alt Hacker News> When education is in-person, attractive students receive higher grades in non-quantitative subjects, in which teachers tend to interact more with students compared to quantitative courses.
I wonder how much of this is less about attraction and more about social skills. Granted, higher attraction affords more opportunity to develop those skills, but I have met plenty of charming people who were not conventionally attractive.
Replies
In many instances, attractiveness is tantamount to having social skills. It's not even a matter of developing a more sophisticated skillset; attractive people (and all the people who are subject to affinity bias) are just given the benefit-of-the-doubt more, and more consistently. This is where advice like, "Be yourself," and, "Don't fear rejection," and the idea that, "the only thing stopping someone from connection is their willingness to dare to try," come from: people whose attractiveness has preempted the requirement to really change or consider how they approach interactions.
And attractive girls social skills go away when classes move online but other students' don't?
Then why would it change between in person and remote environments?
It's very sad people on this site still fall for this rhetoric.
Attractive people have advantage even without the social skills. We have all observed it. Don't cope.
Or maybe it's harder to justify a higher grade on objective tasks like math/physics/...
Good point. Good looking people may have different social skills. Some may have horrible social skills; others may be great. That whole focus on looks is very strange.
Who is your parents play a larger role than attractiveness.
> Granted, higher attraction affords more opportunity to develop those skills
I think this is largely a distraction from the direct effect. For any level of social skill, good-looking people at that level are perceived much more positively than others at the same level.
The question of the causal effect between physical attractiveness and social skill is interesting, though. There are plausible stories both ways, imo: your version, and the contrary one saying that pretty people coast on their looks and the rest of us have to try harder to be interesting or appealing in other ways.
(It's also hard to fully separate the skills from the looks, because the same behaviours that work for a good-looking person might backfire terribly for someone at the other end of the scale. Do we say those two people are equally socially skilled, or the pretty person is more skilled because they chose a strategy that works in their context and the other person didn't?)