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20 BizEd JULY | AUGUST 2015 research+insights In the Eyes of Many Beholders WHILE MUCH RESEARCH has shown that beautiful people have better lives— that include more successful careers, higher-paying jobs, and more positive attention from society—just what con- stitutes "beautiful" can rapidly change, according to a recent study. "We found that human standards of beauty are not set in stone, but are quite fluid and can change almost instanta- neously," says Haiyang Yang, an assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School in Baltimore, Maryland. He conducted research on the topic with Leonard Lee, associate professor and dean's chair at the National University of Singapore. Not only that, they found that standards of beauty continually shift to align with the standards of the majority, that this shift can occur completely with- out social pressure, and that these shifts in perception can become permanent. To conduct their research, Yang and Lee examined about 800,000 anony- mous ratings by more than 60,000 vis- itors to an online dating website where visitors rate people as "hot" or "not," using a ten-point scale where ten is the highest. Once they rate a photo, visi- tors are shown the average score from all previous evaluations. As they view more photos over time, their ratings begin to shift toward the average—even when they aren't shown those averages until they've entered their own rating, and even though no one is watching them make their own evaluations. "Because of this e'ect, some people became 'instantaneously hotter' to the website visitors. Others, unfortunately, became worse o'," Yang says. In a second experiment, view- ers also were allowed to see the average ratings before they made their own determinations. Re- searchers found that viewers' ratings converged on the norm regardless of timing. However, the ratings by view- ers who never saw the averages did not converge on the norm at all. In a final experiment, researchers found that the ratings by participants who were shown photos with falsely lowered averages deviated even more from the true average—even though the participants themselves claimed that knowing the average ratings did not influence their own evaluations. "If the notion of beauty can be instan- taneously constructed, as our findings suggest, it would be important to … identify factors that can influence these processes," says Yang. "Future research in this direction is likely to have implica- tions not just for business but for many other fields." "Instantaneously Hotter: The Dy- namic Revision of Beauty Assessment Standards" is forthcoming in Advances in Consumer Research. Last year, the number of international students studying at U.S. colleges and universities increased to a record high of 886,052, which is 8 percent more than the previous year. The number of U.S. students studying abroad increased by 2 percent, to 289,408, a slower rate of growth than the year before. Most come from STEM fields, and the United Kingdom is their top destination. While 2013-2014 saw an all-time high of U.S. students studying overseas, this group still represents only 10 percent of all U.S. undergrads. To read the full 2014 Open Doors Report on International Educational Exchange, visit www.iie.org/Research-and-Publications/ Open-Doors/Data. 9 10 8 5 4 6 ILLUSTRATION BY 2COMMUNIQUÉ