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A Man’s Perceived Physical Attractiveness Is Fluid

From an evolutionary perspective, beauty is regarded as an assessment of fitness value. The fitness value of a social partner can be influenced by both physical and nonphysical traits. It follows that the perceived beauty of a social partner can be influenced by nonphysical traits such as liking, respect, familiarity, and contribution to shared goals in addition to physical traits such as youth, waist-to-hip ratio, and bilateral symmetry. We present three studies involving the evaluation of known social partners showing that judgments of physical attractiveness are strongly influenced by nonphysical factors. Females are more strongly influenced by nonphysical factors than males and there are large individual differences within each sex. In general, research on physical attractiveness based on the evaluation of purely physical traits of strangers might miss some of the most important factors influencing the perception of physical attractiveness among known associates.

A few studies have examined the effect of nonphysical factors on the judgment of physical attractiveness. Early studies that were not inspired by evolution include Gross and Crofton’s (1977) paper ‘‘What Is Good Is Beautiful,’’ written in response to Dion, Berscheid, and Walster’s (1972) landmark paper ‘‘What Is Beautiful Is Good,’’ and Nisbett and Wilson’s (1977) demonstration of a ‘‘halo effect’’ in which evaluations of one attribute of a person are generalized to influence evaluations of other attributes (see also Feingold 1992; Felson & Bohrenstedt, 1979; Owens & Ford, 1978). The famous ‘‘closing time effect’’ (Gladue & Delaney, 1990) demonstrates that simple availability can influence the perception of physical attractiveness. More recent studies inspired by evolutionary psychology show that social status (Townsend & Levy, 1990) and prosocial orientation (Jensen-Campbell, West, & Graziano, 1995) enhance perception of physical attractiveness.

Another problem is that most studies on physical attractiveness—including the few that examine nonphysical factors—are based on the evaluation of strangers. Moreover, ac- cording to Langlois et al. (2000, p. 408), ‘‘most of the research we reviewed categorized people into two levels of attractiveness, high or low.’’ Comparing the ends of the dis- tribution exaggerates the consistency with which people rate others as physically attractive based on physical traits. These widespread methods are problematic from an evolutionary perspective. In ancestral social environments, interactions took place in small groups of people whose physical attributes were roughly average and whose nonphysical attributes were intimately known to each other. The psychological mechanisms that evolved to integrate these factors into an overall assessment of physical attractiveness might not be engaged by the artificial conditions of psychological experiments, even those that attempt to examine nonphysical factors.

We present three studies that were conducted in this spirit. The first added a twist to the method of evaluating photographs by having people evaluate the photographs of known individuals in their high school yearbooks. The second and third studies were conducted on actual groups of interacting individuals. In the second study, evaluation by group members was compared to evaluation by strangers based on photographs. In the third study, group members evaluated each other when the group was initially formed and again after a period of interaction, providing the strongest test of the effect of nonphysical factors on the assessment of physical attractiveness.

To summarize the results of our first study, the perception of physical attractiveness appeared to be highly influenced by knowing the people and their nonphysical traits. It was not familiarity per se that was important in most cases—otherwise familiarity would have been the most important independent variable in the multiple regressions—but what is known and how it is evaluated in terms of liking and respect.

A description of two team members will make the results of [the second] study more vivid and intuitive. One of the five males was a ‘‘slacker’’ who obviously was not pulling his weight, either literally or figuratively. He was the primary object of negative gossip and social control efforts, such as teasing and inspecting his bedroom window when he failed to show up for practice. He was uniformly rated as physically ugly by team members. Another of the five males was the opposite of the slacker, working so hard that he was discussed as possibly a contender for the U.S. Olympic team. He was uniformly rated as physically attractive by team members. This large difference in perceived physical attractiveness did not exist for raters who knew nothing about the contributions of the two men to the team.

[In the third study], initial rating of physical attractiveness accounted for only 9.3% of the variation in final rating of physical attractiveness for females rating females, 19.2% for females rating males, and 62% for males rating females. The remaining independent variables were highly correlated with each other and with the residual variation, as in our other two studies. Liking was the next variable to be entered in all three analyses and none of the other factors explained the residual variation after the addition of liking.

Our third study is methodologically the strongest by avoiding the use of photographs and employing before-and-after ratings of physical attractiveness by the same person rather than ratings by a separate stranger. Nevertheless, the results of our third study are fully consistent with our other two studies. Among people who actually know and interact with each other, the perception of physical attractiveness is based largely on traits that cannot be detected from physical appearance alone, either from photographs or from actually observing the person before forming a relationship. The effect of nonphysical factors on the perception of physical attractiveness is strongest for females rating females, females rating males, and males rating males. It is weaker but still highly significant for males rating females.

Our studies were designed to address two shortcomings in the literature on physical attractiveness: (1) a relative paucity of studies that examine the effects of both nonphysical and physical factors on the assessment of physical attractiveness and (2) a relative paucity of studies that involve people who actually know each other. All three studies demonstrate that nonphysical factors have a very potent effect on the perception of physical attractiveness, which can persist for decades in the case of the middle-aged participants of our yearbook study.

Physical traits per se are especially important in sexual relationships because they will be partially inherited by one’s offspring. Thus, it makes sense that males are more influenced by physical features when evaluating females than when evaluating males, although the comparable asymmetry did not exist for females.

In conclusion, thinking of beauty as an assessment of fitness value leads to the prediction that nonphysical factors should have a strong effect on the perception of physical attractive- ness. In addition, naturalistic studies are needed to fully understand how physical and nonphysical factors are integrated in the perception of physical attractiveness. If we were to state our results in the form of a beauty tip, it would be, ‘‘If you want to enhance your physical attractiveness, become a valuable social partner.’’

http://heartiste.wordpress.com/2013/08/2...-is-fluid/