Abstract
Previous work showed high agreement in facial attractiveness preferences within and across cultures. The aims of the current study were twofold. First, we tested cross-cultural agreement in the attractiveness judgements of White Scottish and Black South African students for own- and other-ethnicity faces. Results showed significant agreement between White Scottish and Black South African observers' attractiveness judgements, providing further evidence of strong cross-cultural agreement in facial attractiveness preferences. Second, we tested whether cross-cultural agreement is influenced by the ethnicity and/or the gender of the target group. White Scottish and Black South African observers showed significantly higher agreement for Scottish than for African faces, presumably because both groups are familiar with White European facial features, but the Scottish group are less familiar with Black African facial features. Further work investigating this discordance in cross-cultural attractiveness preferences for African faces show that Black South African observers rely more heavily on colour cues when judging African female faces for attractiveness, while White Scottish observers rely more heavily on shape cues. Results also show higher cross-cultural agreement for female, compared to male faces, albeit not significantly higher. The findings shed new light on the factors that influence cross-cultural agreement in attractiveness preferences.
Highlights
Facial attractiveness plays a crucial role in a variety of social interactions, from dating [1] to voting behaviour [2]
Eleven principal components were retained from the female shape Principal Component Analyses (PCA), which together explained 83.16% of the variance in female face shape; Ten principal components were retained from the male shape PCA, which explained 81.45% of the variance in male face shape
The observed correlation between African and Scottish observers’ attractiveness judgements (r = 0.62) was similar to previously reported correlations between populations influenced by Western culture, for example Americans and Koreans (r = 0.64; [8]) and Americans, Brazilians and Russians
Summary
Facial attractiveness plays a crucial role in a variety of social interactions, from dating [1] to voting behaviour [2]. Different cultures were believed to have different standards of physical attractiveness More recent work, including a meta-analysis of facial attractiveness preferences, found high consistency between people’s judgements of facial attractiveness within and across cultures, leading to the conclusion that ‘‘raters agree about who is and is not attractive, both within and across cultures’’ [4]. Most of the studies of adults included in the crosscultural part of the meta-analysis tested agreement between people of different ethnic origins currently living within a single country. A few studies tested agreement across different cultural and ethnic groups living in different countries [5,6,7,8,9], providing a more stringent test of the universality of attractiveness standards.
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