Research question/goal:

The project investigated the causes and consequences of perceptions of physical attractiveness in the context of immigrant integration. Physical attractiveness is a key determinant of life chances in many domains, as attractive individuals are generally treated more favourably. However, perceptions of attractiveness are socially constructed and may vary across cultural boundaries. Everyday perceptions of who is considered attractive can therefore both reflect and reproduce social hierarchies. Against this background, the project examined how immigrants’ perceived attractiveness affects their economic integration and how these perceptions are shaped by ethnicity, religion, gender, and status cues.

To address these questions, we analysed existing survey data with interviewer-rated attractiveness of the respondents and conducted several factorial survey experiments as well as a large-scale correspondence test in the German labour market. In our data collections, we experimentally varied visible characteristics such as ethnicity, gender, Muslim religiosity (via headscarf presence), and occupational status to assess their effects on perceived attractiveness, trustworthiness, and fairness evaluations of wages.

The results revealed that Turkish-origin women who wear a headscarf were perceived as less attractive and that wage disadvantages were considered more acceptable for veiled women than for unveiled women, reflecting a persistent headscarf penalty for Muslim women. While respondents consistently assigned greater importance to human capital characteristics than to attractiveness or ethnicity when evaluating wage fairness, our correspondence test in the German labor market confirmed that both ethnic and Muslim religious cues affected hiring discrimination. Discrimination in the labor market followed a gendered pattern, with Turkish-origin men and veiled Turkish-origin women experiencing the strongest disadvantages. Although attractiveness had a modest positive effect on wages, this effect varied: two of our studies showed the existence of a beauty premium for men and women in the German labour market, while the multiverse analysis showed that this effect was robust among native German employees but less consistent among ethnic minority groups. 

Overall, our findings suggest that physical attractiveness operates within existing hierarchies of ethnicity and religion. Rather than compensating for minority disadvantages, physical attractiveness often reinforces existing patterns of inequality, thereby contributing to social stratification in immigrant societies.