Ah, to be beautiful. There have been countless studies that show that those deemed as beautiful people go on to have better lives than the rest of us. Metrics used to gauge this include career path, income and more positive attention from society. However, according to an article from BizEd, a new study from a JHU Carey School of Business professor shows that what constitutes “beautiful” can rapidly change.
In his research on the changing standards of human beauty, Assistant Professor Haiyang Yang found that, “We found that human standards of beauty are not set in stone, but are quite fluid and can change almost instantaneously.”
This research project, which was made up for three separate experiments, was conducted along with Leonard Lee, associate professor and dean’s chair at the National University of Singapore. The duo found that standards of beauty continually shift to align with the standards of the majority, that this shift can occur completely without social pressure, and that these shifts in perception can become permanent.
The complete study titled “Instantaneously Hotter: The Dynamic Revision of Beauty Assessment Standards” is forthcoming in Advances in Consumer Research.
“If the notion of beauty can be instantaneously constructed, as our findings suggest, it would be important to … identify factors that can influence these processes,” Yang said. “Future research in this direction is likely to have implications not just for business but for many other fields.”