Some of these findings struck me as sadly intuitive and others as surprising. But I was particularly intrigued by a study out this week purporting to show that men with fat faces—ahem, "greater facial width-to-height ratios"—hold an advantage in negotiations with other men.

A team of researchers from the University of California-Riverside, London Business School, and Columbia University found that moon-headed guys were "less cooperative negotiators compared to men with smaller facial ratios," and that "this lack of cooperation allows them] to claim more value when negotiating with other men." Interestingly, the effect is invisible when negotiating with women and these big-heads were deemed "less likely to reach an agreement in a negotiation that required cooperation to reach a creative, integrative solution."

Speaking as a shortish, youngish-looking man with a thin face, I'm keenly interested in an explanation for these biases that obliterates their logic. Unfortunately for my purposes, follow-up studies on the link between height and income have found another variable in play, which is intelligence: People who are notably taller than their peers around the age of 16 also tend to be smarter. Similarly, there is some evidence that men with big heads are biologically predisposed to the sort of bullishness that makes them effective negotiators when they're surrounded by pencil-necks.

But many beauty biases at the office are no more than mental short cuts. The same way that shoppers are constantly hunting for clues that certain products are a good deal because we don't know the true value of anything (look at that discount! it's so much cheaper than that similar-looking thing!), managers and employees, who can't fully know the true potential of their peers, are bound to use short cuts to guess who's competent. Comely women and confident men might not exude PowerPoint skills in their waist-to-hip or facial width-to-height ratios, but comeliness and confidence are easy clues to pick up, which means they begin to inform our opinion of people before we're even aware that we're forming an opinion. After all, the first draft of our first impressions are sealed after as little as 13 milliseconds. Once you realize that, it's amazing we're not even more biased.