Judgments of dominance from the face track physical strength

Visual Attention to Evolutionarily Relevant Information by Heterosexual Men and Women While Viewing Mock Online Dating Profiles

The way people create social connections and access information has been altered greatly by technology in recent decades. Online browsing of visual profiles has become a common means for seeking potential partners for both short- and long-term relationships. Little is known, however, about how people prioritize mate quality information while viewing online profiles. Using eye-tracking methods and self-report, this study investigated how people evaluated profile-based facial attractiveness and text-based financial resources information, represented by income and occupation. Heterosexual male and female participants, aged between 18 and 27 years, viewed opposite-sex profiles while their eye-movements were recorded using a remote eye-tracking camera. In line with current theory, resources information had little effect on men's overall attention to women's faces, whereas women's overall attention to men's faces varied depending on the level of income and occupation. Women evaluated men's faces more when income and occupation were low, regardless of attractiveness. Unexpectedly, however, men marginally increased their attention toward unattractive women who showed a high-level of income and more esteemed occupation. Men self-reported a higher interest in women for a short-term relationship and women self-reported a higher interest in men for a long-term relationship. This work provides a foundation to further examine how people browse profile-based information and to investigate the mate selection process, with real-world implications for online dating app users, profile design, and content.

Involuntary Celibacy: A Review of Incel Ideology and Experiences with Dating, Rejection, and Associated Mental Health and Emotional Sequelae

PURPOSE OF REVIEW

Incels (involuntary celibates) have recently garnered media attention for seemingly random attacks of violence. Much attention has centered around the misogynistic and violent discourse that has taken place in online incel forums as well as manifestos written by incels who have perpetrated deadly attacks. Such work overlooks the experiences and issues faced by incels themselves, the majority of which have not engaged in any violent behavior.

RECENT FINDINGS

A small number of studies have recruited incels. Results from these studies highlight the nuanced nature of the incel identity. It is also apparent that incels suffer from high levels of romantic rejection and a greater degree of depressive and anxious symptoms, insecure attachment, fear of being single, and loneliness. Incels report significant issues pertaining to their mental, social, and relational well-being and may seek support from forums that often feature misogynistic and violent content.

Africans and Europeans differ in their facial perception of dominance and sex-typicality: a multidimensional Bayesian approach

Biosocial impact of facial dominance and sex-typicality is well-evidenced in various human groups. It remains unclear, though, whether perceived sex-typicality and dominance can be consistently predicted from sexually dimorphic facial features across populations. Using a combination of multidimensional Bayesian approach and geometric morphometrics, we explored associations between perceived dominance, perceived sex-typicality, measured sexual shape dimorphism, and skin colour in a European and an African population. Unlike previous studies, we investigated the effect of facial variation due to shape separately from variation due to visual cues not related to shape in natural nonmanipulated stimuli. In men, perceived masculinity was associated with perceived dominance in both populations. In European women higher perceived femininity was, surprisingly, likewise positively associated with perceived dominance. Both shape and non-shape components participate in the constitution of facial sex-typicality and dominance. Skin colour predicted perceived sex-typicality in Africans but not in Europeans. Members of each population probably use different cues to assess sex-typicality and dominance. Using our methods, we found no universal sexually dimorphic scale predicting human perception of sex-typicality and dominance. Unidimensional understanding of sex-typicality thus seems problematic and should be applied with cautions when studying perceived sex-typicality and its correlates.

Long-Term Mating Orientation in Men: The Role of Socioeconomic Status, Protection Skills, and Parenthood Disposition

From an evolutionary perspective, phenotypic, social, and environmental factors help to shape the different costs and benefits of pursuing different reproductive strategies (or a mixture of them) from one individual to another. Since men's reproductive success is mainly constrained to women's availability, their mating orientations should be partially calibrated by features that women prefer in a potential partner. For long-term relationships, women prefer traits that signal access to resources, protection skills, and the willingness to share them. Using generalized linear models with laboratory data taken from a Chilean population (N = 197), this study aimed to test whether real and potential resources (measured as self-reported socioeconomic status), protection skills (measured as handgrip strength), and the willingness to provide resources and protection (measured as their disposition toward parenthood) are related to mating orientation in men. Our predictions were: (1) socioeconomic status would be positively associated with long-term and short-term mating orientation but for long-term-oriented individuals, this would be enhanced by having a more favorable parenthood disposition and (2) strength would be positively related to long-term mating orientation in men with higher socioeconomic status and a favorable disposition toward parenthood and it would have a positive and direct association with short-term mating orientation. Our results partially supported the first hypothesis, since men with higher socioeconomic status were more long-term oriented, but parenting disposition did not moderate this effect. Contrary to our expectations, socioeconomic status was not related to short-term mating orientation. Strength appeared not to be significant for long-term mating orientation, even interacting with other traits. However, strength by itself was powerfully linked with a short-term mating orientation. Our results suggest that only some individuals that are attractive for long-term relationships are indeed long-term oriented and may reflect the overall conflict of interests between mating strategies among sexes.

Dependents as Signals of Mate Value: Long-term Mating Strategy Predicts Displays on Online Dating Profiles for Men

Sexual strategies theory indicates women prefer mates who show the ability and willingness to invest in a long-term mate due to asymmetries in obligate parental care of children. Consequently, women's potential mates must show they can provide investment - especially when women are seeking a long-term mate. Investment may be exhibited through financial and social status, and the ability to care for a mate and any resulting offspring. Men who care for children and pets (hereafter "dependents") are perceived as high-quality mates, given that dependents signal an ability to invest; however, no studies have examined how dependents are associated with short-term and long-term mating strategies. Here, online dating profiles were used to test the predictions that an interactive effect between sex and mating strategy will predict displays of dependents, with long-term mating strategy predicting for men but not women. Moreover, this pattern should hold for all dependent types and, due to relative asymmetries in required investment, differences will be strongest regarding displays of children and least in non-canine pets. As expected, men seeking long-term mates displayed dependents more than men seeking short-term mates, but both men and women seeking long-term mates displayed dependents similarly. This pattern was driven mostly by canines. These findings indicate that men adopting a long-term mating strategy display their investment capabilities more compared to those seeking short-term mates, which may be used to signal their mate value.

Friend effects framework: Contrastive and hierarchical processing in cheerleader effects

Cheerleader effects, group attractiveness effects, and divisive normalization are all characterized by faces appearing more attractive when seen within a group. However, it is possible that your friends could have a detrimental effect upon your attractiveness too: if these group effects arose partly as a contrastive process between your face and your friends, then highly attractive friends may diminish your attractiveness. We confirm this hypothesis across two experiments by showing that the presence of highly attractive friends can indeed make you appear less attractive (i.e., a reverse cheerleader effect), suggesting friend effects are driven in part by a contrastive process against the group. However, these effects are also influenced by your own attractiveness in a fashion that appears consistent with hierarchical encoding, where less attractive targets benefit more from being viewed in an increasingly unattractive group than attractive targets. Our final experiment demonstrates that the company of others not only alters our attractiveness, but also induces shifts in how average or distinctive a target face appears too, with these averageness effects associated with the friend effects observed in our first experiment. We present a Friend Effects Framework within which 'friend effects' is an umbrella term for the positive (e.g., cheerleader effects, group attractiveness effects) and negative (i.e., the reverse cheerleader effect) ways in which hierarchical encoding, group contrastive effects, and other influences of friends can have on your attractiveness.

Limited evidence of hierarchical encoding in the cheerleader effect

"The cheerleader effect" refers to the increase in attractiveness that an individual face experiences when seen in a group of other faces. It has been proposed that the cheerleader effect occurs because (a) the visual system rapidly summarises a group of faces into an ensemble representation, (b) which is hypothesised to be highly attractive because of its average facial characteristics, and (c) observers remember individual faces to be more alike the ensemble representation than they were, due to hierarchical structure of visual working memory. Across three experiments, we investigated whether the cheerleader effect is consistent with hierarchical encoding, by asking observers to give attractiveness ratings to the same target faces shown in groups and alone. Consistent with hierarchical encoding, the largest attractiveness increases of 1.5-2.0% occurred when target faces were presented in groups of faces that could be mentally summarised to create an ensemble representation with average facial characteristics. Surprisingly, smaller cheerleader effects still occurred in conditions that were incompatible with hierarchical encoding (i.e., groups with non-human images). Together, these results offer only limited evidence for the role of hierarchical encoding in the cheerleader effect, suggesting that alternative mechanisms must be explored in future research.

The Interplay Between Economic Status and Attractiveness, and the Importance of Attire in Mate Choice Judgments

Desirable characteristics of "opposite sex others," such as physical attractiveness and economic status, can influence how individuals are judged, and this is different for men and women. However, under various social contexts where cues of higher or lower economic status is suggested, sex differences in judgments related to mate choice have not been fully explored. In two studies, ratings of economic status and attractiveness were quantified for male and female targets that were presented under various social contexts. Study 1 assessed judgments (n = 1,359) of images of nine male and nine female targets in different sized groups containing only opposite-sex others (i.e., group size). While we found no significant effects of group size on male and female attractiveness, target female economic status increased when surrounded by two or more men. An ad hoc analysis controlling for the attire of the targets (business or casual) found that the association between target female economic status and group size occurred when females were in business attire. Study 2 investigates this effect further by presenting images of 12 males and 12 females, in higher and lower status attire (i.e., business and casual clothing) and measured judgments of attractiveness and economic status among women and men (n = 1,038). Consistent with the results of Study 1, female economic status was only affected when women were in business attire. However, female economic status decreased when in the presence of other men in business attire. There were no sex differences in judgments of economic status when judging stimuli in casual attire. Additionally, negative associations between attractiveness and economic status were found for males presented in casual attire. We discuss these results in the light of evolutionary sexual conflict theory by demonstrating how the asymmetrical importance of status between men and women can influence mate choice judgments.

Power Affects Sexual Assertiveness and Sexual Esteem Equally in Women and Men

Common stereotypes hold that men and women differ strongly in their attitudes toward sex and that such differences are amplified by social power. In contrast, an emerging literature suggests that social power affects both sexes similarly, thus potentially attenuating differences between the sexes. Four samples obtained in the Netherlands, the U.S., Britain, and South-East Asia (total N = 1985) test the effect of social power (operationalized as self-reported amount of power over others at the work place) on validated self-report measures of sexual assertiveness and sexual esteem. Across all samples, power was associated with greater sexual assertiveness and sexual esteem-equally for men and women. Furthermore, effects of power were larger and more consistent than differences between men and women. These findings add to an emerging literature, suggesting that often-observed differences between male and female sexuality actually reflect power differences. This suggests that such differences decrease with greater social equality.

Judgements of a speaker's personality are correlated across differing content and stimulus type

It has previously been shown that first impressions of a speaker's personality, whether accurate or not, can be judged from short utterances of vowels and greetings, as well as from prolonged sentences and readings of complex paragraphs. From these studies, it is established that listeners' judgements are highly consistent with one another, suggesting that different people judge personality traits in a similar fashion, with three key personality traits being related to measures of valence (associated with trustworthiness), dominance, and attractiveness. Yet, particularly in voice perception, limited research has established the reliability of such personality judgements across stimulus types of varying lengths. Here we investigate whether first impressions of trustworthiness, dominance, and attractiveness of novel speakers are related when a judgement is made on hearing both one word and one sentence from the same speaker. Secondly, we test whether what is said, thus adjusting content, influences the stability of personality ratings. 60 Scottish voices (30 females) were recorded reading two texts: one of ambiguous content and one with socially-relevant content. One word (~500 ms) and one sentence (~3000 ms) were extracted from each recording for each speaker. 181 participants (138 females) rated either male or female voices across both content conditions (ambiguous, socially-relevant) and both stimulus types (word, sentence) for one of the three personality traits (trustworthiness, dominance, attractiveness). Pearson correlations showed personality ratings between words and sentences were strongly correlated, with no significant influence of content. In short, when establishing an impression of a novel speaker, judgments of three key personality traits are highly related whether you hear one word or one sentence, irrespective of what they are saying. This finding is consistent with initial personality judgments serving as elucidators of approach or avoidance behaviour, without modulation by time or content. All data and sounds are available on OSF (osf.io/s3cxy).

Cues of upper body strength account for most of the variance in men's bodily attractiveness

Evolution equips sexually reproducing species with mate choice mechanisms that function to evaluate the reproductive consequences of mating with different individuals. Indeed, evolutionary psychologists have shown that women's mate choice mechanisms track many cues of men's genetic quality and ability to invest resources in the woman and her offspring. One variable that predicted both a man's genetic quality and his ability to invest is the man's formidability (i.e. fighting ability or resource holding power/potential). Modern women, therefore, should have mate choice mechanisms that respond to ancestral cues of a man's fighting ability. One crucial component of a man's ability to fight is his upper body strength. Here, we test how important physical strength is to men's bodily attractiveness. Three sets of photographs of men's bodies were shown to raters who estimated either their physical strength or their attractiveness. Estimates of physical strength determined over 70% of men's bodily attractiveness. Additional analyses showed that tallness and leanness were also favoured, and, along with estimates of physical strength, accounted for 80% of men's bodily attractiveness. Contrary to popular theories of men's physical attractiveness, there was no evidence of a nonlinear effect; the strongest men were the most attractive in all samples.

Using knowledge from human research to improve understanding of contest theory and contest dynamics

Our understanding of animal contests and the factors that affect contest dynamics and decisions stems from a long and prosperous collaboration between empiricists and theoreticians. Over the last two decades, however, theoretical predictions regarding the factors that affect individual decisions before, during and after a contest are becoming increasingly difficult to test empirically. Extremely large sample sizes are necessary to experimentally test the nuanced theoretical assumptions surrounding how information is used by animals during a contest, how context changes the information used, and how individuals change behaviour as a result of both the information available and the context in which the information is acquired. In this review, we discuss how the investigation of contests in humans through the collaboration of biologists and psychologists may advance contest theory and dynamics in general. We argue that a long and productive history exploring human behaviour and psychology combined with technological advancements provide a unique opportunity to manipulate human perception during contests and collect unbiased data, allowing more targeted examinations of particular aspects of contest theory (e.g. winner/loser effects, information use as a function of age). We hope that our perspective provides the impetus for many future collaborations between biologists and psychologists.

How Social Status Shapes Person Perception and Evaluation: A Social Neuroscience Perspective

Inferring the relative rank (i.e., status) of others is essential to navigating social hierarchies. A survey of the expanding social psychological and neuroscience literatures on status reveals a diversity of focuses (e.g., perceiver vs. agent), operationalizations (e.g., status as dominance vs. wealth), and methodologies (e.g., behavioral, neuroscientific). Accommodating this burgeoning literature on status in person perception, the present review offers a novel social neuroscientific framework that integrates existing work with theoretical clarity. This framework distinguishes between five key concepts: (1) strategic pathways to status acquisition for agents, (2) status antecedents (i.e., perceptual and knowledge-based cues that confer status rank), (3) status dimensions (i.e., domains in which an individual may be ranked, such as wealth), (4) status level (i.e., one's rank along a given dimension), and (5) the relative importance of a given status dimension, dependent on perceiver and context characteristics. Against the backdrop of this framework, we review multiple dimensions of status in the nonhuman and human primate literatures. We then review the behavioral and neuroscientific literatures on the consequences of perceived status for attention and evaluation. Finally, after proposing a social neuroscience framework, we highlight innovative directions for future social status research in social psychology and neuroscience.

Calibrating facial morphs for use as stimuli in biological studies of social perception

Studies of human social perception become more persuasive when the behavior of raters can be separated from the variability of the stimuli they are rating. We prototype such a rigorous analysis for a set of five social ratings of faces varying by body fat percentage (BFP). 274 raters of both sexes in three age groups (adolescent, young adult, senior) rated five morphs of the same averaged facial image warped to the positions of 72 landmarks and semilandmarks predicted by linear regression on BFP at five different levels (the average, ±2 SD, ±5 SD). Each subject rated all five morphs for maturity, dominance, masculinity, attractiveness, and health. The patterns of dependence of ratings on the BFP calibration differ for the different ratings, but not substantially across the six groups of raters. This has implications for theories of social perception, specifically, the relevance of individual rater scale anchoring. The method is also highly relevant for other studies on how biological facial variation affects ratings.

Sexual Conflict and Gender Gap Effects: Associations between Social Context and Sex on Rated Attractiveness and Economic Status

Human mate choice research often concerns sex differences in the importance of traits such as physical attractiveness and social status. A growing number of studies indicate that cues to social context, including other people who appear in stimulus photographs, can alter that individual's attractiveness. Fewer studies, however, consider judgements of traits other than physical attractiveness, such as wealth. Here we manipulate the presence/absence of other people in photographs of target models, and test the effects on judgments of both attractiveness and earnings (a proxy for status). Participants (N = 2044) rated either male or female models for either physical attractiveness or social/economic status when presented alone, with same sex others or with opposite sex others. We collectively refer to this manipulation as 'social context'. Male and female models received similar responses for physical attractiveness, but social context affected ratings of status differently for women and men. Males presented alongside other men received the highest status ratings while females presented alone were given the highest status ratings. Further, the status of females presented alongside a male was constrained by the rated status of that male. Our results suggests that high status may not directly lead to high attractiveness in men, but that status is more readily attributed to men than to women. This divide in status between the sexes is very clear when men and women are presented together, possibly reflecting one underlying mechanism of the modern day gender gap and sexist attitudes to women's economic participation. This adds complexity to our understanding of the relationship between attractiveness, status, and sex in the light of parental investment theory, sexual conflict and economic theory.

Evidence from Meta-Analyses of the Facial Width-to-Height Ratio as an Evolved Cue of Threat

The facial width-to-height ratio (FWHR) is the width of the face divided by the height of the upper face. There is mixed evidence for the hypothesis that the FWHR is a cue of threat and dominance in the human face. We conducted a systematic review and meta-analyses of all peer-reviewed studies (and 2 unpublished studies) to estimate the magnitude of the sex difference in the FWHR, and the magnitude of the relationship between the FWHR and threatening and dominant behaviours and perceptions. Studies were eligible for inclusion if the authors reported an analysis involving the FWHR. Our analyses revealed that the FWHR was larger in men than in women (d¯ = .11, n = 10,853), cued judgements of masculinity in men (r¯ = .35, n of faces = 487; n of observers = 339), and was related to body mass index (r¯ = .31, n = 2,506). Further, the FWHR predicted both threat behaviour in men (r¯ = .16, n = 4,603) and dominance behaviour in both sexes (r¯ = .12, n = 948) across a variety of indices. Individuals with larger FWHRs were judged by observers as more threatening (r¯ = .46, n of faces = 1,691; n of observers = 2,076) and more dominant (r¯ = .20, n of faces = 603; n of observers = 236) than those with smaller FWHRs. Individuals with larger FWHRs were also judged as less attractive (r¯ = -.26, n of faces = 721; n of observers = 335), especially when women made the judgements. These findings provide some support for the hypothesis that the FWHR is part of an evolved cueing system of intra-sexual threat and dominance in men. A limitation of the meta-analyses on perceptions of threat and dominance were the low number of stimuli involving female and older adult faces.

The Rival Wears Prada: Luxury Consumption as a Female Competition Strategy

Previous studies on luxury consumption demonstrated that men spend large sums of money on luxury brands to signal their mate value to women and, thus, increase their reproductive success. Although women also spend copious amounts of money on luxuries, research focusing on women's motives for luxury consumption is rather scarce. Relying on costly signaling and intrasexual competition theory, the goal of the current study was to test whether female intrasexual competition in a mate attraction context triggers women's spending on luxuries. The results of the first experiment reveal that an intrasexual competition context enhances women's preferences for attractiveness enhancing, but not for non-attractiveness related luxuries such as a smartphone. This finding indicates that women may use luxury consumption as a self-promotion strategy during within-sex competitions, as these luxuries improve their advantages against same-sex rivals for mates. A follow-up study shows that compared to women who do not consume luxuries, women who do so are perceived as more attractive, flirty, young, ambitious, sexy, and less loyal, mature and smart by other women. These results suggest that luxury consumption may provide information about a women's willingness to engage in sex, as well as her views about other women, and consequently, her success in intrasexual competitions.