{"id":108,"date":"2012-01-19T12:44:00","date_gmt":"2012-01-19T19:44:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/egregioustwaddle\/2012\/01\/the-ugliness-of-smart-an-update-foiled\/"},"modified":"2016-05-02T10:47:45","modified_gmt":"2016-05-02T16:47:45","slug":"the-ugliness-of-smart-an-update-foiled","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/egregioustwaddle\/2012\/01\/the-ugliness-of-smart-an-update-foiled.html","title":{"rendered":"The Ugliness of Smart? An Update Foiled"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>
<\/div>\n

I thought I was going to squeeze out a win for Team Non-Beauty when I saw, at Slate<\/a>, that The Explainer\u2019s 2011 Question of the Year turned out to be Why Are Smart People Usually Ugly?<\/a> Woohoo! I thought. If we can\u2019t be good<\/a>, we can sure claim the intellectual high ground and devote ourselves to being evil genii. I am Mojo Jojo! You must obey!<\/i> But Nooooooooo<\/i>.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

Turns out, some studies show a general correlation between beauty and smarts, which I should have figured out from the sheer number of Librarian Takes Off Her Glasses and Lets Down Her Sexy Hair scenes to which I have been exposed in a lifetime of sucking up popular entertainment.<\/p>\n

\n
Booth<\/span><\/strong>: All right, what I want you to do is take off your glasses, shake out your hair, and say,\u201dMr. Booth, do you know what the penalty is for an overdue book?\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
Brennan<\/span><\/strong>: Why?<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
Booth<\/span><\/span><\/strong>: Never mind.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
\u2014<\/span>Bones<\/span><\/span><\/em>, \u201cThe Passenger in the Oven\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

What\u2019s worse, The Explainer found even stronger evidence of a correlation between not-so-beautiful and not-so-smart.<\/p>\n

Another researcher, Leslie Zebrowitz of Brandeis University, noticed that the looks-smarts relationship applies only to the ugly side of the spectrum. It\u2019s not that beautiful people are especially smart, she says, so much as that\u00a0<\/span>ugly<\/span>\u00a0people are especially\u00a0<\/span>dumb<\/span>.<\/span><\/i><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/div>\n

But what about the nerd trope? What about famously unbeautiful brainiacs like Jean-Paul Sartre and Eleanor Roosevelt? What, in the name of Athena, about Socrates himself\u2013the crooked gargoyle who came up with the Grecian Formula of Beauty = Goodness in the first place?<\/p>\n

Exceptions. Ugly, it seems, is a U-shaped curve, with clusters on both ends. Ugly people tend to be either lots smarter than non-ugly people (rare), or lots dumber (much more common). You can say this about Team Non-Beauty: we\u2019re never mediocre.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I thought I was going to squeeze out a win for Team Non-Beauty when I saw, at Slate, that The Explainer\u2019s 2011 Question of the Year turned out to be Why Are Smart People Usually Ugly? Woohoo! I thought. If we can\u2019t be good, we can sure claim the intellectual high ground and devote ourselves […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1086,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Ugliness of Smart? 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