Alpha Dominance

There should be little disagreement that beauty comes with perks.  Being beautiful imbues a wealth of social and economic benefits to the lucky few.  Moreover despite the hue and cry in the media beauty is not in the eye of the beholder, but represents those endowed with superior genomes.  Beauty is valuable because the offspring you are more likely to have with a beautiful woman will have greater reproductive fitness than their plain counterparts.  All of this suggests that we have a hardwired preference for the attractive and indeed we find this to be so.  In fact, a pretty face primes us for positive associations even where there is no basis for them.

“We’re able to judge attractiveness with surprising speed and on the basis of very little information,” said Ingrid Olson, a professor in Penn’s Department of Psychology and researcher at Penn’s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. “It seems that pretty faces ‘prime’ our minds to make us more likely to associate the pretty face with a positive emotion.”

Olson, along with co-author Christy Marshuetz, of Yale University recently published their findings in the journal Emotion, a publication of the American Psychological Association. The researchers set out to study cognitive processes behind a very real phenomenon: physically attractive people have advantages that unattractive people do not.

“Research has demonstrated time and again that there are tremendous social and economic benefits to being attractive,” Olson said. “Attractive people are paid more, are judged more intelligent and will receive more attention in most facets of life.

“This favoritism, while poorly understood, seems to be innate and cross-cultural. Studies suggest that even infants prefer pretty faces,” Olson said.

In their report, the researchers describe three experiments to investigate the preference for attractiveness.

The first study tested the idea that beauty can be assessed rapidly by asking study participants to rate faces pictures of non-famous males and females taken from three different high school yearbooks and the Internet shown for .013 seconds on a computer screen.

Although participants reported that they could not see the faces and that they were guessing on each trial, they were able to accurately rate the attractiveness of those faces.

“There are no definite rules to what kind of face can be called beautiful, but we chose faces of either extreme very ugly or very pretty,” Olson said. “Seen rapidly, viewers were able to make what amounted to an unconscious, albeit accurate, assessment of physical beauty.”

In their second and third experiments, the researchers explored the notion of “priming” whether or not seeing a pretty face makes a viewer more likely to associate that face with positive attributes. The second experiment involved rapidly showing a face on the screen, followed shortly thereafter by a word in white text on a black screen. Participants were instructed to ignore the face and were timed on how quickly they could classify the word as either good or bad. Almost uniformly, response times to good words, such as “laughter” or “happiness,” were faster after viewing an attractive face.

“In a way, pretty faces are rewarding; they make us more likely to think good thoughts,” said Olson. “There are some underlying processes going on in the brain that prejudice us to respond to attractive people better even if we are not aware of it.”

They repeated the priming test in a third experiment, this time using images of houses, to see whether the beauty bias is a general phenomenon or one that is limited to socially important stimuli such as faces. Unlike faces, response times to good words were not faster after having viewed an attractive house.

“Faces hold a special power for us, perhaps more so than art or objects,” Olson said. “The beauty bias has a real influence upon us, something we should be mindful of when dealing with others.”

This effect pays economic benefits to the beautiful.  It has been shown that the beautiful make a premium over their genetically bereft counterparts, even when other variables such as intelligence are accounted for.

“Little is known about why there are income disparities between the good-looking and the not-so-good-looking,” said the study’s lead author, Timothy Judge, PhD, of the University of Florida. “We’ve found that, even accounting for intelligence, a person’s feeling of self-worth is enhanced by how attractive they are and this, in turn, results in higher pay.”

Judge’s team analyzed data from the Harvard Study of Health and Life Quality, a national, longitudinal study.

The study looked at 191 men and women between the ages of 25 and 75 who were interviewed three times six months apart starting in 1995. They answered questions about their household income, education and financial stresses and evaluated how happy or disappointed they were with their achievements up to that point. They completed several intelligence and cognitive tests and had their pictures taken. Several different people on the research team rated each person’s attractiveness relative to their age and gender. The raters were men and women of varying ages. The authors then calculated an average attractiveness score for each participant based on those ratings.

The researchers found that physical attractiveness had a significant impact on how much people got paid, how educated they were, and how they evaluated themselves. Basically, people who were rated good-looking made more money, were better educated and were more confident. But the effects of a person’s intelligence on income were stronger than those of a person’s attractiveness.

“We can be somewhat heartened by the fact that the effects of general intelligence on income were stronger than those of facial attractiveness,” said Judge. “It turns out that the brainy are not necessarily at a disadvantage to the beautiful, and if one possesses intelligence and good looks, then all the better.”

The research did show that good-looking people tend to think more highly of their worth and capabilities which, in turn, led to more money and less financial stress. But, the study’s authors note, these findings also should be a warning to employers who may subconsciously favor the more attractive. “It is still worthwhile for employers to make an effort to reduce the effects of bias toward attractive people in the workplace,” said Judge. One good means of doing this, according to Judge, is to rely on objective measures such as personality and ability tests.

However, Judge wrote, education and intelligence still had a greater payoff than good looks when it came to their effect on people’s level of income. He concluded that it could be more effective for people to build on important job skills and education before seeking the latest beauty treatments.

Obviously these benefits pay greater dividends to your female offspring than your male ones, but in either case the effect exists.  In today’s world it is cost prohibitive for all but the most affluent of us to raise a multitude of offspring.  Consequently each child we do sire is more critical to our reproductive success.  It makes sense that we would invest more greatly in fewer children, and this is what we see with the most beautiful of women, who disproportionately pair with the most successful men due to hypergamy.

Lessons learned in mastering game are broadly applicable to social and career success as well as in increasing your chances of attracting and keeping the highest quality mate.  By mastering game you will be endowed with greater material wealth which will benefit your offspring, should you choose to have them.  By mastering game you will have the most beautiful women available to you to produce those offspring.  Beautiful daughters you may sire will have far greater reproductive opportunities.  Your beautiful children will be more likely to be intelligent, to obtain education and their own social and career success, whereby your sons will themselves obtain greater reproductive success.

There are clear benefits to your potential offspring in doing whatever necessary to obtain and keep attractive mates.  Game is the single most effective avenue to gaining control of this aspect of your life.  It is imperative that any man aspiring to becoming a super-Y master game.  Plus, it’s a damn sight more fun than waiting for life to simply happen to you.  Take control of your destiny and do whatever necessary to get to the top of your game.