Events calendar

11.00 - 12.30 Tuesday 14 May 2013

On campus - London - United Kingdom

OB Seminar Series: Dr Kathleen O'Connor

Speaker(s):

Sitting Pretty: Attractiveness, Social Capital and Success

That attractive people enjoy relatively better outcomes in life compared to other people is well and widely documented. Explanations of how and why this occurs are fewer and tend to focus on the correlated human capital characteristics of attractive people—their greater confidence and social skill, for example. We draw on social capital theory from the sociology literature to propose that, instead of being attributable solely to individual differences, the success that flows to attractive actors comes through actors’ social capital—both perceived and real. Findings from three experiments establish that people’s schemas for attractiveness include beliefs about attractive people’s social capital. These perceptions encourage people to initiate ties with attractive individuals, and to appoint attractive candidates to positions with greater social capital opportunities. Together, these decisions create powerful self-fulfilling prophecies, and deliver relatively quick professional success. Further, we show that the effects of attractiveness disappear when perceptions of social capital are included in the models, indicating that it is these beliefs that drive the effects of attractiveness on decisions. In a fourth study, we test whether our expectations about the link between attractiveness and social capital are reflected in people’s real-world social networks. As predicted, attractive people have networks that are relatively larger, less dense, and contain a greater percentage of weak ties, all characteristics of networks that are rich in social capital.

Event location

SG06

Contact: Patti Luong - Email: pluong@london.edu Tel: 02070008912
Kate Lewis - Email: klewis@london.edu Tel: 02070008911