5 ways being attractive affects your professional success

Attractive people tend to be more confident

Because of the halo effect, experiments have shown that we consider attractive people "as more sociable, dominant, sexually warm, mentally healthy, intelligent, and socially skilled" than unattractive people.

By the time cute kids become attractive adults, they've benefited from this bias for years, giving them higher levels of confidence.

It's a "self-fulfilling prophecy," say Markus Mobius and Tanya Rosenblat in a University of Michigan paper called "Why Beauty Matters."

Attractive people tend to have better social skills

Mobius and Rosenblat's experiments also found physical attractiveness to raise social and communication skills, which in return raise an employer's estimate of the worker's productivity.

This has a major impact over the course of a career. Research shows that raising kids' social skills is a better predictor of lifetime earnings than raising their intellectual ability.

Attractive women may have more bargaining power

As Business Insider's Shana Lebowitz previously reported, research suggests that men are more likely to tolerate unfairness from attractive women.

During a study out of Zhejiang University's School of Management in China, Chinese men between ages 18 and 26 looked at 300 photographs of faces of Chinese women who had previously been rated attractive or unattractive by another group of men. They were then shown a photo of one of the women and asked to decide whether to accept the woman's offer to split a sum of money.

The men were more likely to accept unfair offers when the woman was attractive than when she was unattractive.

Attractive people may be less likely to get a job offer if their interviewer is less attractive

Believe it or not, however, not all bias towards attractive people is beneficial to them.

As Heidi Grant Halvorson explains in her book, "No One Understands You And What To Do About It," a job interviewer's ego may be threatened if she is less attractive than the candidate she's interviewing, and it's likely she'd choose to go the route of avoiding competition by simply not hiring her.

And numerous studies bear this out.

"No one actually says to himself or herself, much less to others, I am threatened by this person, so there is no way I'm hiring this applicant," Halverson says, "but that's exactly what happens."