Men overestimate women's preference for masculinity
bps.org.uk
bps.org.uk
The most "astonishing/counterintuitive" detail was that women were essentially more concerned or attracted to good looks than men were. If you rate people's attractiveness on how much other people like their look, you can then look at how much people are interested in people "out of their league", so to speak. And women showed a much greater tendency to flock toward the most good looking men, men who were "numerically" out of their reach (because too many women wanted too few men)
This is not the same thing as preferring "masculinity" which this study concerns itself with, but it is similar. There are masculine traits you can fake or modify, like "abs" and there are masculine traits that are more innate, like shape of your face/jaw. Presumably both men and women are innately more aware of "underlying" looks. Part of what this article concerns itself with are "mutable" characteristics that people are over focusing on.
it's just interesting to learn that women care about looks more than men do, at least on a "dating menu"; irl could be totally different.
It's pretty obvious that is not reflective of "all women".
It's always annoying to see headlines trumpeting general conclusions from what turns out to be a small/over-selected sample population.
I think there are legitimate reasons for restricting the sample on the basis of race/ethnicity and sexual orientation. It is plausible that both are confounding variables (even if there is no biological difference in the psychology of sexual attraction in those cases, there are no doubt differences in cultural influences); but, to properly control for them, you need adequate representation of minorities in your sample, which may mean your sample needs to be a lot bigger, which makes your study take longer and cost more, and you might not have that in your time and money budget. Another approach is to try to oversample minorities, but that brings its own statistical risks. So, the idea of limiting your study to cisheterosexual people from the ethnoracial majority, and then potentially following up with future studies specifically targeting LGBT and ethnoracially diverse populations, could be a reasonable approach
18–27 is likely because it is easy for researchers based at universities to use students, most of whom are relatively young (and mature age students are not just fewer, they are possibly even less representative of the average person of their age)
> Given the narrow demographic of the study, however, it's not possible to say whether these results would vary in non-White, non-American, LGBT+, and other populations.
And if you read the actual paper, it makes similar points in its “Limitations” section, albeit not as succinctly
This all suggests that misjudging what others find attractive doesn't just skew our view of potential partners, but also distorts our own self-image. Just as concerns about muscularity, body type, or weight can lead to insecurity and unhappiness, so too can worries about the masculinity or femininity of our facial features.
It is amazing to me to catch the occasional glimpse beyond my own preoccupations and see the outside world unmarred.
I'm not sure what to do with these experiences. Maybe this will be helpful to you.
https://web.archive.org/web/20221006180631/https://europeanr...
Anyway, the methodology for quantifying how masculine or feminine a face is in the study was kind of interesting, though it wasn't brought up in the press release.
>Transformation was achieved by applying or subtracting the linear difference between the average male face shape and female face shape to target face (i.e. average faces for illustration and each individual composite or base face for stimuli. The distance from the average female face shape to the average male face shape was equivalent to a +100% increase in masculinity. Thus, each of the 118 faces contributed to the definition of the dimorphism vector along which base faces were manipulated
So some notion of deformation — the medical imaging community uses the concept of a "deformation vector field" — is being applied to project face shapes onto an axis of feminine to masculine.
One limitation of face-shape studies like this is that the faces are always shown in orthographic projection on a flat screen, which creates a predictable distortion of facial features, tending to widen and flatten faces compared to what you see in real life. This is the "camera adds ten pounds" effect:
https://petapixel.com/2016/07/28/camera-adds-10-pounds/
Since the preferences for female faces were both predicted by women and chosen by men to be much more feminine (>100%) than the displayed faces, it seems possible that the method of display may have been slightly distorted as though projected from infinity, like the telephoto examples in the article, where the subject's face is widened.
But perhaps the greater lesson is that it isn't so simple to display a 3D object on a flat screen. In fact, the method of projection isn't even mentioned in the study, much less the article!
Reading, I would say that the author isn't really "European" but rather a sex pest trying to sell an American audience the exoticism of "Europe."
(See Neil Gaiman and the rest of that gang for recent more specificity.)
The representation isn't genuine but assumed. I'm not sure you picked the best example.
Stay true to yourself and hell what others think - with basic social skills and a few smiles you'd be surprised what comes your way.
But yeah, one needs to leave his screen at some point - so be a bit more social and just say hi around.
But I expect that none of these social science things would work out in the real world so it's a fairly reasonable representation
It's easier to switch to either an alternative frontend that lets you ignore flags or an RSS reader that will even let you see entirely deleted posts.
My takeaway is: choose what you like instead of chasing what others want or what you think is desirable to the opposite sex.
I myself don't really want to work all that hard to build a muscular body so my preferential default is coincidentally also the broadest appeal to women. Not too much work, but reasonably attainable.
I just don't terribly think that masculine or not, neither choice seems socially less/more acceptable to me.
And for my own preferences, even if I was feeling ridiculously overly-socially concious of my choices I don't even know which end of the scale I'd have to pretend to be embarassed about.