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We need scientists to tell us this?

If you’ve ever found yourself excluded from a clique, it may be you’re just not good looking enough – according to science.
A study has found that people rated as attractive tend to seek out equally attractive people in social situations.
And attractive women were most likely of all to be found at the centre of a group, the researchers said.

Researchers from the University of Otago in New Zealand, Oxford University and others carried out a giant experiment using hidden cameras on the roof of a sports stadium in Dunedin, New Zealand.

We can probably close down large chunks of our universities if this is what they are reduced to studying. Because absolutely anyone even vaguely observant, doesn’t have to be blokes out on the pull, would tell you this in an instant. Just look at the birds in a pub or nightclub. There will be some slight variance of hotness and shaggability among groups of of them, said variability being very much less than that variance between groups.

Everyone knows this already: why are we paying tax money to get people to “study” it?

13 thoughts on “We need scientists to tell us this?”

  1. Picture the scene: Isaac Newton snoozing on a hot day in late summer. An apple falls!

    Newton thinks “another stupid bastard apple to pick up”, rolls his eyes, adjusts his wig, and goes back to sleep because after all, any fule kno that things fall. What’s to study?

    Tax money point taken, of course.

  2. It probably works the other way around as well. The sports journalist Gabriele Marcotti once wrote a great piece on why football wasn’t a fit for the Olympics. He compared it to having George Clooney in your gang: great for a short while, but then his looks, brains, charm, aspirations, all would jar with your gang. Eventually you would end up ostracism him.
    So gentlemen (it is mostly gentlemen here); if anyone is feeling slightly lonely or unloved as they read their papers and blogs today, they’re probably just a gorgeous hunk, just too cool for friends.

  3. +1 to Formertory

    It’s a bit like looking for the perfect light bulb. Each one of these confirms that what we know about the world and the way it works is, probably, correct.

    But once in a while, something unusual is discovered, and that ‘pays’ for the other 999 times we got a confirmation.

    But we need more research to confirm that this is the case…

  4. Tax money? I thought students were paying life altering fees . If so, they can study what they like. This study, involving judging who’s really hot in social groups, sounds quite fun .
    Unlike Economics which has become full of so much junk Maths ,including Algebra for fucks sake, that the magnificent Sorbonne graduate students rose up in 2000 and anathematised it as autistic .If after studying the tres snob PPE at Oxford, Bullingdon Boys or the “sons of landed gentry baying for broken glass” as Evelyn Waugh depicted them (from life), come out thinking that the banks lend money and don’t create it and that laissez faire is not founded on Land Value Tax then the sooner Economics teaching is shut down at Oxford the better. Be on the safe side: shut down the whole thing ,pour encourager les autres.

  5. Absolute belter of a post, DBC.

    I didn’t understand a word of it, and it also squeezed in a couple of references to Bullington and the like before unveiling LVT as the finale.

    Satire at its best.

  6. ‘Researchers from the University of Otago in New Zealand, Oxford University and others carried out a giant experiment using hidden cameras on the roof of a sports stadium in Dunedin, New Zealand.’

    Have the voyeurs been arrested yet?

  7. Attractive women are in the center of social groups, but not attractive men. One assumes, but the study doesn’t explore, that strong men are in the center of male social groups. We already know this from the 1960s hit Leader of the Pack.

  8. Everyone knows this already: why are we paying tax money to get people to “study” it?

    Because we have a target of 100% of the population of the UK being “university” graduates. Given the relative thickness of 50% of the population we need them to “study” subjects which their abilities enable them to pass.

  9. But what about the contrary stereotype where a middling good-looking girl will pal up with a plainer girl, to emphasise the contrast? Which stereotype is true?

  10. Sorry I see this was NZ students, not UK, but the principle of my comment applies in relation to UK educashun policy.

  11. Sometimes you need to do what appears to be a duff study to work out if the methodolgy works so it can be applied to something else. “Study proves apples contain sugar, pah idiots!” vs “Study shows that doing X Y and Z can measure the sugar content of an organic sample, as demonstrated by tests using apples, further research with bananas required”.

    Not sure what methodology the hotness test was testing though.

  12. Bloke in Costa Rica

    I see DBC has given the orderlies the slip and strolled out the main gate into town to talk bollocks to passers-by. It is unclear to me how much worthwhile economics would be left if all the mathematics were stripped out, but I suppose it would have the benefit of being in a sufficiently etiolated state for Murphy’s class of window-lickers at City U. to understand it.

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