If I understand you correctly, essentially you’re saying that the practical effect in my daily life would be that everyone would treat me slightly better. So for example when I ask a friend or colleague to do something with me, they are 10% more likely to accept, which is significant over time, but hard to separate from natural variance. This seems plausible, but hard to verify.
Regarding natural variance I think the variance is significant, but in the downward direction. Essentially some of my t-shirts are not particularly well designed, covered in sponsors, say specific years like 2016 on them, and the print is visibly worn out from years of laundry. Contrast this to a plain dark t-shirt that I think looks OK, and I think there is a significant difference. Similarly my hair typically gets cut to about 4cm on top and 1cm on the sides, which I think looks OK right after the haircut. However, after growing about 1 cm per months for 3 months, it starts covering my ears, pube-like hairs grow in the back of my neck, and the ends of my hairs are splitting.
Nevertheless, this variance might not be enough to detect spread out overall treatment changes like the one described in the first paragraph.
My alternative hypothesis is that looks matter a lot for first impressions, but are replaced by stronger status indicators when someone gets to know me better. This would align with how looks matter the most in cases where strangers judge you, like being on stage or in person marketing.
But in this world, the people I interact with daily are people I interact with regularly, so they have stronger signals of social status that override their looks-based initial impression, and hence looks don’t matter much in my daily life (outside of meeting new people like dating).
If I understand you correctly, essentially you’re saying that the practical effect in my daily life would be that everyone would treat me slightly better. So for example when I ask a friend or colleague to do something with me, they are 10% more likely to accept, which is significant over time, but hard to separate from natural variance. This seems plausible, but hard to verify.
Regarding natural variance I think the variance is significant, but in the downward direction.
Essentially some of my t-shirts are not particularly well designed, covered in sponsors, say specific years like 2016 on them, and the print is visibly worn out from years of laundry. Contrast this to a plain dark t-shirt that I think looks OK, and I think there is a significant difference.
Similarly my hair typically gets cut to about 4cm on top and 1cm on the sides, which I think looks OK right after the haircut. However, after growing about 1 cm per months for 3 months, it starts covering my ears, pube-like hairs grow in the back of my neck, and the ends of my hairs are splitting.
Nevertheless, this variance might not be enough to detect spread out overall treatment changes like the one described in the first paragraph.
My alternative hypothesis is that looks matter a lot for first impressions, but are replaced by stronger status indicators when someone gets to know me better. This would align with how looks matter the most in cases where strangers judge you, like being on stage or in person marketing.
But in this world, the people I interact with daily are people I interact with regularly, so they have stronger signals of social status that override their looks-based initial impression, and hence looks don’t matter much in my daily life (outside of meeting new people like dating).