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A Pretty Dumb Hypothesis About Good Looks

Word to the wise, guys: Give a girl the eye and you might not just be committing an unwanted advance; you might be denting the co-ed's capacity for cognition. So say a pair of psychologists trying to prove the feminist theory that the experience of being sexually "objectified" overburdens the female brain.

In a paper recently published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, researchers Robin K. Gay and Emanuele Castano set out to document the detrimental effect of women being on the receiving end of appraising glances. A group of women took an intelligence test to set a baseline for their smarts, and then each walked around, all the while being videotaped (sometimes the camera was held by a man, sometimes by a woman). Each volunteer was shown her video, and then given another IQ test. By and large, the scores on the second test dropped—especially if the videographer was male.

Jessica Simpson ENLARGE
Jessica Simpson Getty Images

Of course, it's not clear that the researchers have demonstrated anything with this exercise other than that when young women sit down and watch film of themselves walking back and forth, they get self-conscious and distracted. Or perhaps it's merely proof that participation in contrived social psychology experiments is in and of itself stupefying. But maybe it does explain one of the most durable and perplexing caricatures of popular culture: the notion that pretty women are dumb. It's all the leering of men, you see: lookers attract more looks, and their IQs suffer accordingly.

Undoubtedly, there is a prejudice against the comely, an insidious assumption that brains and beauty don't mix. Let's call it the Velma-Daphne Divide. Those of us with misspent youths will recall that in the cartoon universe of "Scooby Doo, Where Are You!" Daphne was the dingbat ingénue, vacuous, vain and impeccably turned-out. Velma, by contrast, was the geeky brainiac, traits signaled by her wide, plain face, high-refracting eyeglasses, frumpy mop of hair and shapeless sweater. The cartoonists expected us to know, just at a glance, which of the two was smart. And don't imagine that any gender is free of lookist attitudes. Were you to view two pictures, one of a fellow who resembles Bill Gates and the other a Fabio doppelganger, wouldn't you make a quick assumption about which was a genius and which was a dolt?

And yet, the Velma-Daphne Divide just doesn't make sense. If the evolutionary biologists are right, one would expect there to be some correlation between smarts and sex appeal. Over the millennia it was the men who were successful, powerful—and thus, no stretch to assume, of at least better-than-average intelligence—who were able to woo the most attractive mates. On the flip side, the most attractive women will have had better luck winning capable—i.e., intelligent—providers. If, over history, the smart and the beautiful have been attracted to each other, you could expect the Daphnes of the world to be, on average, a little smarter than the Velmas. And it seems that they are.

Researchers plumbing the data in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health have found that, to some small yet statistically significant degree, good looks and intelligence go together. There's even a correlation between being well-groomed and earning better grades. Which makes our question all the more perplexing: If spending time under a hair-drier is good for the brain, why are we so quick to assume that Daphnes are ditzes?

The big Adolescent Health study may suggest an explanation or two. For example, young people who are more attractive are also more likely to indulge in binge drinking. Which has a certain raw logic to it: The handsome and the pretty get invited to more parties. Perhaps our perception of their relative intelligence has something to do with the damage they suffer socializing.

But maybe the best explanation for the Velma-Daphne paradigm can be found in rational choice theory, as opposed to evolutionary biology. There are many ways to pursue the good things in life. Cultivating one's intelligence is hard, requiring huge investments of time and effort. If you're born with the rare and valuable asset, beauty, an asset that can be exploited rather more immediately than smarts (what with all the opportunity costs of education), it would make sense to make the most of said asset. Which is to say, for the attractive it just might be smart to be dumb.

Not that there aren't unpleasant consequences of such a dynamic. A few years ago I heard corporate raider Carl Icahn explain why so many companies are so poorly run, and thus such ripe targets for his brand of intervention. He said that too many firms are run by CEOs who got where they are through boyish good looks and fraternity-president bonhomie. Even if such guys have an abundance of native intelligence, they choose not to build those mental muscles. Is it any wonder, in the recent financial unpleasantness, that some corner-office guys didn't know, or couldn't comprehend, what the quants were up to?

Which is a strong argument that even those blessed with animal magnetism might do well to invest more effort in developing their intellectual resources. And let's not forget the long view: As far as economic assets go, beauty has a brutal depreciation curve. Unless, of course, like Daphne, you're a cartoon.

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