Abstract
Background Heterosexual men and women differ in their sensitivity to cues indicating material status. This dissociation has been explained by appealing to sexual selection processes that encourage women to evaluate men on the basis of their material status but could perhaps be explained by sex differences in contextual attention, or, associative representations. Method In Experiment 1, heterosexual women rated the attractiveness of an opposite sex model in 4 conditions; (1) attractive context, (2) attractive context with implied ownership, (3) unattractive context, and (4) unattractive context with ownership implied. A second experiment used a fictitious stockbroker learning task (with both men and women) in 2 biconditional discriminations to measure contextual attention (stage 1) and then to explore the structure of contextual representation (stage 2) using a transfer of occasion setting test. Results In Experiment 1, females increased ratings in attractive contexts, both when context ownership was impli...
Highlights
Sex differences in sensitivity to cues indicating material status may reflect how men and women tend to encode the relationships between background/context stimuli and target stimuli
The analysis revealed a main effect of context F1,59 = 18.557, P = 0.000, showing that model presented in attractive contexts was perceived as more attractive than when the same model was presented in the unattractive contexts
Learning of the biconditional discrimination was indexed as the mean difference in confidence ratings between profit trials (AX & BY) and loss trials (AY & BX)
Summary
It has been argued that men evaluate attractiveness on the basis of the physical characteristics of women (e.g., hip to waist ratio, Furnham et al, 2006) whilst women base their evaluations on cues that indicate wealth and status Some researchers have directly manipulated the perceived material status of models through changes of costume (Hill, Nocks, & Gardner, 1987; Hoult, 1954) or apparent ownership of prestige cars/apartments (Dunn & Searle, 2010; Dunn & Hill, 2014) Both of these manipulations have shown that women are sensitive to status manipulations (attractiveness of a model increases in the high status condition), whilst men are not. This dissociation has been explained by appealing to sexual selection processes that encourage women to evaluate men on the basis of their material status but could perhaps be explained by sex differences in contextual attention, or, associative representations
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