Beauty Leads to Intelligence

Grant posted a link reporting a study suggesting that patients feel more comfortable when doctors are dressed stereotypically.

I commented, "It's also true that pretty people are more intelligent. It turns out that if you have 'good genes' it gives you lots of advantages, including physical beauty, intelligence, disease resistance, and many others. (In other words, the same genes that regulate accurate production of a person's face also regulate accurate production of a person's brain.)"

Grant worried that studies that get at this correlation might be driven by rare but powerful outliers such as genetic syndromes that affect both craniofacial development and IQ. That is probably not the case because (a) those syndromes are astoundingly rare and (b) they would cause a potential subject from being admitted to a scientific study to begin with.

Here's a review and meta-analysis confirming this effect. It also points out that the earliest research in this field merely found that people were much better than expected at predicting the IQ of someone they'd never met from just looking at a picture of the stranger. The connection to attractiveness came later:

PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY BULLETIN, Vol. 28 No. 2, February 2002 238-249

A recently discovered and interesting related finding is that people are much better than chance at picking which of two candidates they've never seen won an election in some far-away place. That suggests that people are reacting at a gut level simply to how people look when making their votes. So people are good at picking out the more attractive candidates which correlates with intelligence and (I would strongly hope) with competence.

Science 10 June 2005: Vol. 308. no. 5728, pp. 1623 - 1626

Science 27 February 2009: Vol. 323. no. 5918, p. 1183

Grant himself has become quite beautiful since I knew him back in college. Here's a recent picture of himself that he posts on his blog: