Bastian Jaeger

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The Last Show with David Cooper.

People are really good at calling out unfairness when it's about gender or race.

However, there's a new psychology study showing that we often miss another powerful bias that forms who gets what job, what pay, even justice.

That bias, how attractive somebody is.

I'm here with someone who's worked on this research.

His name is Bastian Jaeger, and he's a social psychology professor at Tilburg University in the Netherlands.

Bastian, thanks for being on the show.

Thanks for having me.

So before we get to the findings, to your research, what made you suspicious that attractiveness bias or beauty bias was being treated differently than other kinds of biases that I think we all label, we all understand, we all see?

You know, I feel like everyone's got a mental list that might map to like, you know, the law of what discrimination classes there are.

There's gender, race, age, even veteran status.

Like, do you think attractiveness falls on people's mental list when they when they consider discrimination?

I don't think so.

So how did this all show up in your study?

What did you do to try to test whether this stuff was true?

People didn't notice, which is, I think, what's so striking here.

Maybe it's because it's subtle.

Do you think maybe it's because deep down we've kind of normalized it as that's just the way the world works?

Pretty people, tall people, you know, handsome people, beautiful people, they get ahead and that's okay.