5 ways being attractive affects your professional success

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If you ever felt like the most attractive people always have the greatest career success, you may be on to something.

As it turns out, success, at least in some part, is skin deep.

Of course attractive people aren't always dealt the best cards — just more frequently than the rest of us average joes.

Here's how being attractive influences success:

Drake Baer contributed to reporting in this article.

Attractive people tend to get paid more

Because of what social psychologists call "the halo effect" — our tendency to assume someone possesses other positive qualities because the posses one — the better someone looks, the better a person we think they are.

Thanks to this cognitive bias, attractive people tend to be paid a premium.

Daniel Hamermesh, a University of Texas psychologist who studies beauty in the workplace, has found that a person with above-average looks earning $20 an hour over a 40-year career would earn $1.69 million, while a person with below-average looks would pull in $1.46 million.

In one sample of Americans and Canadians, economists found that attractive people make 12% to 14% more money than unattractive people.

And attractive real-estate brokers have been found to bring in more money than their less attractive peers.

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.