Automaticity of facial attractiveness perception and sex-specific mating strategies
Section snippets
Automaticity of facial attractiveness perception
It has been suggested that the perception of facial attractiveness operates independently of attentional resources and, hence, would not suffer from concurrent processing of other stimuli or tasks (Moors & de Houwer, 2006). This means that the process is seen as capacity-free, and therefore automatic, as low capacity demands are one criterion of automatic processes (Schneider & Chein, 2003). A well-established experimental method for exploring the capacity needs of a cognitive process is the
Study 1
In the first study, both male and female participants judged the attractiveness of opposite-sex faces. We assumed that women, but not men, require central capacity for processing facial attractiveness. More precisely, we assumed that the processing of facial attractiveness in Task 2 cannot occur in parallel with central Task 1 processing in female participants, and thus predicted additive effects of Task 2 difficulty and SOA for female participants. In contrast, we assumed that the processing
Study 2
Results from the first study supported predictions from sexual strategies theory (Buss and Schmitt, 1993, Buss and Schmitt, 2019). However, as the participants evaluated only opposite-sex faces in Study 1, it is not clear whether the observed sex difference could be attributed to the sex of the observers or the sex of the stimulus faces. Experiments can only convincingly support the predictions from sexual strategies theory when considering all possible combinations of participants' and
General discussion
In two studies, we found evidence suggesting that assumptions about the automaticity of perceiving facial attractiveness should be more differentiated in the literature. In particular, in our PRP experiments, we observed that the difficulty of discriminating facial attractiveness had no effect at short SOAs when men judged female faces, whereas the difficulty effect was present when men judged male faces, or when women judged male or female faces. This pattern suggests that perceiving facial
Ethical consideration
All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Lisa Klümper:Conceptualization, Methodology, Investigation, Writing - original draft, Project administration.Peter Wühr:Investigation, Resources, Writing - review & editing.Manfred Hassebrauck:Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing - review & editing.Sascha Schwarz:Conceptualization, Methodology, Formal analysis, Writing - original draft, Supervision.
Declaration of competing interest
The author(s) declared no conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship or the publication of this article.
Acknowledgments
We thank Niklas Nitsch for stylistic suggestions, and Alina Burzinski, Maike Höhn, Marie Kessler, Linn Rothe, and Svenja Sürth for their efforts in collecting the data.
Neither of the experiments reported in this article was formally preregistered. Data and materials are privately registered at the Open Science Framework website (https://osf.io/p48nk/?view_only=3665f6d9fed84f46ab9af745cf3a7961) and will be made available for the public after acceptance of the manuscript.
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