In human mate choice, sexually dimorphic faces and voices comprise hormone-mediated cues that purportedly develop as an indicator of mate quality or the ability to compete with same-sex rivals. If preferences for faces communicate the same biologically relevant information as do voices, then ratings of these cues should correlate. Sixty participants (30 male and 30 female) rated a series of opp...

Do men value physical attractiveness in a mate more than women? Scientists in numerous disciplines believe that they do, but recent research using speed-dating paradigms suggests that males and females are equally influenced by physical attractiveness when choosing potential mates. Nevertheless, the premise of the current work is that sex differences in the importance of physical attractiveness...

We analyze how attractiveness rated at the start of the interview in the German General Social Survey is related to weight, height, and body mass index (BMI), separately by gender and accounting for interviewers' characteristics or fixed effects. We show that height, weight, and BMI all strongly contribute to male and female attractiveness when attractiveness is rated by opposite-sex interviewe...

The present study investigated the relative contribution of four characteristics to attractiveness of the female body: waist-to-hip ratio (WHR), breasts, buttocks and thighs. Using a program for computer animation (DAZ 3D) 81 female figures were generated. Figures were created as combinations of 4 characteristics  3 equidistant sizes (small, medium and large). Participants (N=260) of both gend...

Scientific research on facial attractiveness has focused primarily on elucidating universal factors to which all raters respond consistently. However, recent work has shown that there is also substantial disagreement between raters, highlighting the importance of determining how attractiveness preferences vary among different individuals. We conducted a typical attractiveness ratings study, but...

In four experiments, we tested the existence of an ideal facial feature arrangement that could optimize the attractiveness of any face given its facial features. Participants made paired comparisons of attractiveness between faces with identical facial features but different eye-mouth distances and different interocular distances. We found that although different faces have varying attractivene...

In recent years, various studies have attempted to understand human evolution by examining relationships between athletic performance or physical fitness and facial attractiveness. Over a wide range of five homogeneous groups (n = 327), there is an approximate 3% shared variance between facial attractiveness and athletic performance or physical fitness (95% CI = 0.5-8%, p = 0.002). Further, stu...

Beauty Queens and Battling Knights: Risk Taking and Attractiveness in Chess We explore the relationship between attractiveness and risk taking in chess. We use a large international panel dataset on chess competitions which includes a control for the players’ skill in chess. This data is combined with results from a survey on an online labor market where participants were asked to rate the phot...

Humans in societies around the world discriminate between potential mates on the basis of attractiveness in ways that can dramatically affect their lives. From an evolutionary perspective, a reasonable working hypothesis is that the psychological mechanisms underlying attractiveness judgments are adaptations that have evolved in the service of choosing a mate so as to increase gene propagation ...

Symmetry is an important concept in biology, being related to mate selection strategies, health, and survival of species. In human faces, the relevance of left-right symmetry to attractiveness and health is not well understood. We compared the appearance of facial attractiveness, health, and symmetry in three separate experiments. Participants inspected front views of faces on the computer scre...