Thread: Success and Physical Appearance

If you're referring to a kind of success as far as one getting a particular job over another during an interview and both candidates are fairly qualified then in some case physical attributes may actually play the deciding factor, depending on the interviewer. In this particular scenario it just all depends on the person who's doing the hiring there are situations that comes down to, how appealing one is to the eye and then there are situations where attractiveness is not part of the equation.

If were talking about what I would deem as 'real success', the kind like Bill Gates, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, Oprah Winfrey, Mark Zuckerberg, just to name a few. Then physical appearance has absolutely nothing to do with it.

So, unfortunately I can't really vote yes or no, because sometimes looks are the deciding factor and sometimes it's not.

Of course!! It's tremendously important in all dealings with people.

and even in less obvious ways - example an attractive person learns throughout their life that they have a certain advantage and that gives them confidence - it becomes a sort of self-feeding cycle.

But this presupposes that the person doesn't suffer form some debilitating psychological complex that stops them from taking advantage of their advantage. Extreme shyness or stand-offishness or lack of confidence will kill their chances.


But, attractiveness isn't all physical/visual. It's also largely just confidence and presentation. I know you said to disregard extreme uncleanliness etc, but I mean the way a person presents themselves to others - stance, expression, whether they seem genuinely happy and excited to talk to people or a bit shy or awkward etc. This all factors into attractiveness. An otherwise dumpy unattractive person can have it all if they're confident and assertive and charming.

And yeah, I didn't vote because I don't really agree with either of the simple extremes provided.

I think it's more correlation than causation. I feel people who are successful are more likely to care about their physical appearance and put forth effort to look good. Where as unsuccessful people obviously don't care about much and will continue to eat McDonalds without hitting the gym. However, there are plenty of attractive people who are unsuccessful and vis versa. The two don't always go hand in hand, but there is a strong correlation.

Originally Posted by LikesToTrip

I feel people who are successful are more likely to care about their physical appearance and put forth effort to look good.

hmmm I don't know about this. Take Keanu Reeves for example who I think is fairly successful but off-set he's mostly found sporting his bummy look. If he wasn't an actor you'd swear he was a bum..lol

In a word: Yes.

Not in all cases, of course, but I think people generally want to be around good-looking people (provided they have the right type of attitude to go with those looks, of course). Say you are the head-honcho in a firm, are charged with hiring/firing people, and you have two, equally-qualified young (opposite sex) come in for an interview, but one of them is drop-dead gorgeous. And let's go even further, and say that they're also single, as are you. Which are you going to be more likely to choose?

Even outside of a strictly romantic/sexual point, I think it's a general assumption that people who take care of themselves, physically, are a bit more 'in control' of themselves and their life. It gives off the (sometimes false) vibe that they have their sh!t together. The opposite is often true, though, as some people who have their lives together wear the philosophy that peoples' perception of your worth shouldn't depend on what you look like. Whether or not it affects their success is both out of their control and out of their concern. In many of those cases, it's also that person's level of confidence that makes them successful, in other ways.

I think this idea largely exists because of movies. Actors are selected largely based on their appearance (or more specifically on how they appear to audiences in general.) They're very highly visible people in our culture and very highly paid. Not that I really disagree with the idea entirely but I think TV and movies tend to exaggerate the effect.

Originally Posted by Darkmatters

Of course!! It's tremendously important in all dealings with people.

and even in less obvious ways - example an attractive person learns throughout their life that they have a certain advantage and that gives them confidence - it becomes a sort of self-feeding cycle.

But this presupposes that the person doesn't suffer form some debilitating psychological complex that stops them from taking advantage of their advantage. Extreme shyness or stand-offishness or lack of confidence will kill their chances.


But, attractiveness isn't all physical/visual. It's also largely just confidence and presentation. I know you said to disregard extreme uncleanliness etc, but I mean the way a person presents themselves to others - stance, expression, whether they seem genuinely happy and excited to talk to people or a bit shy or awkward etc. This all factors into attractiveness. An otherwise dumpy unattractive person can have it all if they're confident and assertive and charming.

And yeah, I didn't vote because I don't really agree with either of the simple extremes provided.

DM, I sort of agree but let me embellish. If you look really attractive to many, yes there is a certain confidence, but if you think much about it, you maybe think you are being liked for shallow reasons. Sometimes you may feel you are disliked for really quite shallow reasons as well. This is likely a psychological challenge for many celebrities.

My experience of the workplace has been largely in a nice restaurant. The owner was fat, the sous was small and weedy. I also worked in a bank once where the boss was a dumpy lady.

In academia, people look utterly average. Some are unattractive, some are middling, some are attractive. You find the usual proportions of such at every tier of intelligence (yep, there are several extremely talented mathematicians who also look very nice).

So basically just a gigantic lolnope to this thread. I think you have some vague image of a top tier advertising agency in New York or something.

Looks, and even moreso height (for males), may be a factor. But it's not nearly as much of a factor as some short, unattractive people like to think it is.

I put no because you said to discount presentation and to take into account only physical looks. I don't think that really plays much of a role if at all. What I do believe however, is that appearance plays a large role in successes, when appearance is based entirely on presentation. It is about clothing and confidence. Even make up can be used to make yourself look better. Very little is set on natural physical features. I would say even physical appearance is more about presentation than actual differences in say facial structure.

Something to be thought about here is how we define success.

Of course it CAN be attributed to it. It obviously isn't always. And as eldante said (WOAH, I'm agreeing with it?) it depends how you define success.
Almost every person you see driving a really expensive car is disgustingly ugly.
If that's how you want to define success - money, cool shit - then no, it doesn't matter. But most of these people are probably their own bosses anyway.

Success at landing a job could have a big attractiveness factor in it for sure. It's been shown that we make up our decision about a person within the first 2 seconds of seeing them.
And that rarely changes. Especially unlikely to change in the time span of an interview which would be like 15 minutes or less.

Success at love, relationships. Maybe, but then ugly people date ugly people. So maybe not.

Success at growing as a person and learning, most likely not.

For males, probably. For females, I really don't know. I can see where the OP is coming from, but I also get the feeling that some people are quick to correlate attractiveness with a lack of intelligence, so for jobs that require mental ability more than social ability, it might be the opposite.

I'd forgotten about that, O' just posted that study a few days ago. That's a good point.

So I think the conclusion is that sometimes it matters and sometimes it doesn't.

I apologize for my delayed contributions, Halloween weekend was a bit of a rager this year.

More on topic, I agree with most of what has been said in this. Physical appearance can't rightly be separated into a single one of its aspects (like facial structure/body type) because they are interdependent on each other. So, yes, it would be rather difficult to come to an accurate conclusion about the correlation between success and someone's rating on the hottness scale. However, I do agree with what Darkmatters mentioned in post #3, that a person's attractiveness start to affect how people treat them at a young age and thus plays a significant role in the shaping of their personality, making them more confident, manipulative, timid, etc.