Does attractiveness buy happiness?

by Ariel Goldring

Well, it depends on where you’re from.

A fascinating new study in Personal Relationships finds that attractive women tend to be happier, but only in cities, not in the countryside:

Results provide strong and consistent support for our hypothesis that the well-documented association of attractiveness with both social connection and well-being outcomes varies across contexts. Among urban participants, greater conformity to cultural ideals of attractiveness (i.e., lower [waist-to-hip-ratio] WHR) predicts better well-being, partly through its relationship with positive social connectedness. No such relationships exist among rural participants. We interpret these findings as evidence for our theoretical framework regarding the sociocultural grounding of relationship (Adams et al., 2004; Adams & Plaut, 2003; Anderson et al., 2008). According to this framework, urban settings (but not rural settings) promote a “free market” of relationships (Fiske, 1991) in which attractiveness, a basis for personal choice, is an important determinant of social and psychological well-being.

The figure below shows the correlation of waist-to-hip ratio and family and friend relationship outcomes by urban–rural background.