If we’d smugly thought — or hoped — society had progressed beyond superficiality, we were, apparently, dead wrong; a study out of the University of Alberta claims that parents are culprits of a strangely intuitive but menacing type of favoritism — parents treat attractive children better than they treat ugly children.

The team of researchers at the University of Alberta, led by Dr. W. Andrew Harrell, head of the university’s Population Research Laboratory, scattered themselves across 14 supermarkets, of all places, and then observed over 400 interactions between parents and their children. Having rated the child’s attractiveness on a scale of 1 to 10, the researchers used the following as some of the criteria for how a parent treated his or her child: whether the parents safely belted the child into the seat of the grocery cart, whether the parents’ attention waned or lost focus, and whether the parents permissively or absent mindedly allowed the child to wander away or frolic dangerously in the grocery store. The results of the study — although, to be fair, the findings have yet to be published, so the academic community has not yet had sufficient time to pass judgment on Harrell’s claims — point to the creepy conclusion that parents take markedly better care of attractive children over their less attractive peers.

Harrell, who led the search, insists that, “like lots of animals, we tend to parcel out our resources on the basis of value … Maybe we can’t always articulate that, but in fact we do it. There are a lot of things that make a person more valuable, and physical attractiveness may be one of them.” The treatment of the child, according to Harrell, can be reduced to tendencies that make evolutionary sense, with attractive children and their attractive genes meriting more care.

While academics have not yet had time to sink their teeth into Harrell’s argument, some have already dismissed the study. Robert Sternberg, a psychology and education professor at Yale, pooh-poohed Harrell’s methodology — such as ignoring the socio-economic status of the parents and children who were observed — and dismissed the evolutionary theory as “speculative.”

Regardless of whether Harrell’s theory carries any scientific or intellectual legitimacy and parents do, in fact, enter into some sort of bankrupt aesthetic calculus when deciding how to treat their children, we can at least know that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and not least in the eyes of the researchers.  

Mimi Hanaoka