3 days ago
Revealed: Where in the world it pays to be pretty (literally)
It is said beauty is in the eye of the beholder – but a study has found that some people value it more than others.
People in Somalia, Albania and the Maldives link beauty with success, affluence and trustworthiness more strongly than the population of other nations, data show.
Meanwhile, Vietnamese and Romanian people have negative views on beauty and associate it with bad traits such as incompetence, distrust and failure.
Scientists have long known that being attractive brings 'pretty privilege', which confers social and economic advantages on good-looking people.
Those seen as physically attractive have better employment prospects, higher earning potential, and a better ability to attract sexual partners, previous studies have found.
But while this phenomenon was well known in English-speaking nations, it was unknown how widely it is found globally.
Ugliness and failure strongly linked
Scientists at the University of Mannheim in Germany used AI to analyse 68 languages to determine how much value beauty was given in each tongue, and whether it was positive or negative.
The computers looked through reams of freely available writing online to see which words were often used with others, such as ball and circle being more commonly associated than circle and cat, for example.
The scientists started by seeing if they detected pretty privilege, also known as a 'beauty premium', in English, and found a clear indication that beauty was linked to success.
However, the study also found an even stronger link between ugliness and failure.
This, the scientists conclude, means that for English people they dislike ugliness more than they like beauty.
After extending the analysis to dozens of languages, the scientists identified 'substantial heterogeneity in the existence and size of the linguistic beauty premium across cultures'.
Pretty privilege was found to be very widespread, but not universal, with it not existing among Thai, Spanish and German cultures.
And while it was present in English, it ranked relatively low. The advantage English people confer on good-looking people is more than the Chinese, Afrikaans and Russians do, but far less than some other cultures.
For example, pretty Finnish and Japanese people receive four times as much favouritism as English beauties get.
'There's substantial research highlighting the evolutionary advantages of physical attractiveness,' Wladislaw Mill, the study author, told The Telegraph.
'It seems plausible that cultural norms have evolved to reflect and reinforce these advantages, which may explain why we observe pretty privilege across many societies.'
Evolution might be key factor
Exactly why some cultures seem to value attractiveness more than others remains unknown, but Dr Mill believes beauty will be associated with some evolutionary advantages in those cultures that make it of particular value.
'We can derive three main insights: (1) most languages show a linguistic beauty premium, (2) English is relatively mediocre in the extent of its beauty premium, and (3) some languages have no or even a negative linguistic beauty premium,' the study authors write in their paper.
