Research finds 'attractiveness advantage' in customer experience

Have you ever found yourself thinking a server, salesperson or customer service employee was especially attractive, and wondered if that changed the way you felt about the interaction or even the outcome?

Those questions inspired a University of Mississippi doctoral graduate and an Illinois State University marketing and sales professor to delve into how physical attractiveness affects perceptions of service.

Goldar Lenjeu Chefor, of Canada, who completed her doctorate in business administration at Ole Miss in May, worked with ISU professor Ellis Chefor to publish their results recently in the Journal of Service Theory and Practice. They used a comprehensive meta-analysis – which combines results of several previous studies – to examine how physical attractiveness affects service outcomes.

They discovered that looks do, in fact, matter.

"We were trying to find out how general the effect of physical attractiveness is on, not necessarily a service provider's performance, but how the service provider is evaluated," Goldar Chefor said. "The mechanism through which physical attractiveness influences service outcomes is an implicit social judgment of the employee."

If a person is attractive, they are implicitly associated with traits like likeability, trustworthiness and competence and therefore thought to perform better, compared to someone less attractive, she said.

Each of the studies included in the analysis measured unique measures of physical attractiveness, Ellis Chefor said.

"In one study, they'll say physical attractiveness is your facial appearance," he said. "Another study will say it's the way you dress or style yourself, or perhaps it's your body shape.

"We quantified what was measured to see the effect of whatever it is that we're measuring of physical attractiveness."

This new analysis indicates that physical attractiveness does affect service outcomes, but not always in the same way. Sometimes the impact is slightly negative; other times it's moderately positive and sometimes there's no impact at all, depending on the situation and how attractiveness is defined.

The researchers also found that social perceptions play a big role. In many cases, people judge service workers not just on what they do, but on how they look.

"We expected that the beauty bias will be greater for women than men, primarily because prior research shows that consumers expect women, much more than men, to show more of those traits like likeability and warmth that are easily implicitly inferred from attractiveness," Goldar Chefor said. "But our results showed the opposite. It appeared that men's evaluations are driven more by their physical attractiveness, and the effect that attractiveness has is not on their actual performance, but on their perceived performance.

"So how people evaluate men relies more on attractiveness than it does for women. That was a little bit surprising."

The project also explored how artificial intelligence could help reduce bias in service settings by shifting the focus from appearance to objective performance.

"There's a growing trend in the industry of organizations using AI service agents as sales managers to evaluate, to rate and to promote salespeople," Ellis Chefor said. "We need to figure out whether AI helps control the kind of discrimination we suspect exists, particularly around how people are evaluated based on attractiveness.

"It's not just about the interaction between the consumer and the service employee; AI is now being used to train, evaluate and promote service agents."

The effect of attraction doesn't stop at service industries. Research shows that people perceived as attractive tend to receive more help, better job opportunities and higher wages, said Robin Kramer, senior lecturer in the School of Psychology at the University of Lincoln.

This bias extends even further, to the courtroom, where more attractive defendants often receive more lenient sentences compared to those who are less attractive or appear less trustworthy, Kramer said. Studies involving mock jurors consistently support the finding that attractiveness can lead to lighter punishments for various crimes.

But that may not help workers who feel that their appearance is being used against them.

"People often try to sue organizations for discriminatory hiring and promotion practices based on appearance, but these cases rarely succeed," Ellis Chefor said. "That's because proving someone is more attractive than another is subjective and difficult to quantify.

"You can see the bias happening, but without a clear way to measure it, it's nearly impossible to prove in court."

By highlighting how appearance influences hiring and leadership decisions, the researchers hope to start a broader conversation about discrimination in the workplace.

"Our approach was to identify the impact of attractiveness bias to help managers make more informed decisions and to highlight the often-overlooked negative consequences that can result," Ellis Chefor said.

"For example, if I had a bad experience at a restaurant and the waiter was attractive, I'm going to have a worse evaluation of the organization than if they were not attractive. There are negative consequences of having attractive people, especially when there's some kind of service failure."

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