Better sexy than flexy? A lab experiment assessing the impact of perceived attractiveness and personality traits on hiring decisions

Abstract

We present a laboratory experiment to assess the relative and independent effect of perceived attractiveness and personality traits on hiring decisions. Our results indicate that attractiveness and conscientiousness, followed by emotional stability, are important drivers of recruiters’ decisions.

Keywords:

• hiring discrimination
• Economics of beauty
• Economics of personality
• lab experiments

JEL Classification:

• J24
• J71
• C91

Acknowledgements

We thank Bart Cockx and Dieter Verhaest for their insightful comments and suggestions, which have helped to improve this study considerably. Nevertheless, the authors assume sole scientific responsibility for the present work.

Notes

¹ Notable exceptions are Robins et al. (2011), who study the beauty premium in the United States while controlling for personality traits, and Chang and Weng (2012), who investigate the relative wage effect of physical appearance and risky sex behaviour among prostitutes.

² Falk et al. (2013) and Hosoda et al. (2003) show that, both in general and also more specifically in rating job candidates, students’ ratings are nearly identical to those of professionals.

³ These photographs were bought from microstock photography agencies.

⁴ This degree corresponds to the ISCED 5 level. ISCED stands for International Standard Classification of Education.

⁵ Providing subjects only with photographs is a common practice in the cited literature in which laboratory experiments are designed to assess the beauty premium in the labour market. By doing this, any dependence of hiring outcomes on other information than (perceived) attractiviness and personality traits is erased (subjects may be more perceptive about good additional information about candidates with advantageous indices for attractiveness and personality traits). However, our design choice may at the same time lead to a degree of overexposure of the attributes revealed by the photograph in comparison with more realistic settings in which for example the photograph is included in a resumé. Therefore, when discussing our statistical results, we do not focus on the particular magnitude of an attribute but rather on its relative effect compared to other attributes.