Changing perceptions of attractiveness as observers are exposed to a different culture

By Martin J. Tovee, Viren Swami, Adrian Furnham, Roshila Mangalparsad. 2006

230 citations recorded by the source corpus.

It has been suggested that certain physical cues can be used to predict mate quality and that sensitivity to these cues would therefore be adaptive. From this, it follows that in environments where the optimal values for these features differ, the attractiveness preferences should also be different. In this study, we show that there are striking differences in attractiveness preferences for female bodies between United Kingdom (UK) Caucasian and South African Zulu observers. These differences can be explained by different local optima for survival and reproduction in the two environments. In the UK, a high body mass is correlated with low health and low fertility, and the converse is true in rural South Africa. We also report significant changes in the attractiveness preferences of Zulus who have moved to the UK. This suggests that these preferences are malleable and can change with exposure to different environments and conditions. Additionally, we show that Britons of African origin, who were born and who grew up in the UK, have exactly the same preferences as our UK Caucasian observers. These results suggest that humans have mechanisms for acquiring norms of attractiveness that are highly plastic, which allow them to track different ecological conditions through learning.

Subfields: Ecology, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9d41637637841e9ee0cbebe5f3c002806621c019

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In Ecology

In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Conditional mate preferences: Factors influencing preferences for height (2008, background): “The ability to form, attend to, and internalize social norms is an important feature of evolved human psychology (Boyd & Richerson, 2005), and social norms play a role in reflecting and determining what is considered physically attractive (Tovee et al., 2006).”
The Attractive Female Body Weight and Female Body Dissatisfaction in 26 Countries Across 10 World Regions: Results of the International Body Project I (2010, background): “First, recent work has documented an inverse relation between SES (a covariate of resource security) and ideal body weight (e.g., Scott, Bentley, Tovée, Ahamed, & Magid, 2007; Swami & Tovée, 2005a, 2007a, 2007b, 2007c; Swami, Knight, et al., 2007; Tovée et al., 2006).”
Cross-Cultural Variation in Mate Preferences for Averageness, Symmetry, Body Size, and Masculinity (2013, background): “South African Zulu men also show a stable preference for women with BMIs ranging from 23 kg/m2 (normal) to 38 kg/m2 (very obese; Tovée, Swami, Furnham, & Mangalaparsad, 2006), in contrast to British men, most of whom prefer a BMI of 20.5 kg/m2 (low-normal; Tovée et al., 2006).”