Rating attractiveness: study finds consensus among men, not women | Hacker News Reader

Rating attractiveness: study finds consensus among men, not women

wfu.edu

21 pointstoni9 comments

Older participants were more likely to find people attractive if they were smiling.

The more life beats you down the more you appreciate a great a smile and the way it makes you feel. And also, one learns to be more wary of people who aren't smiling.

Does anyone have access to the full text of the study?

PubMed link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19469598

I'm interested in the numbers obtained in the study -- how much variance among men, how much among women, etc.

The press contacts at WFU are at bottom of summary. If you can't find the email of Dustin Wood at WFU, ask the press contact to forward your request for a snail-mail reprint of the article.

Better ask soon, the popular press will probably whip up this story and deplete his reprint copies soon.

I was part of a study that looked at this issue when I was an undergraduate. I would look for replication of the new study

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

before taking this as the last word on the subject.

They would find consensus amongst women if they studied their response to the size of a man's bank account.

file this under "duh", men care about looks, women care more about status as a stand-in for fitness to provide offspring with resources.

The study wasn't about who cares more about looks. It was about whether women or men agree more about who is good looking. Caring about a trait and agreeing with others on how to measure it are not at all the same. For example, virtually everybody cares about listening to good music, but nobody can agree on what good music actually is.

That women mainly want high-status men manifests itself by a pretty flexible view of physical attractiveness. I wouldn't be shocked if women thought that the most attractive men were similar in appearance to whatever alpha males they most admired.

looks correlate directly to reproductive fitness for women, status doesn't necessarily correlate directly to looks for men. therefore male preferences are more uniform than females.

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