Research has broadly shown that good looking people tend to have an easier time of it in life.  They get paid more, receive better job evaluations and are generally more employable.

This so called ‘beauty premium’ may not be quite as potent as it once was.  Indeed, new research suggests that customers may not be all that keen on engaging with beautiful staff.

The researchers recruited several hundred volunteers to explore how they respond to attractive customer service staff.  The staff were shown a standard description of being served a meal in a restaurant, before being shown a picture of their waiter.

The volunteers were shown images of either a male or female waiter, with their facial features altered to make them more or less attractive.  This was done using previous research on how to define beauty.  What’s more, the volunteers were also ‘rated’ on that same method so the researchers could gauge whether the waiters were more or less attractive than each volunteer.

Finally, each volunteer was asked to rate the attractiveness of the waiter, and reveal how ‘psychologically close’ they felt to them, alongside their level of satisfaction with the service they received.

Attractive service

The data suggests a clear correlation between how close the ‘customer’ felt towards he waiter, and the perceived quality of the service they received.  This distance was most likely to be felt by those who thought the waiter was considerably better looking than them.

A second experiment then placed a few hundred more volunteers in a queue to board a flight at an airport in China.  They were asked to read a scenario about receiving in-flight service from the flight attendant.  As before, they were shown a picture of the attendant and asked to rate the attractiveness of the individual.  They were also asked to say whether they thought there was any connection between looks and ability, before rating the service they received.

As before, those who thought themselves to be un-attractive felt a significant distance between them and the more attractive flight attendants, and subsequently perceived the service they received as lower quality.  This was even so when they suggested that there was no link between looks and ability.

This trend was replicated in a third experiment where shoppers in a mall were quizzed as to the face-to-face encounters they had just had with a customer service representative.  There appears to be a clear link between the looks of an employee, our own looks and the perception of the service we receive.

The results suggest that hiring beautiful people may not be the easy win that we think it is, and may even come with a considerable down side.