To Make Sure People Don't Hate You, Don't Be Ugly or Mean at Work

While the following news may seem a little bit TL;DR/duh/moving on, a new study indicates that if you are unattractive and/or mean at work, your coworkers are more like to be unpleasant to you. Man, I hate high school.

Study leaders claim that this is actually the first look at workplace cruelty; previous research has dug into bullying at school and its connection to attractiveness. Brent Scott, one of the co-authors, told Michigan State University’s newspaper that:

“Frankly, it’s an ugly finding. Although we like to think we’re professional and mature in the workplace, it can be just like high school in many ways.”

No matter how totally likely and unsurprising these findings are, this study was based off of a look at only 114 people at one “health care facility in the southeastern U.S.” (let’s get a betting pool going on which one it was).

If you need help with workplace bullying, contact the Workplace Bullying Institute, which is a real organization that has a VERY thorough website that taught me a lot. Incidentally, just today lawmakers in Massachusetts moved forward to pass a bill nicknamed “The Healthy Workforce” bill which, according to the Boston Herald, “would offer protections and legal recourse to workers who have been subject to bullying, abuse or other forms of harassment at work.” FOX News (eh) says that since 2003, over 20 bills like this have been introduced, but none have gone through.