Which is better brains or beauty

Results came from surveys of men and women between the ages of 25 and 75 who participated in the National Midlife Development in the United States study. Researchers judged attractiveness by rating personal photographs of the participants on a scale of one to seven.

After brains, self-confidence ranked second in importance, followed by beauty, he said. We know from studies showing that political success can be predicted from facial appearance, that people can be influenced by how someone looks rather than, necessarily, what they say.

We wanted to see if this was true for scientists. A new study published today in Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences PNAS from researchers at the University of Cambridge and the University of Essex suggests that when it comes to judging scientists, we are more likely to find an attractive scientist interesting, but more likely to consider their less attractive colleagues to be better scientists.

Dr Skylark and colleagues randomly sampled the faces of scientists from the Physics and Genetics departments at US universities scientists for each field , and then from the Physics and Biological Sciences departments at UK universities scientists for each field for replication studies.

In the first set of studies, the team asked one group to rate the faces on a variety of traits, such as how intelligent the individual looked, how attractive they were, and their perceived age. The researchers found that people were more interested in learning about the work of scientists who were physically attractive and who appeared competent and moral.

Interest was also slightly stronger for older scientists, and slightly lower for females. There was no difference in interest between white and non-white scientists. Participants were more likely to choose research that was paired with a photo of an interesting-looking scientist. This bias was present both for male and female scientists, physics and biology news stories, and both video and text formats.

Next, the participants were told that they would read articles from a new magazine section comprising profiles of people discussing their interests and work.

The articles were adapted from news websites to make them appear like the scientist was describing his or her own work to a general audience. In addition, quality judgments were higher for physics articles than for biology articles.

A similar study found that the attractiveness of the scientist had only a small effect on the perceived quality of their research. Facial appearance affects science communication. The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4. For image use please see separate credits above. And what they're checking is the stuff in this poll: is she smart, is she funny, is she kind, is she not crazy? Those are the things that really matter," he said.

Ball added, "[Men] want women, I think, who are, with the brains and humor being rated higher than beauty and sex drive That could mean Yet, the television character men would most like to marry is Penny from CBS's The Big Bang Theory, a pretty blonde known for her feisty nature and approachable personality rather than her intelligence, culinary skills, or maternal instincts.

She's the blonde, ditzy, girl-next-door. So there's a push-pull there, I think," Ball also pointed out.