According to researchers, physically unattractive teenagers are more likely to grow up to be criminals. In a study that reads like an issue of the Onion, economists found that the long-term consequences of being young and ugly were consistent. Cute guys were uniformly less likely than averages would indicate to have committed crimes such as burglary and selling drugs, while the unhandsome were consistently more likely to have broken the law.

“We find that unattractive individuals commit more crime in comparison to average-looking ones, and very attractive individuals commit less crime in comparison to those who are average-looking,” claim Naci Mocan of the University of Colorado and Erdal Tekin of Georgia State University.

Very attractive high school girls were also found to be less likely to commit crimes, while those rated unattractive were more likely to have done so, controlling for personal and family characteristics known to be associated with criminal behavior.

Anyone who remembers high school will likely respond to the above with a collective “duh.” By 10th grade it was clear that good looking kids had it made while the rest of us slugged it out in anonymity. While the handsome ones when on to become bond traders and second wives, us ugly folk became bloggers living off of our measly Google AdSense checks.

h/t: boing boing

technorati: crime attractiveness

This entry was posted on Monday, February 20th, 2006 at 11:31 pm by Insider and is filed under I knew I'd use my Econ major. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.