Human preferences for sexually dimorphic faces may be evolutionarily novel
| Autor: | Zejun Huang, Mhairi A. Gibson, Adam H. Boyette, Steven C. Josephson, Viren Swami, Isabel M. Scott, Benjamin Grant Purzycki, Yangke Zhao, Barry S. Hewlett, Mark Jamieson, J. Josh Snodgrass, Lawrence S. Sugiyama, Innes C. Cuthill, Melissa A. Liebert, John H. Shaver, P. Lynne Honey, William R. Jankowiak, Andrew Clark, Ruby L. Fried, Ian S. Penton-Voak, Douglas W. Yu, Richard Sosis |
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| Jazyk: | angličtina |
| Rok vydání: | 2014 |
| Předmět: |
Attractiveness
Adult Cross-Cultural Comparison Male genetic structures Evolution media_common.quotation_subject Social Sciences behavioral disciplines and activities Choice Behavior Beauty medicine Personality Humans Least-Squares Analysis media_common Masculinity Stereotyping Facial expression Multidisciplinary Aggression Cross-cultural Femininity Cross-cultural studies Biological Evolution Facial attractiveness Sexual dimorphism Evolutionary biology Face Visual Perception Regression Analysis Female medicine.symptom Psychology psychological phenomena and processes |
| Popis: | This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund. A large literature proposes that preferences for exaggerated sex typicality in human faces (masculinity/femininity) reflect a long evolutionary history of sexual and social selection. This proposal implies that dimorphism was important to judgments of attractiveness and personality in ancestral environments. It is difficult to evaluate, however, because most available data come from largescale, industrialized, urban populations. Here, we report the results for 12 populations with very diverse levels of economic development. Surprisingly, preferences for exaggerated sex-specific traits are only found in the novel, highly developed environments. Similarly, perceptions that masculine males look aggressive increase strongly with development, specifically, urbanization. These data challenge the hypothesis that facial dimorphism was an important ancestral signal of heritable mate value. One possibility is that highly developed environments provide novel opportunities to discern relationships between facial traits and behavior by exposing individuals to large numbers of unfamiliar faces, revealing patterns too subtle to detect with smaller samples. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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