The Beguiling Truth About Beauty
Don’t hate yourself for wanting to be beautiful. Good-looking people get special treatment from strangers, employers and even their own mothers. The comely reap real social and economic gains in life, from broader romantic proposals to lighter punishment in criminal courts. The rest of us curse the advantages of beauty because we can never claim membership in the knockout club.
Or can we? We’re not even close to objective when it comes to judging our own looks. Other people see the whole package. But when we look in the mirror, we’re liable to zero in on the imperfections. That bump on your friend’s nose? It’s her trademark! It gives her character! But to you, that thing on your nose is downright disfiguring. Our opinion of our own looks is also capricious: We can feel like the belle of the ball …..
Blah, blah, blah. OK. I get where this is going. Self worth, anxiety about society’s judgement on beauty, etc, etc. How many times have we heard this before.
This was what caught my attention. That’s right. Someone got funding to test if babes in bikinis could do better at solving math problems than ones wearing regular clothes. I swear you can apply for a grant to fund anything.
In a study where people were asked to solve math problems, there was no difference in how well men and women scored—when everyone was fully dressed. But when subjects were required to perform the calculations in their bathing suits, the women suddenly fared worse than their male counterparts. They were too busy wondering how they looked to crunch numbers correctly.
“I took an IQ test and I flunked it of course.
I can’t spell VW but I got a Porsche.
Cuz I’m a blond yeah, yeah, yeah.”
These tests are such a joke, and the fact that funding is being used on crap like this strikes a nerve with me. I would say that men feel just a concious about their appearance, when stripped down like that, as women do. I am an engineer, and science is my life. Studies and wastes of time like this really drive me nuts.
Funding could be used for better things than this. What is one more study stating that woman are more concious of their apperance than men going to do to better our situation….. NOTHING. what a joke. How about some government funding for stem cell research. That might make a little sense.
If you take the personality of the girls in the video, times it by their monotone voice, you don’t have to take the derivative to get zero. Even so, I would have loved this “training aid” when I was 16.
It’s a shame skimpy clothing didn’t IMPROVE test scores… then we could petition the school board to relax dress codes… 😀
Where in the article did it suggest, let alone state, that someone got funding for the study?
I remember back last century when I was in school, Post Grad students often took volunteers to help with a study for a paper they were doing. These studies were usually done on the cheap and might get funding if at the Doctorate level.
While it is often too easy to say anxiety will influence a test, can you prove it? Can you specifically cite a study that concluded the anxiety from a specific situation had a certain effect? Sure there is that ole “common sense” stuff. Yup, just like evolution being too complicated to have happened randomly.
I agree. Common sense (seems like a oxymoron), and scientific fact are mutually exclusive and unless there is evidence to support a claim…wait!…How does every conversation turn into a discussion on Iraq?
Let the games begin!