Why men are attracted to women with small feet | Hacker News Reader

Why men are attracted to women with small feet

newscientist.com

39 pointsfogus43 comments

22 year old gay male here--I chose right, left, right, right. For the women, I thought the right faces looked happier and more engaging. I was pretty confident in my answers except for #2, the first male in the series. I think the transparent hair across the forehead was skewing my reaction.

If heterosexual males and females preferred the left images far more often, it's strange that I would have chosen the right for both. I wonder if these results are typical for my subgroup, and if so, why?

Gotta love having hardwired sexual preferences for a non-reproductive orientation! It's like asking whether you prefer carburetors or fuel injection on your bumper car. :)

Huh. I would describe myself as a "very" hetero male -- though not with any issues around those that aren't -- and I chose the exact opposite, left-right-left-left.

It would be really neat to do a statistically significant test on that.

Neat! Yeah, I'd love to take the full test and see their dataset.

What do you mean with 4 choices, and a male? I just found two faces on the article and I tried to follow the links but didn't see where these 4 options are.

The popup when you enter the page isn't actually spam, and isn't actually some customer satisfaction thing. It took me a few minutes to figure that out, though.

Obligatory: http://xkcd.com/570/

Heterosexual male, picked all four left, although only the first was obvious for me.

Enable JavaScript. I couldn't see it either until I allowed the domain with NoScript. There's a popup that shows up with a link to the survey on Survey Monkey.

I only saw one image in the article. What are you guys looking at?

There's a survey that you can take from the popup on the article page.

I missed that the first time since I have an automatic close-popups-without-reading reflex.

right right(barely) left left. I think most of my opinion is based on how I feel about people I've known that looked vaguely like the composites.

I think I'm not answering the right question though. Looking at the first picture, I'd agree that the left face is more attractive, but I'm more attracted to the face on the right. Weird distinction.

I'm also a bit jaded by a quote I heard a long time ago along the lines of "experimental psychology is really the psychology of the 18-year old freshman psych student."

I'm heterosexual and preferred the women on the right too, and I agree they look more engaging and happy.

I'm fairly surprised that the actual results were so skewed. And my wife's feelings are hurt because I tell her she's attractive and now she knows my taste is abnormal.

Same here. Actually, I'd say it's quite a compliment. Abnormal just means that you don't have typical tastes in beauty, so it means her beauty is of special kind.

I found the first girl on the right definitely more attractive, but I generally find slightly more masculine looking women more attractive, even though I'm quite heterosexual. I guess most men just like more feminine looking women because of some kind of dominance instinct. (Though it could also just be a flawed study, a statistical fluke of some sort.)

"Women with smaller feet have prettier faces, at least according to the men who took part in this study. So do women with longer thigh bones and narrower hips, as well as women who are taller overall."

Seems odd because short women usually don't have large feet (at least from my experience).

My wife is only 4'11" but has small feet.

I thought the right face was more attractive - it looks "warmer" (nicer, friendlier) than the left one. I must be doing something wrong, like preferring women with whom I would like to be friends. ;-)

Me too. I guess we are fetishists and should prowl at the circus?

This is an effect of the lighting. The picture on the right has much better lighting; it's almost textbook portrait. The compositing messed up the lighting in the one on the left, which makes the features look muted in comparison.

My guess would be that the pictures that made up the right-hand composite were more consistent. Either the faces were more consistently in the same place, or they consistently had similar lighting.

I agree. The one on the left seems to have the hallmarks of objective attractiveness, but I could much more easily see myself spending time with the one on the right.

Perhaps it's because the right looks more "human". The over compositing will result in attractive features, but it also seems like it can have an almost uncanny valley effect where it's rejected for being too perfect.

I can see that being true, but they're both composites. I don't know, the left one is what I'd call "hot", though it's not really attractive to me. The right one seems to fit "cute" much better.

Since all HN'ers claim they chose right sided faces, I'll be the one to admit I chose all lefts (easy). But I didn't choose a woman (or man :D) to marry, I just chose whichever I considered to be more attractive generally speaking.

This article makes no mention that preference might reflect contemporary culture and times.

I think the underlying assumption is that by selecting traits that one has relatively little control over (foot size, thigh length, etc.), then showing participants a physically unrelated trait (i.e. the face), that they're somehow insulating from contemporary culture.

One could still make the critique that contemporary culture values as attractive traits that are correlated with these other markers, whereas other cultures and times do not, but that argument starts getting a little convoluted itself.

Keep in mind that this work hasn't yet been published (just reported at a conference), so the actual paper will probably be a bit more careful about claims that they make.

Gibson Girl: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibson_Girl

Is it just me or do the two women's morphed faces not seem to be lit exactly the same? The right morph seems to have been photographed in harsher light.

The difference in the space between lower lip in chin is great, also, the one on the right seems to have a squarer jaw, and less-highly-arched eyebrows, along with paler lips. Wider neck too.

In summary, the one on the right looks more like a man. Personal opinion, but I think I've provided some evidence to support it.

Let's say I told you that one of these two women had acromegaly. Which would you pick? The one on the right, most likely. She would also have large feet due to her acromegaly. I suspect that growth hormone (not acromegaly per se) is the link that explains their findings.

What about men who couldn't date a girl with a beautiful face that also had large feet?

This article doesn't spend much time talking about why men are attracted to small feet.

Key quote:

> Atkinson's explanation makes sense, says David Perrett, a psychologist at the University of St. Andrews, UK, who studies facial attractiveness. Since faces and bodies are shaped by the same hormones, he says, you should be able to predict the attractiveness of one body part by looking at another.

So it is (perhaps obviously) not so much the small feet but the overall physiology, bone structure etc., they tend to be indicative of.

Of those two facial morphs, I wonder which people would think had the higher IQ?

Agreed - as with the men (sex vs. long term mate), there are alternate survey questions that would be interesting.

IMHO, the "less attractive" one looks more athletic.

So, you think the one on the right would have a lower IQ? Yeah, she looks more athletic, but I think she'd have the higher IQ too. Maybe that's just me.

I think the parents were alluding to the unconscious deduction many many people have been shown to make- that more attractive people are smarter.

It's funny how things have changed since when I was a kid in the 1960s. Back then, attractive people were generally thought NOT to be smart because they were more social than unattractive (average-looking) people. I hold this belief to this day and in my personal life it has been rarely wrong.

At least in the US, that was hot on the heels of a lot of great scientists, and the nation's pride (the moon landing) was an absolute triumph of the brainy types.

I wasn't alive back then, but I've always gotten the impression attractive people were seen as less intelligent as a direct backlash from scientists and other brainy things being 'in'.

Yeah, but more like a thrower than a distance runner.

With only eight faces per morph, I'm not entirely convinced that there's enough data points here. But perhaps there were a lot more pictures involved in the actual study than we're being shown here.

This reminds me of another study that found that a child of a smoking mother is more likely to end up in prison than that of a non-smoker.

Correlation is not a causation.

Did you read the article? What are you claiming is the wrongly attributed cause here? They didn't claim small feet cause pretty faces. They speculated on potential root causes that might affect feet and faces at the same time, but they certainly didn't say they proved any cause.

> What are you claiming is the wrongly attributed cause here?

They offer a theory that explains their findings, but I am unconvinced their findings are accurate. The sample size of 60 is just too small to average out such subjective parameter as attractiveness, which among other things greatly depends on non-physiological parameters such as lighting during a photo shoot, or a facial expression.

For example, if the girl on the right were to pout just a bit, or had darker hair, or if her hair were darker, or if she was wearing a different color, the preferences might've fallen her way instead. There are other variable parameters affecting the selection that have nothing to do with the bone structure or hormones.

Is there some law which states that every discussion on any new study must include the words "Correlation is not causation"?

Whatever the flaws of this study may be, confusing correlation with causation is not one of them. The fact that foot size is correlated with facial prettiness is (if true) interesting; but nobody is suggesting that having small feet causes your face to get prettier, nor that having a pretty face causes your feet to shrink.

Ok more and more HN is reedit. Yes I flag, no I shouldn't comment but enough please !

I'm sure there are a few really bad sexist jokes in reply to the title. I'll refrain from airing them here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com