market, right? We have these evolutionary analyses of the healthiness of people, including things like symmetry and skin without blemishes, and all kinds of things like that. Basically, these create cues for people to think about how evolutionarily fit that person is. In the dating market, of course, people who are more beautiful, and we infer from that that they’re more evolutionarily fit, are more attractive.

But this also happens to be the case in non-reproductive markets, like the job market. It turns out that even in those markets, it is the case. So more beautiful people do get all kinds of benefits. One of the nice papers on this was actually written about height and not about beauty. But the principles are the same. There is a height premium: tall people make more money than short people. I’m 5’9”, not so good for me. Taller people make more money.

In that particular paper, they looked at the age in which people shot up in height and then looked at their final height. Generally, people who are tall at age 40 were probably also tall at ages 17 and 15, but not everybody. There are some people who shoot up in height earlier, and some people shoot up in height later. What they found was that the way height was concerned was about height at puberty rather than final height. So if you shot up in height earlier but then you stopped, your final height might not be that high, but when you were in puberty, you were relatively tall; people still got the premium as if they were tall.

Conversely, if you were not tall during puberty and then just became taller later, you don’t have the same premium. Now, what this suggests is that it’s not just about the final attribute. It’s not just that we look at tall people and say, “Hey, there’s a tall person. Let me give them more money.” Partially, it has to do with self-confidence.

What happens is that at puberty, tall people basically get to experience more confidence, while shorter people experience less confidence. That confidence stays later, whether or not they remain tall. I think the same thing would happen if we could conduct this study on beauty. Yes, if you’re beautiful, I would look at you and say, “Hey, you’re just pleasant to be around. You’re probably qualified in all kinds of ways like that.”

But if you were beautiful during puberty or at a young age and received lots of attention, it might be the case that you now have confidence stemming from that. So it’s not just my perception of you, but your own definition of yourself that is changing because of it. This could be like a self-fulfilling prophecy. So maybe the advice is to let all kids during puberty think that they are beautiful or something like that.