Empirical evidence for the benefits of being attractive is not easily dismissed, and I agree with the authors that we cannot ignore the explanatory role played by deep-seated mating motivations. However, ancestral mating success is an ultimate cause; one also needs to ask what proximate mechanisms might give rise to these biases and how “attractiveness” is defined in facial signal detection.
The financial/prosocial benefits that the physically attractive enjoy may arise from overt mating strategies that seek to continue interaction with attractive others. However, the salience of one job applicant over another, or the selection of an interaction partner in an economic game, could also arise, at least in part, from cognitive processing biases that can be found in the developmental and evolutionary literatures. Physically attractive women and men have been shown to grab our attention (e.g., Maner et al. Reference Maner, Kenrick, Becker, Delton, Hofer, Wilbur and Neuberg2003), an effect that appears in infancy, replicates across race and age of the faces (Langlois et al. Reference Langlois, Ritter, Roggman and Vaughn1991), and cannot simply be reduced to symmetry detection (Samuels et al. Reference Samuels, Butterworth, Roberts, Graupner and Hole1994). In contrast, memory appears to be sensitive to better recognizing only attractive females, not males (e.g., Becker et al. Reference Becker, Kenrick, Guerin and Maner2005). These effects follow naturally from the perspective that certain features of attractiveness correspond to signs of genetic health and fertility, and that these have different values for short- and long-term mating goals as a function of observer sex.
Attention to attractiveness may be instrumental to adult mating success, but why should infants prefer attractive faces? From the evolutionary-developmental perspective, mating motivations should promote attentional vigilance to signs of genetic fitness even in children without mature mating motivations, because such attention facilitates the building of internal representation systems that will later form the multidimensional “mating space.” The resulting representational system can then, at the onset of puberty, facilitate both mate pursuit and mate acquisition, as well as promote an awareness of one's own mate status, the recognition of reciprocal mating interest, and vigilance to same-sex competitors with the greatest ability to poach our romantic partners. Adult attention is hence a symptom of long-standing habits of adaptive information pickup of mating affordances.
Although physically attractive male and female faces both garner more attention, the long-term encoding of individuating features favors attractive women, but not men (who are more likely to be confused with one another; e.g., Becker et al. Reference Becker, Kenrick, Guerin and Maner2005). Sex differences in the fitness value of physical attractiveness cues suggest an explanation for this disjunction. Short-term mating goals (i.e., those focused on genetic quality and de-emphasizing long-term resource provisioning and parental investments) are sufficiently served by attention being drawn to cues of genetic fitness. Long-term mating strategies must additionally track signs of cooperative and committed behavior for the same individual over time, necessitating a more individuated memory code. Women are more likely to embrace long-term strategies because of sex differences in parental investment, and accordingly, male mate value is more tied to things like status and resources (Buss & Schmitt Reference Buss and Schmitt1993). Such differences collude so that a man's physical attractiveness does not inspire as much encoding into memory without further information. Fluctuations in mating motivations should enhance these effects. For example, ovulating women show increases in attention to attractive men, but no such benefits in memory (Anderson et al. Reference Anderson, Perea, Becker, Ackerman, Shapiro, Neuberg and Kenrick2010). Such findings must be tempered by evidence that women's definition of male facial attractiveness changes during ovulation, emphasizing more masculine (i.e., testosterone-related) features (Boothroyd et al. Reference Boothroyd, Jones, Burt, DeBruine and Perrett2008). Considerable work remains to tease out how these features differentially resonate in cognitive processing. Such considerations suggest a number of testable predictions for sex differences in employee evaluation and economic cooperation games.
The memory difference could also arise from properties of the signal itself. Consider the female-carrier hypothesis (Salter Reference Salter1996), which suggests that certain female facial features are attractive because they facilitate paternity certainty for male mates, allowing the father's features to show through more clearly in the offspring. Such features would additionally differentiate attractive women from each other, working against the “attractiveness is prototypicality” claim (as reviewed in Little et al. Reference Little, Jones and DeBruine2011) and providing additional cues promoting better memory for the female faces that will most likely facilitate paternity determinations. Indeed, the morphed prototypical average of attractive female faces is noticeably different from the morphed average of all female faces (Perrett et al. Reference Perrett, May and Yoshikawa1994), suggesting that these faces have additional features for which recognition could be vigilant. In contrast, male facial attractiveness may be much more about prototypicality, which undermines discriminability in memory. Whereas hormone markers should drive attentional vigilance, features that facilitate paternity certainty, which are at their basis about recognition, should translate into better recognition memory.
These cognitive effects could be largely automatic and could readily produce biases in hiring, and so forth, even when proximity/mating is not an explicit goal. If attractiveness is understood as a set of visual signals of mate quality, this grounds the meaning of attractiveness in mating-related instincts and yields falsifiable explanations of both attention and memory effects, which contribute to the behavioral biases discussed in the target article. This also yields a reciprocal grounding of unattractiveness, and we should be open to the possibility that some of these behavioral effects may be more about evolved mechanisms for avoiding socially costly (e.g., unhealthy) coalition partners.
I have focused on face perception here, largely because that is where the data are available. However, physical attractiveness is also body, movement, voice, smell, and other things. Future work should examine the degree to which the varying features of attractiveness differentially predict mating success and relate these more concrete factors to the variance for which they account in differential employment and cooperation outcomes.
Empirical evidence for the benefits of being attractive is not easily dismissed, and I agree with the authors that we cannot ignore the explanatory role played by deep-seated mating motivations. However, ancestral mating success is an ultimate cause; one also needs to ask what proximate mechanisms might give rise to these biases and how “attractiveness” is defined in facial signal detection.
The financial/prosocial benefits that the physically attractive enjoy may arise from overt mating strategies that seek to continue interaction with attractive others. However, the salience of one job applicant over another, or the selection of an interaction partner in an economic game, could also arise, at least in part, from cognitive processing biases that can be found in the developmental and evolutionary literatures. Physically attractive women and men have been shown to grab our attention (e.g., Maner et al. Reference Maner, Kenrick, Becker, Delton, Hofer, Wilbur and Neuberg2003), an effect that appears in infancy, replicates across race and age of the faces (Langlois et al. Reference Langlois, Ritter, Roggman and Vaughn1991), and cannot simply be reduced to symmetry detection (Samuels et al. Reference Samuels, Butterworth, Roberts, Graupner and Hole1994). In contrast, memory appears to be sensitive to better recognizing only attractive females, not males (e.g., Becker et al. Reference Becker, Kenrick, Guerin and Maner2005). These effects follow naturally from the perspective that certain features of attractiveness correspond to signs of genetic health and fertility, and that these have different values for short- and long-term mating goals as a function of observer sex.
Attention to attractiveness may be instrumental to adult mating success, but why should infants prefer attractive faces? From the evolutionary-developmental perspective, mating motivations should promote attentional vigilance to signs of genetic fitness even in children without mature mating motivations, because such attention facilitates the building of internal representation systems that will later form the multidimensional “mating space.” The resulting representational system can then, at the onset of puberty, facilitate both mate pursuit and mate acquisition, as well as promote an awareness of one's own mate status, the recognition of reciprocal mating interest, and vigilance to same-sex competitors with the greatest ability to poach our romantic partners. Adult attention is hence a symptom of long-standing habits of adaptive information pickup of mating affordances.
Although physically attractive male and female faces both garner more attention, the long-term encoding of individuating features favors attractive women, but not men (who are more likely to be confused with one another; e.g., Becker et al. Reference Becker, Kenrick, Guerin and Maner2005). Sex differences in the fitness value of physical attractiveness cues suggest an explanation for this disjunction. Short-term mating goals (i.e., those focused on genetic quality and de-emphasizing long-term resource provisioning and parental investments) are sufficiently served by attention being drawn to cues of genetic fitness. Long-term mating strategies must additionally track signs of cooperative and committed behavior for the same individual over time, necessitating a more individuated memory code. Women are more likely to embrace long-term strategies because of sex differences in parental investment, and accordingly, male mate value is more tied to things like status and resources (Buss & Schmitt Reference Buss and Schmitt1993). Such differences collude so that a man's physical attractiveness does not inspire as much encoding into memory without further information. Fluctuations in mating motivations should enhance these effects. For example, ovulating women show increases in attention to attractive men, but no such benefits in memory (Anderson et al. Reference Anderson, Perea, Becker, Ackerman, Shapiro, Neuberg and Kenrick2010). Such findings must be tempered by evidence that women's definition of male facial attractiveness changes during ovulation, emphasizing more masculine (i.e., testosterone-related) features (Boothroyd et al. Reference Boothroyd, Jones, Burt, DeBruine and Perrett2008). Considerable work remains to tease out how these features differentially resonate in cognitive processing. Such considerations suggest a number of testable predictions for sex differences in employee evaluation and economic cooperation games.
The memory difference could also arise from properties of the signal itself. Consider the female-carrier hypothesis (Salter Reference Salter1996), which suggests that certain female facial features are attractive because they facilitate paternity certainty for male mates, allowing the father's features to show through more clearly in the offspring. Such features would additionally differentiate attractive women from each other, working against the “attractiveness is prototypicality” claim (as reviewed in Little et al. Reference Little, Jones and DeBruine2011) and providing additional cues promoting better memory for the female faces that will most likely facilitate paternity determinations. Indeed, the morphed prototypical average of attractive female faces is noticeably different from the morphed average of all female faces (Perrett et al. Reference Perrett, May and Yoshikawa1994), suggesting that these faces have additional features for which recognition could be vigilant. In contrast, male facial attractiveness may be much more about prototypicality, which undermines discriminability in memory. Whereas hormone markers should drive attentional vigilance, features that facilitate paternity certainty, which are at their basis about recognition, should translate into better recognition memory.
These cognitive effects could be largely automatic and could readily produce biases in hiring, and so forth, even when proximity/mating is not an explicit goal. If attractiveness is understood as a set of visual signals of mate quality, this grounds the meaning of attractiveness in mating-related instincts and yields falsifiable explanations of both attention and memory effects, which contribute to the behavioral biases discussed in the target article. This also yields a reciprocal grounding of unattractiveness, and we should be open to the possibility that some of these behavioral effects may be more about evolved mechanisms for avoiding socially costly (e.g., unhealthy) coalition partners.
I have focused on face perception here, largely because that is where the data are available. However, physical attractiveness is also body, movement, voice, smell, and other things. Future work should examine the degree to which the varying features of attractiveness differentially predict mating success and relate these more concrete factors to the variance for which they account in differential employment and cooperation outcomes.