QOVES Deep Dive | A Scientific Look At Your Looks

Is there such thing as being too attractive? Apparently so, as we look at a thesis by Mehng on a unique case of Debrahlee Lorenzana who was fired for distracting workers by being 'too attractive.' However, the details of the case aren't as simple as they seem, and if Debrahlee was both attractive but also narcissistic in her personality, then that would make her seem extremely unlikeable, leading us to a theory where being attractive but having a poor personality, has more of a 'double effect' on a persons likeability than being regular in looks but with negative personality traits.  Timming, A.R., Baumann, C., & Gollan, P.J. (2021). Employee voice and perceived attractiveness: are less attractive employees ignored in the workplace?When physical attractiveness does not benefit: Focusing on interpersonal relationship, target employee personality, and career success. Si Ahn Mehng University of North Carolina at Pembroke

This week, we look at the opposite of Ep.12 which suggests that averageing faces results in more attractive looking composites. Much of the benefits of averaged faces are that they have unusually higher rates of symmetry and perfectly clear skin (as a byproduct of the compositing process). However, as other researchers have found, averageness in your facial appeal only gets you so far, and to be truly unique and striking, your face needs features that deviate away from the average and into the extremes of dimorphism and proportion. Langlois, Judith H.; Roggman, Lori A.; Musselman, Lisa (1994). WHAT IS AVERAGE AND WHAT IS NOT AVERAGE ABOUT ATTRACTIVE FACES?. Psychological Science, 5(4), 214–220. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.1994.tb00503.xAlley, Thomas R.; Cunningham, Michael R. (1991). AVERAGED FACES ARE ATTRACTIVE, BUT VERY ATTRACTIVE FACES ARE NOT AVERAGE. , 2(2), 123–125. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.1991.tb00113.x

When it comes to assessing facial attractiveness, 'Facial Attractiveness: Evolutionary Based Research ' by AC Little has proposed three tenants: Symmetry, Dimorphism and Averageness; it is the last point that is seldom discussed and even less understood.An averaged face is one produced as a composite of many other faces. If we were to get many faces, all of a similar ethnic or racial group and overlay their faces together, then the Averageness Hypothesis suggests that the produced face will be more attractive than the sum of its parts, i.e. more attractive than those faces by themselves. This is because averaged faces have greater symmetry and clearer skin, but then the real question to answer becomes is averageness (koinophilia) desired because it is attractive by itself or is it desired because it makes the faces more symmetric (is symmetry the real driving force for why we prefer averageness)? Tim Valentine; Stephen Darling; Mary Donnelly (2004). Why are average faces attractive? The effect of view and averageness on the attractiveness of female faces. , 11(3), 482–487.

Being unattractive is a disadvantage in many social interactions if you do the wrong thing or act out of line. These unusual behaviours are called 'norm violations' and as it turns out, there is a double devil-effect at play when physically unattractive people behave in an unattractive way. The devil effect is the opposite of the more commonly known halo effect where negative cognitive biases are placed on a person based on their physical characteristics. As such, we expect an unattractive person committing norm violations such as making a potentially risque remark towards a woman in the workplace to be percieved as very repelling behaviour; a double devil effect.Gibson, Jeremy L.; Gore, Jonathan S. (2015). You're OK Until You Misbehave: How Norm Violations Magnify the Attractiveness Devil Effect. Gender Issues, 32(4), 266–278. doi:10.1007/s12147-015-9142-5

It's undeniable that intelligence is attractive, but the question still remains whether it is attractive enough to outweigh physical beauty. In this episode, we take a deep dive into the importance of physical attractiveness and what role it plays against other commonly praised traits such as intelligence and more importantly, how this affects men and women asymmetrically.Egebark, J., Ekström, M., Plug, E., & van Praag, M. (2021). Brains or beauty? Causal evidence on the returns to education and attractiveness in the online dating market. Journal of Public Economics, 196, 104372.

Body proportions matter a surprising amount in the context of dating but much of it is only able to be understood in a realistic field study. In today's episode, we go over a unique speed-dating study with a large sample size to confirm that physical features such as shoulder-width ratio and waist-hip ratio matter in making someone appear more physically attractive and how this relates to appearances of social dominance contrasting with femininity (i.e. sexual dimorphism).Sidari, Morgan J.; Lee, Anthony J.; Murphy, Sean C.; Sherlock, James M.; Dixson, Barnaby J. W.; Zietsch, Brendan P. (2020). Preferences for Sexually Dimorphic Body Characteristics Revealed in a Large Sample of Speed Daters. Social Psychological and Personality Science, (), 194855061988292

You may have heard of the phrase that attraction cannot be negotiated and in this episode it couldn't be truer. As we explore through the research of White Et al, unattractive participants in the dating market pay a heft 'unattractive tax' where undesirable characteristics (dealbreakers vs dealmakers) are disproportionately weighted against less attractive daters. Also, in the absence of physical attraction, women and men behave differently. Women tend to strongly enforce their cutoff threshold for what they find desirable in a partner and do not compromise for a person they have already deemed as unattractive. Men on the other hand do compromise their standards for the sake of casual short term relations. It would seem then that women enforce a hard threshold of what they desire in a mate whereas men have a soft threshold which can sway depending on additional factors such as dealmaking traits (green flags). In short, in the absence of physical attraction, women enforce requirements, men enforce preferences due to the evolutionary cost of false negatives, such that building a domestic life with someone who is unable to cater for the offspring or is genetically weak is a high risk, i.e. Error Management Theory.White, K.P., Jonason, P.K. & Al-Shawaf, L. Mating Decisions in the Absence of Physical Attraction. Adaptive Human Behavior and PhysiologyP. K. Jonason; J. R. Garcia; G. D. Webster; N. P. Li; H. E. Fisher (2015). Relationship Dealbreakers: Traits People Avoid in Potential Mates.

Tattoos have gone from a social taboo to the upper echelons of high fashion with Jean Paul Gaultier experimenting with tattoo designs in much of his work in the early 90s. In this episode we discuss the social perception of tattoos and the following research suggesting that tattoos have a sensitive cost-benefit ratio of providing some masculine edginess (for both men and women) which correlates to increased desirability but comes at a hit in terms of long term mate characteristics such as stability, reliability and trustworthiness. The effects of tattoos are also asymmetrical across genders with women being sterotyped more negatively than men who actually gain a benefit. The hypothesised reasons for why this is the case, the sterotyping pitfalls and how tattoos change your physical aesthetic are all discussed right here in this episode!Molloy, Karlyn; Wagstaff, Danielle (2021). Effects of gender, self-rated attractiveness, and mate value on perceptions tattoos. Personality and Individual Differences, 168(), 110382–. doi:10.1016/j.paid.2020.110382

In this episode we go over a relatively new concept called 'the fear of being single' (FOBS) which suggests that individuals with higher amounts of this trait, i.e. afraid of being single, anxiety, loneliness, are less selective with their partner choices and willing to go on many more dates to find a partner, regardless of who it is. This specific paper looks at if this FOBS trait is linked to physical attractiveness such that less attractive individuals have higher FOBS and thus are much less selective in dating. As it turns out, the results are not as intuitive as you may have guessed!Spielmann, Stephanie S.; Maxwell, Jessica A.; MacDonald, Geoff; Peragine, Diana; Impett, Emily A. (2019). The predictive effects of fear of being single on physical attractiveness and less selective partner selection strategies. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, (), 026540751985670–. doi:10.1177/0265407519856701      

In this episode, we start at the Tokyo Olympics and end at a deep dive into why fringe internet communities such as 'incels' and 'femcels' are dissatisfied with their looks and dating by considering Leonhard Et al's paper on dating preferences based on one's own looks. This falls into the category of Festinger's dissonance theory, where couples in such one member is significantly dating down in physical attractiveness undergoes cognitive dissonance in an attempt to justify their reasoning for the large gap in physical attractiveness. As we go through the research in this episode, the results are actually quite surprising and not something you would guess intuitively.Lee, Leonard; Loewenstein, George; Ariely, Dan; Hong, James; Young, Jim (2008). If I'm Not Hot, Are You Hot or Not? Physical-Attractiveness Evaluations and Dating Preferences as a Function of One's Own Attractiveness. Psychological Science, 19(7), 669–677. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02141.x

In this episode we cover the negative sterotyping of unattractive individuals. You may have heard of the 'halo effect' where attractive individuals have positive attributes and traits granted to them simply by virtue of being physically attractive. As it turns out from Klebl Et al's paper, there is evidence to suggest a similar but opposite effect happens to the unattractive parties. Unattractive individuals are seen to be more morally 'impure' by the general public, i.e. more willing to perform uncleanly acts such as stepping in vomit, licking a shoe or eating moldy food (no, really) than their attractive counterparts. This in turn makes these people associated with a contamination risk that should be avoided and so it is arguably more disadvantageous to be unattractive than it is advantageous to be attractive (Griffin & Langlois, 2006). This is because humans are very disease averse and so even the slightest perception or indication of 'uncleanly' behaviour is justification to avoid or negatively sterotype. Griffin, A. M., & Langlois, J. H. (2006). Stereotype directionality and attractiveness stereotyping: Is beauty good or is ugly bad? Social Cognition, 24(2), 187-206. https://dx.doi.org/10.1521/soco.2006.24.2.187Klebl, C., Rhee, J. J., Greenaway, K. H., Luo, Y., & Bastian, B. (2021, February 26). Physical attractiveness biases judgments pertaining to the moral domain of purity. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/3bnge

In this episode we look at  a paper by Groyecka Et al 2017 on how attractiveness is somewhat determined by non-physical cues of voice and smell among other factors such as personality, status and wealth. One of the key findings is just how important smell is, from being able to differentiate between men and women to being able to smell actual personality dominance from different scents. It's not surprise then that many masculine perfumes try to mimic this smell of dominance while feminine ones try to emulate pheromones of subservience and the reasoning behind it is a lot more nuanced than you may think!Corpse Husband is a great example of how visual perceptions of a person are formed before ever meeting them from voice (and somewhat smell) alone.Also check this video by Andrei Terbea on the rise of faceless creators.Groyecka, Agata; Pisanski, Katarzyna; Sorokowska, Agnieszka; Havlíček, Jan; Karwowski, Maciej; Puts, David; Roberts, S. Craig; Sorokowski, Piotr (2017). Attractiveness Is Multimodal: Beauty Is Also in the Nose and Ear of the Beholder. Frontiers in Psychology, 8(), 778–. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00778Little, A. C., Feinberg, D. R., DeBruine, L. M., and Jones, B. C. (2013). Adaptation to faces and voices: unimodal, cross-modal, and sex-specific effects. Psychol. Sci. 24, 2297–2305. doi: 10.1177/0956797613493293

In this episode we dissect Cunningham et al's 1990 paper on female facial preferences in men and why more 'babyish' (neotenous) features are actually preferred over hyper-masculine ones. This podcast takes a deep dive into facial aesthetics research, providing additional context, commentary and findings while simplifying the research into a more generalized application of beauty research for a contemporary audience.In the audio, male model Dan Brown is mentioned for his neotenous looks which combine both the mature, developed elements of a face such as a strong jawline and high cheekbones with immature elements such as rounded eyes and high eyebrows. The research points to this type of prototypical face actually being the most attractive by female preferences, beating out hypermasculine and hyperfeminine male faces.Cunningham, M. R., Barbee, A. P., & Pike, C. L. (1990). What do women want? Facialmetric assessment of multiple motives in the perception of male facial physical attractiveness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59(1), 61–72. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.59.1.61

Quite often, we see far too many people who become hyper fixated on one particular facial feature that leads to their insecurities. For many, it is often the lips or the nose which leads to a downhill spiral of elective cosmetic surgeries as an avenue of a fix rather than seeking psychological help to treat the underlying body dysphoria. In this episode, we discuss the potential pitfalls of too much elective surgery and why this is often a result of a lack of understanding of facial harmony, and how features are actually evaluated by a human rater in principle application.References Mentioned In The Podcast:Fabi, S., Pavicic, T., Braz, A., Green, J. B., Seo, K., & van Loghem, J. A. (2017). Combined aesthetic interventions for prevention of facial ageing, and restoration and beautification of face and body. Clinical, cosmetic and investigational dermatology, 10, 423–429.Rhodes, Gillian. (2006). The Evolutionary Psychology of Facial Beauty. Annual review of psychology. 57. 199-226. 10.1146/annurev.psych.57.102904.190208.