Misperception of the facial appearance that the opposite-sex desires
journals.plos.org
journals.plos.org
Not sure if this means the study was questionable or if I have some kind of face blindness.
When I think of masculine looking women I know, just for example, they look nothing like the masculinized photos. It's like they're focusing on the averages , and a bunch of important variation is being collapsed in the process.
I haven’t even looked at the images myself. But just speaking from personal experience - sometimes one can feel more attracted to the person who doesn’t look as conventionally attractive. Some people see a person who looks like a supermodel and they immediately think “I have zero chance” and so they don’t really feel any attraction. Then they see someone of (judged by conventional standards) more average looks and they feel like they actually might have a chance with them, and that feeling makes them feel attracted to them.
EDIT: After looking at them for a while I notice some subtle differences in the male images, but very subtle. And less differences in the female images.
Also the chin is slightly shorter and less sharp in the women's preference in both short and long-term cases. But yeah it's true that the women's replies seem to not deviate that much from the neutrally dimorphic male face.
Otoh it's surprising to see how both men and women thought the preferred female faces have to possess more than double the neutral dimorphic one.
Except in the women's faces. The ones women predicted look more fat to me (they're supposed to look more thin). So, to me, they look opposite of what they're supposed to be.
Unless you’re talking poisoners and embezzlers and the like who don’t need to warn because they don’t engage in direct conflict.
I get you; someone can look helpless but be packing a Desert Eagle .50 and prepared to use it in any trouble. I don’t see how that is an advantage over not looking helpless, unless the idea is to attract trouble and then kill it.
Obviously not every schoolyard bully gets an army and a navy to play with, but they're all dangerous in their own ways, and that danger often stems from a self-conscious desire to project power.
Putin's propaganda features these absurd strongman displays of masculinity because it works, it's a very well known and ancient exploit in the human mind and societies as a whole.
I'm sure Putin would prefer to do the evil things he does without having to do the whole song and dance of propaganda.
There seems to be some dispute whether strong daily doses alter preferences.
"…man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion."
I think other parts of the body play a huge part in how we interpret a persons face.
The body can make the face appear more masculine or feminine; as can clothes, haircut, tattoos etc.
Probably uncorrelated, the findings though match with 'everything not taken in moderation/to extremes, fail to achieve the desired result". Singing too loud doesn't sound nice. Putting on too much makeup achieves the opposite effect of the intention of using makeup. Becoming skeletal anorexic thin is not attractive to most, and growing grotesque muscles neither.
yay, sexual dimorphism discussed in the context of humans!
I'm a proponent of doing this more often, most features we find attractive and even behaviors that we find frustrating are clearly being selected for, reproducing and selected for again. The complexity of our social fabric has no steering against this except for different traits to be selected for at the same time by the broad population than which other traits the broad population would have gone for at the same time. This renders any uniqueness of human selection to be moot, leaving only congruence with other species on this planet.
Arranged marriages. This is why they are popular in some cultures. And reasonably successful also.
but the amount of variables you would need to control for to get meaningful data is a sneeze in a hurricane.
I'm not saying they look unattractive, im saying they look not quite human.
As a random example, young women will often wear black fingernail polish, which is on average making them less attractive. It looks like damage, as if they had banged on their fingers with a rock and hurt themselves! Damaged, sick, or injured females are unattractive, but scarred males are more attractive. This is because a woman's health is critical to the health of the offspring, but even a dying old male's sperm can just as good as anyone else's. Scars and physical damage is attractive in men because it indicates that they're a "fighter" and didn't die in the process. Fencing scars on the face were a "thing" for centuries! Not on women though. Only on men.
You see these errors get corrected as young men and women grow up, they figure these things out through trial and error. You almost never see any woman over 30 with black fingernails unless they're a lesbian.
I think the origin of this is each person knows what they find attractive. If a girl looks at a boy, they know what makes that boy attractive, even if on a subconscious level. When they look in the mirror they see someone "unattractive" because if they're not gay, then someone of the same sex is by definition not attractive to them! Hence they try to "fix" this defect they see by making the person in the mirror attractive again... accidentally copying traits they would like to see in the opposite sex onto themselves.
Before mirrors, this would not have occurred in nature, expect perhaps for the rare times someone happened to live next to a very still lake they could observe themselves in regularly.
The older the father, the more DNA mutations he's accumulated (I've heard the estimate of 2-3 mutations per year). This increases the risks of all sorts of things, from autism to cancer.
While the overall likelihood is still fairly low, comparatively, it's still strictly worse.