Are Smart People Usually Ugly?

…wouldn’t you like to know?

The answer is: No.
The idea that being ugly might be correlated with being smart has been explored much in the history of psychological testing. Initially researchers looked into whether a person’s face shape was correlated with his/her intelligence. Later on in 1918, a psychologist in Ohio showed photos of well-dressed children to a team of physicians and teachers, and asked them to rank them from smartest to dumbest. A few years later, a researcher in Pittsburgh conducted a similar study with headshots of 69 employees form a department store. In these studies, their guesses were compared to actual test scores to see if they were right.
The results were consistent: you can learn something about how smart someone is just by looking at his/her picture. The Ohio researcher said that the teachers and physicians were influenced a lot by the pleasantness of appearance or in some other cases, smile. Some saw a nice smile as the sign of intelligence; others saw it as a sign of feeble-mindedness.
In the meantime, the famous Edward Thorndike published his theory of the “halo effect”, where an observer’s overall impression of a person influences the observer’s feelings and thoughts about that person’s characteristics. This means that if they were describing someone’s look along with that person’s intelligence, they would assign consistently high or low ratings across both categories. This was soon proven to be true: later studies revealed that if someone looks good, people tend to assume that he/she’s smarter and more sociable.
But this is all on surface level. Are good looks actually correlated with smartness? Recently, the evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa pulled datasets from two resources—-the National Child Development Study in the UK and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health in the US. He found that the two were correlated: in the UK, attractive children have an additional 12.4 points of IQ. The relationship persisted even when family history, race and weight were controlled.
Therefore, the famous halo effect is not an illusion, but it is actually quite accurate: we assume good looking people to be smart, because they actually are.

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