Is beauty only skin deep ?
Certainly not says, Nancy Etcoff of Harvard Medical School.
Beauty is indicative of health, youth and fertility. The ability to detect beauty is a survival mechanism. That is what evolution needs for propagation of species.
We’ve evolved to recognize traits like tender skin, large eyes, baby noses and chubby cheeks as signs of helplessness and vulnerability and hence beautiful. It encourages protective feelings in us. That’s the master plan of evolution.
We are wired to be attracted to beautiful partner for evolution sake.
Three social experiments in support of this.
1.
Karen Dion had researched on attractiveness.
Her experiment showed that adults who observed a beautiful seven-year-old stomping on a dog’s tail were likely to give that child the benefit of the doubt, maybe he was having a bad day.
But when unattractive kids were seen doing the same thing, they were more likely to be punished.
2.
In 1977, scientists conducted a social experiment. They left a dime in a phone booth, and on separate occasions they sent a beautiful woman and an unattractive woman to go to the phone booth and ask the person inside, “Did I leave my dime there?”
Results showed that 87 percent of the people returned the dime to the beautiful woman, and only 64 percent returned it to the unattractive one.
On the flip side, these preferred treatments makes attractive people to grow up to be more impatient.
3.
In another study, participants were purposefully kept waiting for an interview.
The attractive people would wait for an average of 3.3 minutes before demanding attention; less attractive people patiently waited around for an average of 9 minutes.
Dr Ramakanta's Ideas 