It appears that yet another study has found a difference between the ways men and women view physical attractiveness. This will make the evolutionary psychologists happy, as they typically argue that male judgments of female attractiveness focus on youth and fertility, while females are all about finding a man with resources who will protect them and their children.
Dustin Wood and his colleagues asked more that 4000 people to rate photographs of men and women. You can participate in a similar study here. There are 100 photos to rate, so set aside about half an hour to do this.
Men rated women who were thin, seductive, and confident as attractive, but the women showed much less consensus about who they thought was attractive. Some men rated as very attractive by some women were rated very negatively by others. This seems really consistent with the images presented to us in the movies, with actresses all pretty much thin, seductive, and confident (think Angie) and actors ranging from really almost prissy to relatively macho.
The study did find one result of age–older participants preferred images of people smiling. I have to tease Mr. F about that–based on his background in advertising and marketing, he always complains about sad-looking people in textbook photos, so of course, we found mostly smiling people for Discovering Biological Psychology.
Symmetry Usually Predicts Judgments of Attractiveness
It would be interesting to see how these results interact with facial symmetry, which seems to be attractive to everybody, even little babies.
