"Sitting Pretty: Attractiveness, Social Capital, and Success"

Abstract

That attractive people enjoy relatively better outcomes in life compared to other people is well and widely documented. Explanations of how and why this occurs are fewer and tend to focus on the correlated human capital characteristics of attractive people— their greater confidence and social skill, for example. We draw on social capital theory from the sociology literature to propose that, instead of being attributable to solely to purely by individual differences, the success that flows to attractive actors comes through actors’ social capital—both perceived and real. Findings from three experiments establish that people’s schemas for attractiveness include beliefs about attractive people’s social capital. These perceptions encourage people to initiate ties with attractive individuals. People also prefer to appoint attractive candidates to positions with greater social capital opportunities, creating a powerful self-fulfilling prophecy, and ensuring quick professional success. We show that the effects o...