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Misperception of the facial appearance that the opposite-sex desires
- maeil 2y agoThis kind of research should be forced to include the cultural background of the suveyed audience, as many conclusions could easily be turned upside down if the same research is conducted in a different part of the world.
- jcmalone 2y ago“White European heterosexual men and women were asked to choose their own and ideal face shape…” It’s the 5th sentence.
- maeil 2y agoYep, point being it should be part of the title, as that's the degree to which it impacts results, and the title is what has the biggest impact.
- realPubkey 2y agoNo. The title is the title, not the context. If people do not read the first 5 sentences of the introduction, you cannot help anyway.
- zanderwohl 2y agoIf the title doesn't tell you differently you can assume it's WEIRD.
- pfannkuchen 2y agoDo the faces in the results section all look the same to anyone else? Not sure if this means the study was questionable or if I have some kind of face blindness.
- AlotOfReading 2y agoFacial structure alone tends to be fairly androgynous. You're used to a lot of other cues from hair, height, body shape, clothing, and voice.
- agumonkey 2y agoMovement. Feminine way of moving is astonishingly soft and curvy in tons of ways.
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 2y agoAnd skin! Not sure how people overlook skin: cheeks color, smoothness, freckles, tanned/not tanned. Sends so many signals
- wafflemaker 2y agoMaybe it's dark mode, but they all look the same to me too. Barely noticable differences, but can't read any emotional charge, other then some being harder/milder.
- rcpt 2y agoSame I can't see anything
- joegibbs 2y agoI agree, they all look very similar. The more masculine man has a slightly narrower head I think and slightly different eye shape. The more feminine woman looks weird to me, a bit goblin-like with the cheeks and eyes. It would be more interesting to see the actual photos that these are averages of.
- seba_dos1 2y agoGP asked about the "Results" section. The ones in "Materials and methods" are much easier to distinguish.
- smt88 2y ago
- xnx 2y agoSeems like they picked some unusual lighting for the face models. It looks like the nose casts a shadow on each side.
- antegamisou 2y agoFor anyone interested this is probably the software they used https://facegen.com/artist.htm https://facegen.com/artist.htm
- slibhb 2y agoI wonder if any of this misperception would go away if you found a way to use revealed preference instead of asking people what they prefer.
- solardev 2y agoOkcupid (the old fashioned dating site) used to have an amazing blog on the data science of dating before Match.com bought them and shut it down :(
- solardev 2y agoWhat is this, Elder Scrolls science? Those are some terribly low-quality uncanny valley face models... if I were in the study I'd answer whatever I had to just to get out.
- thrance 2y agoI've seen more appealing orcs in Morrowind.
- taneq 2y agoHey, whatever floats your boat. :D
- throwup238 2y agoMaybe after a little skooma.
- solardev 2y agoSeriously. I don't know how this study works when the options range from "Maybe if I was really drunk. And blindfolded." to "Sorry, I think we'll just have to go extinct."
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- puppycodes 2y agoNot a single Redguard... (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
- yieldcrv 2y ago> The discrepancy between own and ideal sexual dimorphism 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.
- SoftTalker 2y ago> our social fabric has no steering against this Arranged marriages. This is why they are popular in some cultures. And reasonably successful also.
- nntwozz 2y agoI think this is a simplistic take, reminds me a bit of a passage in the wonderful quote by Henry Beston in The Outermost House: "…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.
- trimethylpurine 2y agoThe hypothesis is interesting, and even likable. But the methods and everything afterwards just didn't align with any interpretation of the philosophy of science. I'm disheartened in seeing research like this taken seriously.
- retrac 2y agoWe don't just model ourselves to attract a mate. Men often wish to appear more masculine so as to intimidate other men, for example. This effect is absent from most discussions about preferences and self-image.
- deadbabe 2y agoThis is why the most dangerous men often don’t look like much. Because they don’t need to use their appearance to defend themselves through intimidation.
- demosthanos 2y agoIt depends on how you define dangerous—some of the most dangerous men in history have been dangerous in part because of how insecure they are. That's how you get men like Putin, putting on an extremely self-conscious show of masculinity while slaughtering hundreds of thousands. 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.
- Teever 2y agoI don't think that's the lesson from Putin. 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.
- farseer 2y agoSome Western leaders who killed hundreds of thousands including Bush II, Obama etc did not have to put on a masculinity display. The web of lies weaved by traditional media and vested interests gave a good enough cover.
- brookst 2y agoI’m not following this. While intimidation certainly has many dimensions, I don’t see why not looking like much makes them better able to defend themselves? Or be dangerous? Unless you’re talking poisoners and embezzlers and the like who don’t need to warn because they don’t engage in direct conflict.
- bawolff 2y agoFor figure 5, is it just me or is there some sort of uncanny effect going on, because the woman's prediction of male preferences looks monsterous to me. I'm not saying they look unattractive, im saying they look not quite human.
- poiuyt098 2y agoWould be interesting if they also recorded steroid hormone contraceptive use by the women, and perhaps their menstrual cycle phase. There seems to be some dispute whether strong daily doses alter preferences.
- ggm 2y agoDoes this explain bucal fat removal, duck lips and trout pout? I thought it was body dysmorphia from filters.
- jiggawatts 2y agoA related observation that I've made is that young people sometimes make the mistake of trying to make making themselves attractive in a way that would apply to the opposite sex. 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.
- SamPatt 2y agoInteresting take, but one correction: sperm from old men isn't "just as good" as sperm from a young man. 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.
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 2y agoInteresting, wasn't aware of this. Should we freeze our sperm as soon as we hit puberty to improve health of the overall population? I'm only half joking, would the cost be offset by the drastic cost reduction due to less need of health care for those complex genetic conditions?
- teknothom 2y agoThe comments suggesting “subtle differences at best” remind me of visual design discussions with people (usually engineers) who have low awareness or different perception of visual nuance. Working in photography grading and graphic design, as I have, can attune your visual sensitivity to notice the space between the eyes and brow as significant. However, I would say the range of variation is low.
- margaretdouglas 2y agoWhy does the most attractive male face appear suspiciously similar to Zuck?
- fifticon 2y agoThis is what peak performance looks like, which you might not appreciate :-/.
- puppycodes 2y agoI'm not against studies like this I guess? but the amount of variables you would need to control for to get meaningful data is a sneeze in a hurricane.
- fifticon 2y agoI can only echo the feeling of 'corporate wants you to find the difference" meme, for both sexes. At least I can distinguish which is the male and which is the female template.. Also, I can appreciate that the 'source data' in materials-and-method seem to vary a bit. My naive take-away is, that when you take the average of everything, you get "grey" or "0.5". 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.