Aug 29 2009
Fun Science Fact: Gender Differences in Sexual Tastes
Evolutionary psychology is a weak science, particularly when applied fully post hoc: as untested explanations of why things are the way the are by way of speculations about what things were like earlier in human evolution or by finding analogous behavior among other modern primates. (And I am well aware that this applies to my “Almighty Alpha” project). However, it is possible to practice the field in a more strongly scientific fashion. Namely, by making predictions of what should be the case today after considering evolutionary elements. And then putting the prediction to a test.
With this post I invite you to make a prediction about gender differences in sexual tastes based on your thoughts of evolutionary mechanisms “handed down” to modern human beings. Here’s the question: Do you predict that males or females show greater consensus on the attractiveness of members of the opposite sex? A recent study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology examined just that.
So which is it — males or females? Make a prediction and see if this one batch of data backs you up.
Answer below the fold.
It seems there is more consensus among males on female attractiveness. So the answer is females. The study discovered that women consider a greater range of characteristics than men and disagree more on which individuals are attractive.
Here is what the study found:
Men’s judgments of women’s attractiveness were based primarily around physical features and they rated highly those who looked thin and seductive. Most of the men in the study also rated photographs of women who looked confident as more attractive.
As a group, the women rating men showed some preference for thin, muscular subjects, but disagreed on how attractive many men in the study were. Some women gave high attractiveness ratings to the men other women said were not attractive at all.
How did you do?
Before encountering this article, I may have predicted that men would be interested in sowing their seed more broadly, and hence would display greater flexibility in what they considered attractive. But this isn’t the case.
In a post-hoc fashion, and hence more weakly scientific, I can readily conjecture about the evolutionary reasons for the above finding. Rather than having broader tastes, men have simpler tastes. Does she appear fertile and healthy? Good. All systems go.
As for women, I can likewise make weakly scientific sense out of the finding. As supposedly pickier shoppers, in general, women would naturally have a more complex checklist of desirably attributes in sex partners. A chiseled chin and broad shoulders alone just won’t cut it.
But again, these thoughts are after-the-fact. Connecting the dots once the dots are there: easy. And error prone. Making connections and then determining if the dots fall in place: hard. And much more scientific.
