Contents
Who is the cutest in the world? Depends if you are Chinese, British or Shuar.
Living in big cities makes us prefer feminine, at least outwardly, women, and fear aggression from people with pronounced masculine features.
Such a conclusion can be drawn from a large-scale study* conducted by a team of psychologists, anthropologists and biologists from 12 research centers in the UK, USA, Canada and China, led by Isabel M. Scott and Andrew P. Clark from the University of London Brunel.
Read more:
- urban friendship
The study is unique in its composition of respondents. It was attended by 962 people from 12 cultures that exist in very different parts of the globe and live in completely different conditions, different ways, at different levels of development: residents of Malaysia, Great Britain, Fiji, Canada, Shanghai, Tuvans, Native Americans of the Cree tribe in Canada, the people of Hangzhou on the east coast of China, the Shuar people of Ecuador and the Miskitu people of Central America, the Himba people of Namibia and the Aka people of Central Africa.
The participants were shown five sets of photographs, each of which consisted of a male or female portrait in three variations: a real face, that is, a real snapshot of a living person, and two of its computer modifications, one of which enhanced masculine and the other feminine facial features. Men were shown portraits of women, women were shown portraits of men. The sets of images included people of different races and ethnic groups, two of them are shown in the illustration.
Respondents were asked to rate how attractive they found the faces in the photographs, both in terms of their preference for the owner of the face as a potential partner for a short romance, and, separately, his attractiveness as a partner “seriously and for a long time.” In addition, they were asked how aggressive different faces seemed to them.
The results were unexpected. The greatest “demand” for pronouncedly feminine, feminine faces was among men living in cities. Inhabitants of traditional rural communities or representatives of nomadic tribes did not express preferences in this regard. At the same time, men of all nations for the role of “mistress”, that is, for short-term relationships, chose feminine women more willingly than for the role of “wife”, that is, for a long-term relationship.
In women’s preferences, it was also possible to identify a pattern, already completely paradoxical: the more often people die from infections in a given society, the less women appreciate the masculinity of facial features.
But the difference in the preferences of potential “lovers” and potential “husbands”, found among the representatives of some peoples (not all), does not line up in any general trend. By the way, this time the conventional wisdom about the dependence of women’s preferences on the phase of the menstrual cycle was not confirmed.
On the other hand, the representation of participants of both sexes about aggression turned out to be very clear and consistent. Everyone seems to be most dangerous and prone to violence with a markedly masculine face, both male and female, but this perception is most pronounced among residents of modern urban cultures.
Read more:
- J. Vigarello “The Art of Attractiveness: A History of Bodily Beauty from the Renaissance to the Present Day”
Since the results came as a surprise to the authors themselves, they are extremely careful in formulating hypotheses. However, one likely reason for the greater propensity for city dwellers to regard masculine faces as aggressive is that in villages and small tribes “everyone knows each other” and people do not need to rely on stereotypes in evaluating each other’s personal qualities. In large cities, we are often forced to be guided only by the most superficial impression and therefore “cling” to the most noticeable signs that allow us to make it.
As for the strange preferences of women, then maybe it’s the phenomenon of “visual diet”: just as we like the usual food more than the strange, so the usual types of faces are cuter than those that we only occasionally see. Where people are poor, malnourished, prone to disease, and living hard, men have lower testosterone levels than their urban counterparts, and thus appear less masculine. Maybe the women of these peoples are so accustomed to them that it is precisely this appearance that is considered “correct” and attractive.
* See pnas.org/content/111/40/14388 for details