"The Halo Effect": 38 Times People Noticed "Pretty Privilege" Is Real

"Pretty privilege" is proof that we, humans, are visual creatures. For decades, sociologists have found that attractive people have more advantages in life than those who are deemed "plain" or unattractive. They're more likely to be hired for jobs, receive promotions, and get higher salaries.

Dario Maestripieri, Ph.D., a professor of comparative human development, evolutionary biology, and neurobiology at the University of Chicago, theorizes that this phenomenon is all about the desire for physical intimacy. He uses salesmen as an example: people buy things from them because they think it increases their chance of sleeping with them. One needs only to remember why Danny Cordray was the top salesman at Dunder Mifflin.

This might not make sense, but Maestripieri argues that it's how our brains are wired. "The male mind is designed in such a way when it comes to [intimacy] that heterosexual men will do anything to increase their chances to have [relations] with an attractive woman, no matter how small these chances are, and even if what they do only increases the probability from 0.01 to 0.015%," he writes for Psychology Today.

Women do it too, he argues, as it is an unconscious behavior. Most people are driven by the biological need to reproduce. It's undoubtedly weird that this need manifests in ways where we're more likely to give our money to people just because they're attractive, but hey, that's what pretty privilege is.

Beautiful people have an advantage even when they're borrowing money from the bank. A 2007 study found that attractive people are 1.41% more likely to receive a loan and be offered a lower interest rate by 81 basis points. However, this lending strategy often backfires on banks, as attractiveness does not correlate with creditworthiness. In fact, attractive people are three times more likely to default on their loans than their average-looking peers.

Attractiveness isn't always about physical traits. Daniel Hamermesh, a professor of economics at the University of Texas at Austin and author of the book Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People Are More Successful, told Business Insider that people are attracted to how a person carries themselves.

"Beauty may just reflect self-esteem," he posited. "Perhaps people's self-confidence manifests itself in their behavior, so that their looks are rated more highly, and their self-esteem makes them more desirable and higher-paid employees. [...] Beauty and the attractiveness of one's personality are positively related, and it is the general sparkle of one's personality, not one's beauty, that increases earnings."

Attractive people also have the upper hand in many social situations. Psychologists call this the "halo effect." Essentially, we deem attractive people kinder, more trustworthy, and more intelligent even when we have no evidence to support these claims. In the 1920s, psychologist Edward Thorndike coined this term, explaining how we assume a person has more positive traits after perceiving a single positive quality.

The "halo effect" isn't always about physical beauty, but, according to psychologist Kia-Rai Prewitt, PhD, it's where people notice it most. The opposite of the "halo effect" is the "horn effect." It refers to the tendency to see one negative quality in a person and assume that they must be in some way bad. In the world of dating, that can sometimes look like perceiving a less-attractive suitor on a dating app as "a creep," when they're a kind, funny, and thoughtful person in reality.