Hot wheels

IT IS unfair, but true, that beautiful people are more successful than ugly ones. Data indicate that this rule applies in both business and politics—and biological theory suggests the underlying reason is that beauty is an indicator of good genes and good health. How that reason translates into success, though, is more questionable. It could be that the pretty and handsome get a helping hand from their colleagues, bosses (and, in the case of politicians, voters) which is denied to the plain and the unseemly. Or it could be that beautiful people’s underlying qualities mean they really are better, on average, at doing things.

One way to disentangle these explanations is to look at a field of endeavour which is about as close as it is possible to get to a true meritocracy: professional sport. Though favouritism here might put you in the team, it will never land you on the winner’s podium. Erik Postma, of the University of Zurich, has therefore done just that, using long-distance cycling as his example. His results, just published in Biology Letters, suggest that good looks really do reflect underlying fitness, in both the athletic and the biological senses.

Dr Postma recruited 816 volunteers (72% women; 28% men) as judges in a beauty competition. He also assembled a collection of 80 mugshots of participants in the 2012 Tour de France. He showed the pictures, in two groups of 40, to each volunteer, and asked her or him to rate them on a scale of one to five for attractiveness, likeability and masculinity. Volunteers were also asked to note, in each case, if they recognised a rider. If they did, their rating of that individual was discounted. (This happened in 282 of the 32,468 attractiveness ratings made.)

Both sexes agreed on who was good-looking and who was not, though women tended to give those at the top of the list higher marks than men did—especially if the women in question were undergoing natural menstrual cycles. (Women on the pill gave assessments closer to those of men.) Overall, on the five-point scale Dr Postma used, the top 10% of cyclists in the race were reckoned 25% more attractive than the bottom 10%.

Attractiveness turned out to have no link with likeability—in as much as that could be assessed from a picture. (Dr Postma included this category in order to try to steer volunteers away from rating cyclists as attractive merely because they were smiling for the camera, which some did and some did not.) Likeable cyclists were not more likely to be winners. Nor were those rated as more masculine. Only attractiveness showed the correlation.

Athletic training, of course, does itself increase physical attractiveness. But given that everyone competing in the Tour de France is trained to the limit, that variable is irrelevant. Remaining differences in attractiveness are most unlikely to reflect that some have trained harder than others.

Dr Postma’s study does not rule out the role of favouritism in other fields of endeavour. But it does support the idea that at least in areas where physical effort is important, and for men, good looks are a reasonable predictor of outcome. Whether a related study using female cyclists would show a similar correlation between performance and attractiveness remains, according to Dr Postma, “in need of investigation”. And this year’s tour might provide him with the relevant data, for the race’s organisers have just announced that, for the first time (and for one day only, as they race to the finish line in Paris) women will be allowed to compete alongside men.