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The Impact of Health, Wealth, and Attractiveness on Romantic Evaluation from Photographs of Faces

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Abstract

A large literature suggests that men and women differ in their self-reported mate preferences such that men place greater weight on physical attractiveness than women do, whereas women value financial prospects more than men. Yet, little research has addressed how these differences generalize to other contexts, such as modern online dating in which mate selection may largely depend on visual cues. Distinct from the sex differences observed in previous studies relying on self-reports, we found that men and women both used perceptions of health and attractiveness to select hypothetical partners based on photographs of their faces. Importantly, although people reliably identified others’ wealth from their photographs, these perceptions did not influence men’s or women’s partner selections. Thus, men and women may select romantic partners similarly based on limited visual information.

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Notes

  1. Although we instructed our research assistants to download 80 female faces, they downloaded 81 faces; thus, we included them all.

  2. Although we collected photographs of individuals only within this particular bracket, we did not record each target’s specific age when downloading the stimuli and were unable to retrieve this information post hoc. Notably, all effects and significance levels remained reliable when we considered only the targets’ peers (i.e., participants who reported their age to be 18–35 years old; n = 159).

  3. According to Eastwick et al.’s (2014) recent meta-analysis, the average correlation between participants’ judgments of targets’ physical attractiveness and their interest in them at initial attraction (resembling the zero-acquaintance context examined here) was r = .59. Similarly, the correlation between participants’ evaluations of targets’ earning prospects and their interest in them at initial attraction was r = .25. To guarantee sufficient power, we (conservatively) used the latter effect size in our power analysis.

  4. We additionally examined whether people indeed evaluated physical attractiveness and not attractiveness in general. To address this, we recruited an independent sample of 61 participants (n = 28 female), who provided their ratings of physical attractiveness for the opposite sex targets. We found that people’s attractiveness ratings in the main study strongly correlated with the physical attractiveness ratings provided by the participants from the independent sample: r(156) = .95, p < .001. In other words, people indeed evaluated physical attractiveness.

  5. Because standardized estimates may be misleading in the context of multilevel modeling, we report unstandardized coefficients accompanied by their standard errors (Hox, 2010).

  6. Because we were interested in how perceptions of health, wealth, and attractiveness relate to romantic interest, we did not include actual wealth in these models.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Rebecca Zhu and other members of the Social Perception and Cognition Lab for their help with data collection. The current work was supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to Nicholas O. Rule.

Funding

This study was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Grant.

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  1. Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, 100 St. George Street, Toronto, ON, M5S 3G3, Canada

    Konstantin O. Tskhay, Jerri M. Clout & Nicholas O. Rule

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  1. Konstantin O. Tskhay
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  2. Jerri M. Clout
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Correspondence to Konstantin O. Tskhay.

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Konstantin O. Tskhay declares that he has no conflict of interest. Jerri M. Clout declares that she has no conflict of interest. Nicholas O. Rule declares that he has no conflict of interest.

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Tskhay, K.O., Clout, J.M. & Rule, N.O. The Impact of Health, Wealth, and Attractiveness on Romantic Evaluation from Photographs of Faces. Arch Sex Behav 46, 2365–2376 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-017-0963-z

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