外貌与幸福感的关系研究——基于中国家庭追踪调查(CFPS)的实证分析

Study on the Relationship between Appearance and Happiness—Empirical Analysis Based on China Family Panel Studies (CFPS)

摘要: 随着社会中人际交往日益频繁，外貌在日常生活中的重要性逐渐凸显。文章基于中国家庭追踪调查(CFPS)的问卷数据，讨论了中国居民的外貌对于其日常生活中主观幸福感的影响。结果表明，在居民个体的年龄、教育水平、收入、社会地位和健康水平等其他因素基本一致的前提下，外貌评分较高的个体在日常生活中相对会有更高的幸福感，即美貌的确可以给主观幸福感带来正向的促进作用。为解决模型中可能存在的内生性问题，文章引入工具变量并使用两阶段最小二乘法进行估计。结果发现，最小二乘法估计的结果低估了美貌的幸福效应，而美貌对于主观幸福感的影响甚至超过了收入和社会地位对于主观幸福感的影响。文章的研究表明，外貌是影响居民主观幸福感的另一个重要影响因素，有助于人们更加有效地管理自我形象，并为提升主观幸福感提供了一条新的途径。

Abstract: With the increasing frequency of interpersonal interactions in society, the importance of appearance in daily life has gradually been highlighted. Based on questionnaire data from the China Family Tracking Survey (CFPS), this paper discusses the impact of Chinese residents’ appearance on their subjective well-being in daily life. The results show that under the premise that other factors such as age, education level, income, social status and health level of individual residents are basically the same, and individuals with higher appearance scores will have relatively higher happiness in their daily lives, i.e., beauty can indeed bring a positive contribution to subjective happiness. To address the possible endogeneity problem in the model, this paper introduces instrumental variables and uses two-stage least squares estimation. It is found that the least squares estimation underestimates the happiness effect of beauty, and that the effect of beauty on subjective well-being even exceeds the effect of income and social status on subjective well-being. The research in this paper suggests that appearance is another important influence on residents’ subjective well-being, which helps people manage their self-image more effectively and provides a new way to enhance subjective well-being.