There are scientists or smart or beautiful in the eyes of the townsfolk
MOSCOW, may 23 — RIA Novosti. Unusual social survey showed that ordinary people consider ugly scientists are more competent, intelligent and successful than their beautiful counterparts, they seem more interesting narrators, said in an article published in the journal PNAS.
“It seems that people are really using the appearance of the person as a source of information at a time when they choose and evaluate the accuracy of science news. It is not clear how this affects the dissemination and adoption of scientific ideas in society, but the rapid growth of visual media suggests that the importance of the “appearance of science” will only grow,” said William Skylark (Skylark William) from Cambridge University (UK).
The appearance of the person plays a huge role in the development of his life, and it affects not only personal life but also in career and position in society as a whole. For example, in 2011 and 2013, two groups of British researchers found that beautiful people have on average a higher IQ and often get more challenging work than people with ordinary or unsightly appearance.
Skylark and his colleagues decided to find out, does the appearance of the scientists themselves how much they trust people and how they think understandable what they tell scientists.
To do this, scientists took pictures of a few hundred randomly selected physicists and biologists working at universities in the US and Britain, and asked volunteers to estimate the age, intelligence and their attractiveness. Using this data, the British psychologists asked his players, winner of what, viewed from their works seemed to them most reputable scientist and whose scientific work would be most interesting to them.
These interviews led to interesting results.
It turned out that the volunteers seemed most interesting researches of those scholars, whose face seemed to them the most beautiful, but the most intelligent and trustworthy they considered quite unattractive or ugly researchers.
Overall, it was a classic stereotypical image of a scientist — he is a plain man of age of any race and ethnicity. Women and handsome young men are much less likely seemed the volunteers as “advanced” scientists as older men-genetics or physics.
Despite this, scientists often beautiful attracted the eyes of the volunteers in those cases when the researchers were asked to read a few stories about scientific discoveries. It was typical and short popular scientific movies, radio broadcasts and other methods of presenting information.
Why is this happening, scientists still do not know, but plan to reveal the roots of such an ambivalent relation to science and scientists in their future studies. In any case, this factor, according to Skylark, should be used in the preparation of scientific-popular materials and in promoting the importance of science to society.