attractiveness-study.jpg©New Line Cinema/Courtesy Everett Collection

Photo: Everett Collection

We've accepted that life is just easier for handsome dudes. It seems like the best looking guys we know simply manage better—they get off speeding tickets, they have better luck with dating (shocker), and trouble seems to disappear when they flash a smile. There was a small ugly part of us that had hoped it wasn't true. We had hoped that we lived in a world where all levels of attractiveness are considered equal. But science has intervened to tell us that that's officially not the case.

Jeremy Gibson and Jonathan Gore of Eastern Kentucky University proved it by surveying 170 college women on their perceptions of two men. One of them was handsome, the other, not so much. They proposed two identical scenarios. First, the guys ask to borrow a pen in a classroom setting. Harmless. In the second situation, the men approach the woman and ask to take her picture after commenting that she'd be a great model for a project they're working on. Which is how we pick up women all the time.

In the pen scenario, both men were perceived in a non-negative way. That's not particularly surprising—who would be freaked out by such a platonic ask? As you might imagine, after creepily asking to take a photo for a "project," the men were perceived negatively. This is called the devil effect, which the researchers describe as "a negative cognitive bias against a stimulus possessing a negative characteristic." While both men triggered this effect after the photo ask, the unattractive one did it to a greater degree. So, essentially, if you do something ugly, and are unattractive, you become doubly unattractive. The research further indicates that this same phenomenon occurs in online dating. A weird or alarming Tinder profile with an unattractive photo will put you deep in the danger zone.

The study concludes that "the unattractive male is tolerated up to a point; his unattractiveness is OK until he misbehaves." But, in general, we suggest trying not to be a skeevemaster. Doesn't matter how handsome you are. But it does help.

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