Elsevier

Cognition

Volume 204, November 2020, 104379
Cognition

Automaticity of facial attractiveness perception and sex-specific mating strategies

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104379Get rights and content

Highlights

  • The perception of facial attractiveness is not automatic (capacity-free) in general.

  • Men show an automatic (capacity-free) processing of females' facial attractiveness but not of males' facial attractiveness.

  • Women show no automatic (capacity-free) processing of males' or females' facial attractiveness.

  • This pattern makes sense from an evolutionary perspective on different mating strategies of men and women.

Abstract

The current literature shows mixed results regarding whether the perception of facial attractiveness is automatic, i.e. that it operates independently from attentional resources. We argue that an evolutionary perspective on mating strategies provides a comprehensive account of the findings. In two studies, we used the locus-of-slack logic in a psychological refractory period paradigm. Task 1 was a speeded judgment of tone pitch (low vs. high), and Task 2 was a speeded judgment of whether a face was attractive or unattractive on two difficulty levels. Male and female participants judged the attractiveness of opposite-sex faces (Study 1, n = 73) or same-sex faces (Study 2, n = 94) in this paradigm. Results indicate that men do not need attentional resources when processing female faces (Study 1), but require attentional resources when processing same-sex faces (Study 2). In contrast, women need attentional resources to process the attractiveness of opposite as well as same-sex faces.

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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