Physical attractiveness greatly shapes human culture, affecting everything from social standing to employment prospects to who we associate with. So it’s no wonder social scientists are enamored with it.
Through decades of research, they have explored what makes men and women attractive. Musculature, facial symmetry, facial hair, jawline, height, and youth are factors in male attractiveness, while breast fullness, facial symmetry, youth, waist-to-waist ratio hips, a rounded butt, the length of the hair and the size of the eyes can make women more attractive.
Hot or not?
They have also typically dismissed any sentimental notions that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” All of us, regardless of our own physical attractiveness, tend to see the same people as attractive or unattractive.
Dan Ariely, the James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Psychology and Economics at Duke University, shared this blunt truth in an interview with Big Think over a decade ago. It was one of Ariely’s studies that helped prove it.
In it, Ariely and his colleagues made use of the mythical HotorNot.com website, a page started in the year 2000 where anyone could both upload a photo and anonymous users rate its attractiveness on a scale of 1 to 10 and rate the photos. from other users HotorNot offered a collaborative answer to something most people have been agonizing over at one point or another: How attractive am I? To laymen, the site was tacky, bordering on offensive, but endlessly addictive. But for social scientists who study human attractiveness, it was absolute gold.
Ariely and her team mined the website for data, looking to see if a person’s attractiveness affected how they rated others. “And the answer is no, we all see beauty in the same way,” Ariely summed up. “People who have 9 rate people the same way as people who have 4 on the attractiveness rating.”
beauty inequality
HotorNot also had a dating feature that allowed users to communicate with others on the website. The researchers found that users tended only to approach people with a similar attractiveness rating to theirs. It was a clear manifestation of what scientists call selective mating, which Ariely described as “the idea that if you take [everybody] and you ranked them according to how attractive they are… the most attractive would date the most attractive. The attractive middle would basically date the medium, and the short would date the low.”
Furthermore, Ariely found that the less attractive people are, the less they value the physical attractiveness of their potential mates. Instead, they focus on emotional characteristics like kindness, a sense of humor, and dedication.
And this can be a good thing. Studies suggest that attractive people tend to have shorter, less satisfying relationships, perhaps because they overestimate the attractiveness of their partners while overlooking other valuable traits.
As a self-described unattractive person, Ariely tends to step back and look at the social dance of humans from a dispassionate, evidence-based perspective. “We are entering a social hierarchy in a certain place and, depending on our circumstances, we come to understand differently what we want and what we don’t want and how we see the world in a way that is compatible with where we are. we find ourselves in society. hierarchy,” she said.
Source: news.google.com