Abstract
Objectives
To test whether cross-cultural variation in men’s facial hair conforms to patterns predicted by processes of inter-sexual and intra-sexual selection.
Methods
Data were taken from the PEW Research Center’s World’s Muslims’ project that collected information from 14,032 men from 25 countries. An Independent Factor Analysis was used to analyse how suites of demographic factors predict men’s beardedness.
Results
Analyses replicated those from past research using the PEW data, showing that beardedness was more frequent under prevailing conditions of lower health and higher economic disparity.
Conclusions
These findings contribute to evidence that men’s decision to augment their masculinity via full beardedness occurs under conditions characterised by stronger inter-sexual and intra-sexual selection.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Addison, W. E. (1989). Beardedness as a factor in perceived masculinity. Perception and Motor Skills, 68, 921–922.
Barber, N. (2001). Mustache fashion covaries with a good marriage market for women. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 25, 261–272.
Barr, D. J. (2013). Random effects structure for testing interactions in linear mixed-effects models. Frontiers in Psychology, 4, 328.
Barr, D. J., Levy, R., Scheepers, C., & Tily, H. J. (2013). Random effects structure for confirmatory hypothesis testing: Keep it maximal. Journal of Memory and Language, 68, 255–278.
Bates, D., Mächler, M., Bolker, B. M., & Walker, S. C. (2015). Fitting linear mixed-effects models usng lme4. Journal of Statistical Software, 67(1), 1–48.
Beseris, E. A., Naleway, S. E., & Carrier, D. R. (2020). Impact protection potential of mammalian hair: Testing the pugilism hypothesis for the evolution of human facial hair. Integrative Organismal Biology, 2(1), obaa005.
Clarkson, T. R., Sidari, M. J., Sains, R., Alexander, M., Harrison, M., Mefodeva, V., Pearson, S., Lee, A. J., & Dixson, B. J. W. (2020). A multivariate analysis of women’s mating strategies and sexual selection on men’s facial morphology. Royal Society Open Science, 7, 191209.
Craig, B. M., Nelson, N. L., & Dixson, B. J. W. (2019). Sexual selection, agonistic signalling, and the effect of beards on men’s anger displays. Psychological Science, 30, 728–738.
DeBruine, L. M., Jones, B. C., Crawford, J. R., Welling, L. L. M., & Little, A. C. (2010). The health of a nation predicts their mate preferences: Cross-cultural variation in women's preferences for masculinized male faces. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B, 277, 2405–2410.
DeBruine, L. M., Little, A. C., & Jones, B. C. (2012). Extending parasite-stress theory to variation in human mate preferences. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 35, 86–87.
Dixson, B. J. (2019). Sexual selection and extended phenotypes in humans. Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology, 5, 103–107.
Dixson, B. J., & Brooks, R. C. (2013). The role of facial hair in women's perceptions of men's attractiveness, health, masculinity and parenting abilities. Evolution and Human Behavior, 34, 236–241.
Dixson, B. J. W., & Rantala, M. J. (2016). The role of facial and body hair distribution in women’s judgments of men’s sexual attractiveness. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 45, 877–889.
Dixson, B. J., & Vasey, P. L. (2012). Beards augment perceptions of men’s aggressiveness, dominance and age, but not attractiveness. Behavioral Ecology, 23, 481–490.
Dixson, A. F., Dixson, B. J., & Anderson, M. J. (2005). Sexual selection and the evolution of visually conspicuous sexually dimorphic traits in male monkeys, apes, and human beings. Annual Review of Sex Research, 16, 1–19.
Dixson, B. J., Tam, J., & Awasthy, M. (2013). Do women’s preferences for men’s facial hair change with reproductive status? Behavioral Ecology, 24, 708–716.
Dixson, B. J. W., Lee, A. J., Sherlock, J. M., & Talamas, S. N. (2017a). Beneath the beard: Do facial morphometrics influence the strength of judgments of men’s beardedness? Evolution and Human Behavior, 38, 164–174.
Dixson, B. J. W., Rantala, M. J., Melo, E. F., & Brooks, R. C. (2017b). Beards and the big city: Displays of masculinity may be amplified under crowded conditions. Evolution and Human Behavior, 38, 259–264.
Dixson, B. J., Blake, K. R., Denson, T. F., Gooda-Vossos, A., O’Dean, S. M., Sulikowski, D., & Brooks, R. C. (2018a). The role of mating context and fecundability in women’s preferences for men’s facial masculinity and beardedness. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 93, 90–102.
Dixson, B. J. W., Sherlock, J. M., Cornwall, W., & Kasumovic, M. M. (2018b). Contest competition and men’s facial hair: Beards may not provide advantages in combat. Evolution and Human Behavior, 39, 147–153.
Dixson, B. J. W., Kennedy-Costantini, S., Lee, A. J., & Nelson, N. L. (2019a). Mothers are sensitive to men's beards as a potential cue of paternal investment. Hormones and Behavior, 113, 55–66.
Dixson, B. J., Rantala, M. J., & Brooks, R. C. (2019b). Cross-cultural variation in women’s preferences for men’s body hair. Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology, 5, 131–147.
Geniole, S. N., & McCormick, C. M. (2015). Facing our ancestors: Judgments of aggression are consistent and related to the facial width-to-height ratio in men irrespective of beards. Evolution and Human Behavior, 36, 279–285.
Gray, P. B., Craig, L. K., Paiz-Say, J., Lavika, P., Kumar, S. A., & Rangaswamy, M. (2020). Sexual selection, signaling and facial hair: US and India ratings of variable male facial hair. Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology, 6, 170–184.
Grueter, C. C., Isler, K., & Dixson, B. J. (2015). Are badges of status adaptive in large complex primate groups? Evolution and Human Behavior, 36, 398–406.
Hamilton, W. D., & Zuk, M. (1982). Heritable true fitness and bright birds: A role for parasites? Science, 218, 384–387.
Heisig, J. P., & Schaeffer, M. (2019). Why you should always include a random slope for the lower-level variable involved in a cross-level interaction. European Sociological Review, 35, 258–279.
Janif, Z. J., Brooks, R. C., & Dixson, B. J. (2014). Negative frequency-dependent preferences and variation in male facial hair. Biology Letters, 10(4), 20130958.
Kokko, H., & Jennions, M. D. (2008). Parental investment, sexual selection and sex ratios. Journal of Evolutionary Biology, 21, 919–948.
Kokko, H., Jennions, M. D., & Brooks, R. (2006). Unifying and testing models of sexual selection. Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution and Systematics, 37, 43–66.
Kupfer, T. R., & Fessler, D. M. (2018). Ectoparasite defence in humans: Relationships to pathogen avoidance and clinical implications. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 373, 20170207.
Kuppens, T., & Pollet, T. V. (2014). Mind the level: Problems with two recent nation-level analyses in psychology. Frontiers in Psychology, 5(1110), 1–4.
Kuznetsova, A., Brockhoff, P. B., & Christensen, R. H. B. (2015). lmerTest: Tests for random and fixed effects for linear mixed effect models. Retrieved from https://CRAN.R- project.org/package=lmerTest.
Luoto, S. (2019). An updated theoretical framework for human sexual selection: From ecology, genetics, and life history to extended phenotypes. Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology, 5, 48–102.
Marcinkowska, U. M., Kozlov, M. V., Cai, H., Contreras-Garduño, J., Dixson, B. J., Oana, G. A., Kaminski, G., Li, N. P., Lyons, M. T., Onyishi, I. E., Prasai, K., Pazhoohi, F., Prokop, P., Rosales Cardozo, S. L., Sydney, N., Yong, J. C., & Rantala, M. J. (2014). Cross-cultural variation in men's preference for sexual dimorphism in women's faces. Biology Letters, 10, 20130850.
Marcinkowska, U. M., Rantala, M. J., Lee, A. J., Kozlov, M. V., Toivo, A., Cai, T. H., Contreras-Garduño, J., David, O. A., Kaminski, G., Li, N. P., Onyishi, I. E., Prasai, K., Pazhoohi, F., Prokop, P., Cardozo, S. L. R., Sydney, N., Taniguchi, H., Krams, I., & Dixson, B. J. W. (2019). Women’s preferences for men’s facial masculinity are strongest under favourable ecological conditions. Scientific Reports, 9, 3387.
McIntosh, T., Lee, A. J., Sidari, M., Stower, R., Sherlock, J. M., & Dixson, B. J. W. (2017). Microbes and masculinity: Does exposure to pathogenic cues alter women’s preferences for male facial masculinity and beardedness? PLoS One, 12(6), e0178206.
Mefodeva, V., Sidari, M. J., Chau, H., Fitzsimmons, B., Strain, G., Clarkson, T. R., Pearson, S., Lee, A. J., & Dixson, B. J. W. (2020). Multivariate intra-sexual selection on men’s perceptions of male facial morphology. Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology, 6, 143–169.
Moore, F. R., Coetzee, V., Contreras-Garduño, J., Debruine, L. M., Kleisner, K., Krams, I., Marcinkowska, U., Nord, A., Perrett, D. I., Rantala, M. J., Schaum, N., & Suzuki, T. N. (2013). Cross-cultural variation in women's preferences for cues to sex- and stress-hormones in the male face. Biology Letters, 9, 20130050.
Muscarella, F., & Cunningham, M. R. (1996). The evolutionary significance and social perception of male pattern baldness and facial hair. Ethology and Sociobiology, 17, 99–117.
Neave, N., & Shields, K. (2008). The effects of facial hair manipulation on female perceptions of attractiveness, masculinity, and dominance in male faces. Personality and Individual Differences, 45, 373–377.
Nelson, N. L., Kennedy-Costantini, S., Lee, A. J., & Dixson, B. J. W. (2019). Children’s judgements of facial hair are influenced by biological development and experience. Evolution and Human Behavior, 113, 55–66.
Oldstone-Moore, C. (2015). Of beards and men: The revealing history of facial hair. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Pazhoohi, F., & Kingstone, A. (2020). Parasite prevalence and income inequality positively predict beardedness across 25 countries. Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology, 6, 185–193.
Petersen, R. M., & Higham, J. P. (2020). The role of sexual selection in the evolution of facial displays in male non-human primates and men. Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology, 6, 249–276.
Pollet, T. V., Tybur, J. M., Frankenhuis, W. E., & Rickard, I. J. (2014). What can cross-cultural correlations teach us about human nature? Human Nature, 25, 410–429.
Randall, V. A. (2008). Androgens and hair growth. Dermatologic Therapy, 21, 314–328.
Robinson, W. S. (1950). Ecological correlations and the behavior of individuals. American Sociological Review, 15, 351–357.
Robinson, D. E. (1976). Fashions in shaving and trimming of the beard: The men of the illustrated London news, 1842-1972. American Journal of Sociology, 81, 1133–1141.
Saxton, T. K., Mackey, L. L., McCarty, K., & Neave, N. (2016). A lover or a fighter? Opposing sexual selection pressures on men’s vocal pitch and facial hair. Behavioral Ecology, 27, 512-519
Scott, I. M., Clark, A. P., Josephson, S. C., Boyette, A. H., Cuthill, I. C., Fried, R. L., et al. (2014). Human preferences for sexually dimorphic faces may be evolutionarily novel. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111, 14388–14393.
Sherlock, J. M., Tegg, B., Sulikowski, D., & Dixson, B. J. (2017). Facial masculinity and beardedness determine men’s explicit, but not their implicit, responses to male dominance. Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology, 3, 14–29.
Štěrbová, Z., Tureček, P., & Kleisner, K. (2019). She always steps in the same river: Similarity among long-term partners in their demographic, physical, and personality characteristics. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 52.
Stone, E. A., Shackelford, T. K., & Buss, D. M. (2007). Sex ratio and mate preferences: A cross- cultural investigation. European Journal of Social Psychology, 37(2), 288–296.
Stower, R., Lee, A. J., McIntosh, T., Sidari, M., Sherlock, J. M., & Dixson, B. J. W. (2020). Mating strategies and the masculinity paradox: How relationship context, relationship status and sociosexuality shape women's preferences for facial masculinity and beardedness. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 49, 809–820.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of Interest
The authors have no competing interests.
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Electronic supplementary material
ESM 1
(PDF 3453 kb)
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Dixson, B.J.W., Lee, A.J. Cross-Cultural Variation in Men’s Beardedness. Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology 6, 490–500 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40750-020-00150-4
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40750-020-00150-4