Scholars’ physical appearance, research performance, and feelings of happiness

Our study aims to analyse whether former feelings of happiness and/or physical appearance are significantly correlated with the subsequent observable research performance of scholars. To the best of our knowledge, both has not been analysed previously. To do so, we photographed 49 persons attending the 72nd annual conference of the German Academic Association for Business Research (VHB), which took place in Bremen in 2010. We interviewed them about their feelings of happiness. Later we asked students to evaluate the photographed persons’ attractiveness, competence, trustworthiness, likeability and their feelings of happiness. To determine the academics’ research performance we compiled a list of their recent journal publications, considering different journal weights and dividing them by the number of authors. Regression analyses reveal significant relationships between feelings of happiness in 2010 and research performance in 2011/2012. Conversely, we cannot observe significant relationships between previous research performance and subsequently reported feelings of happiness. Even though at first glance one would not expect that physical appearance is relevant for research output we find significant relationships. While previous studies show that scholars’ evaluations of teaching are influenced by attractiveness, our results suggest that research performance is not influenced by attractiveness but especially by (perceived) trustworthiness. Our data also reveal a weakly significant correlation between scholars’ perceived feelings of happiness and their reported feelings of happiness.