{"id":1359,"date":"2014-08-26T14:02:00","date_gmt":"2014-08-26T14:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/families\/?p=140"},"modified":"2014-08-26T14:02:00","modified_gmt":"2014-08-26T14:02:00","slug":"in-school-whether-others-see-you-as-good-looking-or-not-matters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/2014\/08\/26\/in-school-whether-others-see-you-as-good-looking-or-not-matters\/","title":{"rendered":"In school, whether others see you as good-looking or not matters"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post draws from a longer <\/em>CCF Brief<\/em><\/a> originally published December 10, 2013. Rachel A. Gordon<\/a> is a professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"By<\/a>
By Irangilaneh (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-sa\/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons<\/figcaption><\/figure>It is \u201cback to school\u201d time \u2013 we can see this all around us, in stores, online, and in the media. As students shop for school supplies and clothing, many are thinking about the image they will portray when they first walk the halls of school. A recent google ad<\/a> encapsulated these concerns as it opened with a youth searching \u201cHow to not look like a freshman.\u201d Technology amplifes \u2013 or at least makes more visible \u2013 teens\u2019 concern with social image. A recent survey by the We Heart It<\/a> social networking site, and published exclusively by TIME<\/a>, documents the ways in which youth thirst for attaching \u201clikes,\u201d \u201chearts,\u201d and comments to shared photos \u2013 the latest incarnation of the original of Facebook hot or not<\/a> ratings of student photos that make many people cringe, but live on.<\/p>\n

The We Heart It<\/a> study reinforced a finding in my own recent work<\/a> about the impact of not just comments that are openly hurtful or admiring, but of being lost in the shuffle. One teen in the We Heart It<\/em> survey reported \u201cSometimes I just feel like I don\u2019t exist, like I\u2019m invisible to everyone, I pretend it\u2019s okay, but it hurts.\u201d In our study, we considered how others\u2019 ratings of adolescents\u2019 looks associated with their achievement — in grades as well as the social scene. Our most consistent finding was that being above average in looks \u2013 what we call standing out from the crowd \u2013 was correlated with nearly every social and academic domain that we examined in high school.\u00a0 These advantages continued into young adulthood, including through higher college completion and, as a consequence, higher earnings for the attractive than the average in looks.<\/p>\n

Not surprisingly, being at one pole or the other of looks was important, too, but more selectively. What we called the \u201cfairest of the fair\u201d \u2013 being rated very<\/em> attractive rather than attractive \u2013 revealed itself more in young adulthood than in high school, where the best-looking youth in our study rated themselves as more extroverted, reported more friends, and were more likely to attain a college degree. We also importantly documented how youth rated by others as being on the ugly side of looks were more depressed and had fewer friends than those who were average in looks, both in high school and young adulthood.<\/p>\n

We were struck, however, by the extent to which these advantages and disadvantages of being at either end of the perceived beauty continuum can overshadow the importance of being \u201cinvisible\u201d in the middle of the continuum. In fact the largest fraction of youth were in this \u201caverage\u201d category of others\u2019 ratings of their looks \u2013 over 4 out of every 10 youth were rated \u201caverage\u201d \u2013 whereas about 3 in 10 were rated \u201cattractive,\u201d just 1 or 2 out of 10 as \u201cvery attractive\u201d and less than 1 in 10 as \u201cunattractive\u201d or \u201cvery unattractive.\u201d The advantages of standing out \u2013 being on the attractive end rather than \u201cjust\u201d average \u2013 were also meaningful. For instance differentials on high school grades and college graduation between youth rated by others as attractive versus average in looks were similar in size to differentials between youth living in two-parent versus single-parent families.<\/p>\n

Social scientists have not yet developed programs to address lookism. Taking a page from interventions aimed at reducing other prejudices, however, we anticipate that a wide array of strategies might help youth \u2014 and the adults and teachers that they interact with \u2014 circumvent assumptions based on looks. The large size and many different classes in high schools mean that teachers and students usually get to know one another less well than in elementary schools, yet a person\u2019s looks are likely especially salient in these large, impersonal settings. High school cliques also restrict interactions across groups, but one of the most successful strategies for reducing prejudice is cross-group contact. One strategy educators might try could bring students and teachers together for meaningful interactions that cut across social cliques, and assess the extent to which such strategies help level the playing field for youth who are more and less attractive.<\/p>\n

More broadly, we believe the issue is not just about how others perceive adolescents\u2019 looks, but instead reflects a larger concern about American high schools, where some children are socially marginalized (as my co-author Rob Crosnoe showed in his earlier work<\/a>) and as a consequence do not get the most out of school.\u00a0 When this happens, children\u2019s potential is not fully achieved \u2013 they lose out individually, and we lose out as a society. In this way, a major challenge for the school system is to keep all students engaged and feeling a part of school.\u00a0 Initiatives like the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning<\/a> run by my colleagues here in Chicago are trying to do just that, and we hope schools and scholars will continue such work in the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This post draws from a longer CCF Brief originally published December 10, 2013. Rachel A. Gordon is a professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. It is \u201cback to school\u201d time \u2013 we can see this all around us, in stores, online, and in the media. As students shop for school supplies […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1903,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[15,34,8959,55,13,30823,429],"class_list":["post-1359","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-culture","tag-education","tag-families","tag-gender","tag-inequality","tag-lookism","tag-school"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1359","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1903"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1359"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1359\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}