Evolutionary Theories of Attraction

Evolutionary psychologists have provided an important new way to look at

why individuals are attracted to others. Borrowing from the basic theorizing

of the English biologist Charles Darwin, psychologists are paying increasing

attention to the information provided by both physical and social features of

living creatures. Everyone is influenced by what people look like; they form

impressions of others before they even hear them speak. People often use

the appearance and behavior of others to make a variety of judgments about

them. These judgments are made quickly and unconsciously and are fairly

resistant to change. What sort of impressions are formed? What aspects of a

person are focused upon? Evolutionary psychology has some answers to

these questions.

Specifically, evolutionary psychologists suggest that the attractiveness of a

person’s body serves as a valuable and subtle indicator of social behavior, social

relationship potential, fitness, reproductive value, and health. Evolutionary

psychologists place heavy emphasis on clearly observable features of

human bodies and do not focus as much on internal, unobservable aspects

of personality such as kindness or trustworthiness. There is a growing body

of research that supports these ideas. For example, significant relationships

were found between attractiveness and measures of mental health, social

anxiety, and popularity, so the idea behind evolutionary theory does seem to

be relevant.

Most work studying how body characteristics relate to attractiveness has

focused on a single factor, such as the face, although many features of the

body can influence attractiveness. Faces are often the first part of a person

that is looked at. Furthermore, the face is almost always clearly visible (except

for those of women in cultures that forbid it). Social psychologists

have shown that people often make quick judgments about others based on

their faces, and more than 80 percent of studies on judging attractiveness

have focused on the face alone. The sex, age, and past experiences of the

perceiver, specific facial features such as large lips for women and strong

jaws for men, body and facial symmetry, and specific body ratios such as the

waist-to-hip ratio (WHR, the number attained by dividing the waist measurement

by the circumference of the hips) all influence judgments of attractiveness.

Consistent with this idea are findings that some standards of attractiveness

are consistent across time and cultures. For example, people with

symmetrical faces—those whose eyes and ears appear to be of equal size and

equal distances apart—are preferred over people who do not have symmetrical

equal distances apart—are preferred over people who do not have symmetrical

faces. 118