MGMT 572: ASSIGNMENT 2A

Write a roughly one-page reaction paper discussing your thoughts about the
material discussed in the article Agthe et al. (2010)

The article I am writing about is from the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology,
called Dont hate me I am beautiful: Anti-attractiveness bias in organizational
evaluation and decision making, by Maria Agthe, Matthias Sporrle, John K. Maner. This
paper deals with peoples response to different sex and same sex based on physical
attractiveness in an organizational context. A previous study had shown that, in case of
romantic relationships, people of the same sex had negative response to attractive
members. This paper proved the extrapolation of the above conclusion to organizational
decision making. Two studies were conducted with two different scenarios but in the
same professional context. One was regarding the decision to award scholarship and
the other was about job recruitment. There are well documented and proven theories
that, in the mating context same sex individuals when coming across highly physically
attractive person, felt threatened and where hence those perceptions might affect their
relationships. Although there has been much research in case of romantic relationship
about this issue, almost negligible amount has been done in context to organizational
decision making. This reason has motivated the authors to find proof that the same
could most likely happen in an organizational context.
This paper has gone the mathematical way to prove their hypothesis. In the first study,
participants were asked to imagine being a member of a selection committee and to
evaluate either three male or three female finalists. The applications included pictures
including detailed information (e.g., demographics, major, grades, extracurricular
activities). The result was that: for the opposite sex finalists, the selectors were proattractiveness biased for both men and women (in 49.9% cases, men selected the most
attractive women finalist, and 42.5% cases women selected most attractive men). While

in the same sex case, pro-attractiveness bias did not come in to play, only 11.7% of the
cases were where female selectors chose highly attractive females. In the second
study, participants were told to act as job recruiters and evaluated potential job
candidates. They were presented with a description of the person's previous
accomplishments along with their photos. The result form the second study had the
same conclusion. Male and female recruiters favored highly attractive opposite sex
candidates, while when it came same sex selection they did not give positive response.
Another behavior noticed was that, the highly attractive recruiters had lower
discrimination against highly attractive same sex candidates; it was mostly the less
attractive participants who felt threatened by the highly attractive candidates.
Personally, this article was very informative to me. I had always assumed that people
with high physical attractiveness have not had to suffer much discrimination. This study
has opened a lot of more areas of research, say for the gender perspective, etc. But
what this article does stress is that there is a need for further research about the effects
or consequences of physical attractiveness in an organizational decision making
context.