The target article argues that the preferential treatment accorded to attractive people in labor markets, economic games, the justice system, and other social domains is primarily the result of evolved mechanisms designed to maintain access to and court valuable potential mates. We applaud the authors for comprehensively reviewing the relevant literature from multiple fields and for using evolutionary theory to integrate and explain diverse findings. We hope to see more such efforts in the future.

To support their hypothesis, the authors point to evidence that the “beauty premium” occurs somewhat more strongly and consistently toward women and in opposite-sex interactions. They conclude that the existence of these mating-specific biases is crucial for the validity of evolutionary explanations:

In our view, this position inaccurately conflates mating mechanisms with evolutionary explanations in general. Moreover, the mating-specific hypothesis put forth by Maestripieri overlooks alternative adaptationist perspectives on partner choice that may better explain patterns of preferential treatment directed toward physically attractive individuals.

Human social life involves multiple types of long-term cooperative relationships, including trading partnerships, friendships, mating relationships, coalitions, and leader-follower hierarchies (Tooby et al. Reference Tooby, Cosmides and Price2006), all of which involve costly investments in specific individuals with delayed payoffs. Therefore, natural selection would have favored individuals who were attracted to others with traits that ancestrally predicted positive expected returns on these social investments (e.g., Barclay Reference Barclay2016; Sugiyama Reference Sugiyama and Buss2015; Tooby & Cosmides Reference Tooby, Cosmides, Runciman, Smith and Dunbar1996). For example, there would have been strong selection against investing in friends, mates, or allies who would not be alive to reciprocate later on; who could not accumulate sufficient resources to provide help during times of need; or who carried a high load of infectious pathogens.

Because certain physical characteristics may have been cues of partner value in multiple relationship domains, physical attractiveness is likely to predict favorable treatment in multiple domains. For example, physical symmetry, smooth skin, hormone-mediated sexual ornaments, and the lack of disfigurement are all ancestrally valid indicators of good health and low pathogen load (Little et al. Reference Little, Jones and DeBruine2011; Kurzban & Leary Reference Kurzban and Leary2001; Sugiyama Reference Sugiyama and Buss2015). These features would therefore have predicted longevity, continued ability to extract resources from the environment, and low risk of transmitting pathogens, all of which are valuable in multiple types of social partners. Likewise, cues of physical prowess and coordination, which would have predicted human ancestors' ability to accumulate resources via effective foraging (Apicella Reference Apicella2014) and social bargaining (Sell et al. Reference Sell, Tooby and Cosmides2009), should also be attractive in multiple types of social partners. Therefore, to the degree that cues of (ancestral) mate value overlap with cues of (ancestral) partner value in other domains, mate attractiveness should predict favorable treatment in a variety of settings.

This broader partner choice-based approach predicts that people will direct preferential treatment toward attractive others as an investment in a cooperative relationship, and that this will often be true for both sexes, within same- and opposite-sex relationships, and also among people of nonreproductive ages. Evidence is overwhelmingly consistent with these predictions. For example, the meta-analytic review by Langlois et al. (Reference Langlois, Kalakanis, Rubenstein, Larson, Hallam and Smoot2000) showed that attractive males and females receive preferential treatment within children's peer groups, adult-child dyads, and interactions among both same- and opposite-sex adults. Many researchers have found correlations between physically attractive features and social connectedness, status, and income within both same- and mixed-sex organizations (e.g., Anderson et al. Reference Anderson, John, Keltner and Kring2001; Judge & Cable Reference Judge and Cable2004; Little & Roberts Reference Little and Roberts2012; Tyrrell et al. Reference Tyrrell, Jones, Beaumont, Astley, Lovell, Yaghootkar, Tuke, Ruth, Freathy, Hirschhorn, Wood, Murray, Weedon and Frayling2016). We recently found that men playing the ultimatum game were more generous to other men who appeared healthier, more attractive, and physically stronger, and that this latter effect was attributable to strength triggering perceptions of productivity rather than intimidation (Eisenbruch et al., Reference Eisenbruch, Grillot, Maestripieri and Roneyin press). Physical attractiveness alone predicted nearly two-thirds of the variance in how generously men were treated by other men. Similarly, we recently showed that both men and women willingly allocate positions of high organizational status and income to physically stronger (and hence more attractive) men, because they are seen as being better able to enforce cooperation within the group and successfully negotiate with other groups (Lukaszewski et al. Reference Lukaszewski, Simmons, Anderson and Roney2016). These effects are incongruous with the target article's mating-specific account, but are consistent with an evolved psychology of partner choice in which mate choice shares desiderata with partner choice in other social domains.

We emphasize that we agree with the argument made by Maestripieri et al. that mating motivations likely explain any tendency for attractiveness-based preferential treatment to be strongest from men toward women. Mating is highly fitness relevant, and it is therefore likely that mating motives have particularly powerful effects on (especially men's) behavior. We reject, however, the idea that these sex effects should be the litmus test for evolutionary explanations of the “beauty premium,” or that attractiveness effects in nonmating domains must be the result of overgeneralizations of mate choice mechanisms. In addition, we are not arguing that attractive individuals are necessarily better cooperative partners in contemporary environments; rather, physical attractiveness in cooperative partners likely predicted larger streams of material benefits within ancestral hunter-gatherer environments, even if it does not reliably predict worker performance in technologically modern occupations. Because partner choice mechanisms evolved in such ancestral ecologies, those mechanisms may still produce preferences for attractive cooperative partners in modern economies. Whether attractive individuals continue to be differentially productive within at least some modern organizations, for example, by virtue of their ability to elicit prosocial behavior in customers, clients, or other workers, is an important empirical question for future research.

In sum, because mate choice is not the only type of partner choice that has benefited from preferences for physical attractiveness, any account that depends exclusively on mate choice to explain broad preferences for attractive people will likely be incomplete.