A new University of Alberta study posits that parents provide better care and more attention to "good-looking children." Social psychologist Andrew Harrell conducted the study by watching how parents monitor their children in supermarkets. Of course, the tricky (and, in my opinion, questionable) thing is judging a child's attractiveness to begin with. In this study, the researchers (not the parents) "graded each child on a scale of one to 10." From the press release:
Findings showed that 1.2 per cent of the least attractive children were buckled in, compared with 13.3 per cent of the most attractive youngsters. The observers also noticed the less attractive children were allowed to wander further away and more often from their parents. In total, there were 426 observations at the 14 supermarkets.
Harrell, who has been researching shopping cart safety since 1990 and has published a total of 13 articles on the topic, figures his latest results are based on a parent's instinctive Darwinian response: we're unconsciously more likely to lavish attention on attractive children simply because they're our best genetic material. basis of attractiveness.
