People

Are unattractive kids loved less?

Written By: Tom Murray

2005-04-15

A recent observational study on children and shopping cart safety by the University of Alberta’s Dr. Andrew Harrell has caused a minor uproar in the Canadian media. His findings, which can be boiled down to the notion that good-looking children are more likely to be better attended to by their parents than “unattractive” kids are, has provoked articles in Maclean’s Magazine, the Edmonton Journal, and CTV. Responses from parents interviewed about Harrell’s findings have ranged from discomfort to denial.

“I’ve gotten a few e-mails about it,” Harrell says. “People are sensitive about this issue of attractiveness.”

Harrell, the executive director of the Population Research Laboratory in the Department of Sociology, has been researching shopping cart safety since 1990, publishing a total of 13 articles on the topic. Earlier articles, concerning the configuration of shopping carts, length of the shopping trip and the age of the child were innocuous enough to escape widespread notice, but the unpleasant notion that we favour cute children over homely ones has triggered the minor uproar.

“Most people are upset that attractiveness would even be a factor – they certainly don’t think it is. If you give them a questionnaire, they’ll say, ‘No, I love all my kids, and I don’t discriminate on the basis of attractiveness.’ The whole point of our research is that people do.”

Harrell’s team of observers followed parents and their two to five-year-old children around the grocery store for 10 minutes each, noting if the child was buckled into the grocery-cart seat, and how often the child wandered more than 10 feet away. Findings showed that 1.2 per cent of the least attractive children were buckled in, compared with 13.3 per cent of the most attractive youngsters. The observers also made judgments as to age, gender and attractiveness. A second set of observers documented the adequacy of the parenting and use of seatbelts, among other things. In total, there were 426 observations at 14 local supermarkets.

Harrell figures that it’s a Darwinian response: we’re unconsciously more likely to lavish attention on attractive children simply because they’re our best genetic material. This shouldn’t come as too much of a shock – other studies, such as a 1995 report by psychologists at the University of Texas, verify Harrell’s findings.

“Attractiveness as a big predictor of behaviour, especially parenting behaviour, has been around a long time,” Harrell said. “When I was a grad student in the late 1960s, people were doing research on it, finding it an important factor in everyday life, in how we treat others. It’s pretty ancient literature, in terms of the longevity of the field. My advisor in graduate school has gone on to do a fair amount of work in child abuse, and he’s been talking about these factors for decades now.”

It’s not as though Harrell is pleased with his own findings. The 60-year-old has five children of his own and is grandfather to three. The idea that one child would be given precedence over another based on looks is repugnant to him, but the facts are tough to get around, and more so to swallow, even in the scientific community.

“Our original data was collected back in the '90s, and the research that the Maclean’s article was based on was completed in 2003. I’ve been massaging it and re-analyzing it just to make it palatable to a journal. We have three studies dealing with the same topic, but I know they’re not politically correct, and you need a brave journal to publish them.”


Original: ExpressNews


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