2024-08-05 05:13:42
A claim has been made that high school yearbook photos are a reliable indicator of a person’s life expectancy.
A new study finds that people rated as unattractive based on their yearbook photos live shorter lives than their more attractive classmates.
It has been well established through many studies that various social conditions such as income, marital status, and education level have important effects on health and longevity. However, the role of physical attractiveness in determining longevity has been relatively overlooked. This is interesting because attractiveness can have a significant impact on social stratification processes that affect health outcomes. For example, greater physical attractiveness can have a positive impact on social stratification processes such as employment, higher income, and formation of beneficial social connections. These social advantages are likely to lead to better life outcomes.
Noting that physical attractiveness may play an important role in shaping overall health and lifespan, researchers explored the impact of attractiveness on longevity.
“I’ve always thought that attractiveness was an understudied aspect of social inequality,” said Connor M. Sheehan, a professor at Arizona State University and lead author of the study published in the journal Social Science & Medicine, in a press release. “It may not be as structural as other dimensions, but we all know it’s important.”
The researchers used the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, a survey that followed Wisconsin high school graduates since 1957 for life.
The researchers measured the attractiveness of 8,386 men and women using high school yearbook photos that could be tracked until 2022. To ensure consistency, six trained raters, six men and six women, rated the graduates on an 11-point scale.
The researchers used Cox proportional hazards models and life table techniques to analyze the relationship between attractiveness and mortality risk. These models took into account a variety of covariates, including high school achievement, intelligence, family background, income in adulthood, and mental and physical health in midlife. They also included these factors to isolate the specific effects of attractiveness on life expectancy.
The study found that people in the lowest quartile of attractiveness scores had a 16.8 percent higher mortality rate than those in the middle quartile.
Of note, there was no significant difference in life expectancy between those rated as most attractive in the high school yearbook and those who scored in the middle, suggesting that above-average attractiveness (physical beauty) does not necessarily guarantee a longer lifespan.
“The people who were rated as least attractive based on their yearbook photos actually lived longer than the others,” Sheehan told PsyPost. “What was also surprising was that the most attractive people didn’t seem to have any special advantage over the others,” he added. “That means the disadvantages of being unattractive outweigh the benefits of being attractive, at least in this group of Wisconsin high school graduates.”
“These findings really highlight the need to treat people more fairly, regardless of their appearance,” said Professor Sheehan.
Reporter Park Hae-sik, Donga.com [email protected]
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2024-08-05 05:13:42