you can’t judge a book by its cover.
it’s what’s on the inside that counts.
beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Toss another three cliches in the trash. This article talks about studies showing that ugly people commit more crime:
“We find that unattractive individuals commit more crime in comparison to average-looking ones, and very attractive individuals commit less crime in comparison to those who are average-looking,” claim Naci Mocan of the University of Colorado and Erdal Tekin of Georgia State University.
Mocan and Tekin analyzed data from a federally sponsored survey of 15,000 high-schoolers who were interviewed in 1994 and again in 1996 and 2002. One question asked interviewers to rate the physical appearance of the student on a five-point scale ranging from “very attractive” to “very unattractive.”
How rude of people to agree on what’s ugly and what isn’t!
These economists found that the long-term consequences of being young and ugly were small but consistent. Cute guys were uniformly less likely than averages would indicate to have committed seven crimes including burglary and selling drugs, while the unhandsome were consistently more likely to have broken the law.
Very attractive high school girls were less likely to commit six of the seven crimes, while those rated unattractive were more likely to have done six of seven, controlling for personal and family characteristics known to be associated with criminal behavior.
It’s practically a biblical injunction that thou shalt not make presumptions about the character of people based on their physical attributes. Yet here is proof that yes, we can make useful generalizations about people with the bad luck to be born with unappealing faces. Whether the ugly face itself causes criminal tendencies or the social disadvantages steer an ugly person into crime is irrelevant to the wisdom of judgment. If an ugly person is more likely to do A, people around him will respond by doing B.
Some other things you can assume about ugly people and be right more often than not:
Bitter. (wouldn’t you be if your condition was the last acceptable form of public contempt?)
Less intelligent. (smart guys and hot chicks mate assortatively)
Crappy social skills. (socially adept guys tend to have children with hot chicks)
Below the median income. (no promotions for you!)
Depressed. (imagine a life of constant, gnawing pain)
Lonely. (no one likes to be around suicidally depressed people)
Hard up. (girls and guys, though the ugly threshold for hard up-ness is lower for men)
Smells bad. (when a shower isn’t going to help your cause, why bother?)
Introverted. (naturally extroverted ugly people learn the hard way that no one wants to party with them. they eventually hide in their apartments all the time)
Belligerent. (an ugly person who doesn’t retreat to solitude and braves public scorn starts to expect the worst from people and defaults to hatemode)
There’s a reason we associate certain personality traits with physical ugliness. Grendel and Gollum ask you to understand.
