Physical Attractiveness

What makes someone attractive? How does physical attractiveness affect our mating choices? In many animal species, looks are crucial for successful reproduction. In peacocks, it's the male with the largest colourful tail that gets the best chances to mate. The beautiful, large tail signals that the bird is strong and healthy, which attracts the female birds.

But is it all about fitness in the human world? What is the role of physical beauty, and how can it influence our judgements? Let's explore the role of physical attraction in romantic relationships.

• We'll begin with defining physical attraction meaning.
• Next, we'll introduce physical attractiveness theory and outline physical attractiveness examples, including the waist-to-hip ratio and facial features.
• Then, we'll introduce the halo effect psychology and the support behind it.
• Moving on, we'll discuss the matching hypothesis and look at the matching hypothesis experiment, to understand the role of attraction in choosing a partner.

• Finally, we'll evaluate the theories explaining the role of physical attractiveness in relationships.

Fig. 1: We're often drawn to people we consider attractive.

Physical Attraction Meaning

Attraction is an instinctive feeling that involves a desire to be around someone. When we are attracted to someone, we feel fond of this person, we find their presence pleasing, and we can develop an interest in them. Attraction can be due to many factors, and one of them is physical attractiveness.

Physical attractiveness is based on one's physical appearance and the degree to which it aligns with the aesthetic preferences of others. Looks are especially powerful at evoking attraction, they can make us interested in a person from the moment we see their face or even a photo on a dating app. It's how “love at first sight” works.

Physical Attractiveness Theory

The definition of beauty is generally arbitrary – the physical traits we perceive as attractive have changed across cultures and times. However, evolutionary psychologists argue that certain universals exist when it comes to physical attraction. Attraction towards traits that signal to others that we are healthy and ready to reproduce has been proposed to be evolutionarily adaptive.

Physical Attractiveness Examples

We'll consider example traits that have been associated with attraction across cultures, including the waist-to-hip ratio, facial features and facial symmetry.

Waist-to-Hip Ratio

One physical feature that has been linked to attractiveness is the waist-to-hip ratio in females. Singh hypothesised that a small waist-to-hip ratio is an honest indicator of health, youthfulness and female fertility and therefore results in attraction in males regardless of culture.

The preference for the small waist-to-hip ratio is thought to be evolutionarily adaptive, as it's one of the signals of health and youthfulness.

• The limited period of fertility for women could lead to pressure on choosing younger female partners.
• Men with this preference had higher chances of selecting a partner that can bear many children, allowing him to successfully pass on his genes.
• While men without this preference could have lower reproductive success.

Facial Features

Cunningham et al. (1995) studied Asian, white, and Hispanic men’s attitudes towards women. They found that high cheekbones, small noses, and large eyes were consistently rated as attractive across all cultures. This suggests a certain universality when it comes to the desired facial features.

Similarly to the waist-to-hip ratio, these facial features are also associated with youthfulness. Therefore, a universal preference for these features in females could develop due to evolutionary pressures.

Facial Symmetry

Another feature that makes people seem more attractive is facial symmetry. The influence of facial symmetry on attraction was investigated by Langlois and Roggman (1990). They hypothesised that faces that look average in the population would be perceived as the most attractive.

To investigate this hypothesis, they took photos of 3 male and 3 female faces and created a composite image for each gender.

• When these composite images were shown to participants, they were consistently rated as more attractive compared to the individual faces. The more faces were averaged to create the composite image, the more attractive it was perceived.

Rhodes et al. (2001) repeated this experiment on non-Western faces to investigate the universality of the attractiveness of symmetry and averageness. They found that Japanese composite faces were judged as more attractive for Japanese participants, and average Chinese faces were more attractive for Chinese participants.

In their second experiment, they also investigated whether perfect symmetry would be preferred compared to composite images.

• It was found that participants judged faces which were perfectly symmetrical (the two halves were mirror images of each other) as more attractive than average faces.

The preference for facial symmetry can also be explained by evolutionary pressures, as it's one of the indicators of good health.

The Halo Effect: Psychology

Physical attractiveness makes us more desirable to potential partners, but it can also make us seem more likeable or even more competent. According to the halo effect, we are more likely to view attractive people in a positive light in domains unrelated to appearance.

The Halo effect was investigated by Dion et al. (1972). They recruited 30 male and 30 female American students to take part in the study. Participants were told the study is a ‘people perception’ experiment alongside graduates trained in the field.

• Each participant was given a randomly chosen selection of three envelopes containing photos: one with an ‘attractive’ person, one with an ‘average-looking person’, and another with an ‘unattractive’ person.
• The participants then had to rate the people in the photos on 27 different personality traits on a scale from 1 to 6.
• They were then asked which they thought was most likely to achieve marital, parental, and general happiness.
• Additionally, participants were asked what profession they would assign to each person divided into low, medium, and high-status occupations.

The results clearly demonstrated that participants perceived attractive people as having more positive personality traits, higher-status jobs, and greater happiness. These results support the halo effect theory, as they suggest that people do link physical attractiveness to other positive attributes.

Fig. 2: We judge attractive people as more happy and more successful.

The Matching Hypothesis

When looking for a potential partner, we may not instantly go for the most attractive person around. Instead, we look for someone who we think fits our level of attractiveness, known as the matching hypothesis.

You might have heard people use the phrase “she’s way out of my league”, which demonstrates that we are often looking for someone who's at a similar level of attractiveness to us.

According to this theory, a person’s choice of partner is a balance between someone who is of a similar level of attractiveness to them and who is the most attractive person possible within their ‘league’. This is because people aim to get the best outcome (the most attractive partner) without the negative experience of being rejected.

Matching Hypothesis Experiment

Murstein (1972) studied 197 college couples. First, each participant was given a rating of attractiveness from a panel of judges individually. Then, the similarity in the ratings between the people who were together was compared to the similarity of random men and women in the sample that were not together.

• It was found that the ratings of attractiveness in the real couples were more similar compared to the random pairings, supporting the matching hypothesis. There was a positive correlation between attractiveness in real relationships.

These findings are also supported by Feingold (1988), who conducted a meta-analysis of 17 studies that investigated how similar are couples or same-sex friends in terms of physical attractiveness.

• He found that there was a greater positive correlation between the partners’ ratings of attractiveness compared to the ratings in friend pairs, supporting the matching hypothesis.

However, some research contradicts the matching hypothesis, suggesting that people are more interested in partners that are more attractive than them rather than match their level of attractiveness (Walster et al. 1966; Taylor et al. 2011).

Evaluation of the Theories of Physical Attractiveness

One strength of the theories of physical attraction is that they have been supported by numerous studies. What is more, they've been investigated across different cultures, which supports the evolutionary basis for why certain physical attributes make us look universally more attractive.

However, some critics point out that physical attractiveness mainly applies to short-term relationships, whereas in long-term relationships, the most important things are compatibility of attitudes and values. The matching theory also doesn’t consider that people may compensate for a lack of physical attraction by focusing on people’s positive personality traits.

Moreover, research on physical attractiveness is often affected by beta bias, as it usually focuses on male views.

• Many studies have shown men value physical attractiveness more than women in relationships. This shows that physical attractiveness is not a reliable motivator for attraction across genders.

Finally, attractiveness may be more or less influential depending on our values. Towhey (1979) gave participants photos of strangers along with some biographical information and found that those who held sexist views were more likely to view physical attractiveness as important.

Fig. 3: Physical attractiveness is not the only factor that counts, especially in long-term relationships.