OP Unit 9: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder

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• Middelbare school
• vwo
• Leerjaar 5

Unit 9

Fitting in

Objectives unit 9

Speaking: you are able to talk about the role of people's appearance

 in society and personal lives.

Writing: Comparing two texts (optional)

Grammar: Gerunds and infinitives

Reading and Use of English: Parts 1, 2 and 6

Can you explain:

"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder"?

Who said/ wrote this?

What is beauty? Can you define it?

Work with a partner:

- What is beauty according to you? 

- How important is beauty to you?

- How important is beauty in society?

- Does beauty influence people's career prospects?

>>>  Compare your answers to that of another team.

Let's zoom in on career opportunities

5 ways being attractive affects your professional success  www.businessinsider.com

Of course attractive people aren't always dealt the best cards — just more frequently than the rest of us average joes.

Here's how being attractive influences success:

1. Attractive people tend to get paid more

Because of what social psychologists call "the halo effect" — our tendency to assume someone possesses other positive qualities because the posses one — the better someone looks, the better a person we think they are.

  

Thanks to this cognitive bias, attractive people tend to be paid a premium.

In one sample of Americans and Canadians, economists found that attractive people make 12% to 14% more money than unattractive people.

2. Attractive people tend to be more confident

Because of the halo effect, experiments have shown that we consider attractive people "as more sociable, dominant, sexually warm, mentally healthy, intelligent, and socially skilled" than unattractive people.

By the time cute kids become attractive adults, they've benefited from this bias for years, giving them higher levels of confidence.

3. Attractive people tend to have better social skills

Mobius and Rosenblat's experiments also found physical attractiveness to raise social and communication skills, which in return raise an employer's estimate of the worker's productivity.

This has a major impact over the course of a career. Research shows that raising kids' social skills is a better predictor of lifetime earnings than raising their intellectual ability.

4. Attractive women may have more bargaining power

Research suggests that men are more likely to tolerate unfairness from attractive women.

  

During a study out of Zhejiang University's School of Management in China, Chinese men between ages 18 and 26 looked at 300 photographs of faces of Chinese women who had previously been rated attractive or unattractive by another group of men. They were then shown a photo of one of the women and asked to decide whether to accept the woman's offer to split a sum of money.

The men were more likely to accept unfair offers when the woman was attractive than when she was unattractive.

Here comes the downside ...

5. Attractive people may be less likely to get a job offer if their interviewer is less attractive!

Believe it or not, however, not all bias towards attractive people is beneficial to them.

  

As Heidi Grant Halvorson explains in her book, "No One Understands You And What To Do About It," a job interviewer's ego may be threatened if she is less attractive than the candidate she's interviewing, and it's likely she'd choose to go the route of avoiding competition by simply not hiring her.

And numerous studies bear this out.

How about the search for a partner?

One of the most robust findings in evolutionary psychology is the observation that men and women differ in the characteristics they prefer in potential mates. In study after study, in country after country, psychologists consistently find that men strongly prefer looks over resources, whereas women value resources over looks.                       (www.psychologytoday. com)

The standard explanation from evolutionary psychology is known as evolved preferences theory, and it goes something like this: Men are looking for healthy, fertile women who will bear high-quality offspring for them. Since fertility for women rises in the late teens and peaks in the mid-twenties, men prefer mates in that age range. Furthermore, characteristics of feminine beauty—such as low waist-to-hip ratio, clear skin, and lustrous hair—are all signs of good health, so it’s only natural that men would find these attractive.

In contrast, according to the theory, women are at a natural disadvantage when it comes to acquiring resources. They’re physically weaker than men, and their mobility is hampered by pregnancy and child-rearing. So women are dependent on men to provide for them and their children, and that’s why they value resources over looks in a potential mate.

But, don't worry!

Here's what people are really looking for in a partner:

So what are the most important things to prioritize if you want to have a happy and successful relationship? Decades of research into relationship satisfaction and longevity points to several key qualities you may be able to spot early on:

1. Kindness, loyalty, and understanding (not looks, status, and excitement).

2. Similarity.

3. Conscientiousness. (This is about being reliable, practical, rule-following, and organized. )

4. Emotional stability. (The personality trait that affects our relationships most!)

5. The belief that relationships take work.

On every jar fits a lid 

(in good English)

or

Every Jack has his Jill

//

Every Jill has her Jack

Objective Proficiency Unit 9

Vocabulary: Exercise 3 and Phrase spot on pages 76-77  (Done?)

Grammar: all exercises on page 78-79 (incl. Corpus spot).

Writing:  Only exercise 3 on page 81.

Reading: (Exam folder 5) pages 82-83
.