About a month ago, Sanjay Srivastava, a psychologist at the University of Oregon, performed a somewhat tongue-in-cheek analysis of IQ and hotness among academics, posting it to his blog (link is external). The attractiveness data came from a study in 2006, which looked at ratings of university professors from the website RateMyProfessor.com. They were based on how many students described their professors “hot” or “not hot”. What Dr. Srivastava found is that the disciplines with the highest hotness ratings tended to be those nearer to the bottom when ranked by the average IQ of graduate students (IQ was estimated by the Graduate Record Examination). In other words, attractiveness appeared to be negatively correlated with IQ among college professors.

This was an amusing result, which was shared on several other websites. Reading between the lines, it seemed to confirm many people’s intuitions that the hard university subjects are taught by nerdy professors, while the professors for the less-difficult subjects, and possibly their students, are of the cooler sort.

https://cdn.psychologytoday.com/sites/default/files/styles/image-article_inline_full/public/blogs/56144/2013/10/135699-135598.png?itok=7SBOBKYE

*Interestingly though, Srivastava’s result runs counter to much psychological research on attractiveness and intelligence. Generally, studies on this topic have found small positive associations between physical attractiveness and IQ scores. For example, a well-cited study by Zebrowitz and colleagues (link is external) found a positive correlation of .22 between facial attractiveness and IQ in adults. This raises the question: Why the discrepancy for professors? One confound could be the gender of the raters. In Srivastava’s analysis, the disciplines with low hotness included Computer Science, Math, Engineering and Chemistry. These are the classic STEM fields that are disproportionately occupied by men, at both the student and teaching level. This could account for why professors in these fields didn’t get as many “hot” ratings as professors in more gender-balanced disciplines like Political Science or Biology. On the other hand, maybe professors are such an outlying group that the typical findings about attractiveness and IQ don’t apply to them.

However, thinking about this subject made me wonder how the results would look for actual students in different university disciplines, rather than their professors. I decided to run a short analysis using publically available data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health (link is external)). The study was one of the few nationally representative studies that included attractiveness ratings. Participants were rated on attractiveness at around age 23 by interviewers. To get IQ estimates for different college disciplines I used the latest SAT scores from 2012, assuming that average IQ of SAT-takers was 103. I excluded college majors in Add Health with less than five participants.

https://cdn.psychologytoday.com/sites/default/files/styles/image-article_inline_full/public/blogs/56144/2013/10/135699-135779.png?itok=f-xOVRae

In the whole sample, the correlation between attractiveness and IQ-level of college major was, as expected, slightly positive (r = .21). So the story was indeed different for undergraduates compared to professors. However, something intriguing happened when I split the sample into men and women. In men the correlation was still positive, but in women it was slightly negative!

This seems to run counter to the popular theory that men don't like smart women, it seems they have a slight positive correlation to their perceived attractiveness. It could therefore be negative personality traits (overly high expectations due to education/income of high IQ women) or others factors that are distastefully turning off men.

Basically what this means is that women's physical selection criteria for mating is slightly dysgenic when simply looking at raw attractiveness vs intelligence of men. They basically prefer slightly dumber men. But since women value a man's income 1000 times as much as a man value's a woman's income for LTR/marriage, beta bucks exists. That is the great equalizer that ensures the dysgenic effect is not resulting in a great many babies being born though (unless via out of wedlock single mothers).

https://cdn.psychologytoday.com/sites/default/files/styles/image-article_inline_full/public/blogs/56144/2013/10/135699-135780.png?itok=Q0iSYZaM