Abstract
BackgroundIn many animals, exaggerated sex-typical male traits are preferred by females, and may be a signal of both past and current disease resistance. The proposal that the same is true in humans – i.e., that masculine men are immunocompetent and attractive – underpins a large literature on facial masculinity preferences. Recently, theoretical models have suggested that current condition may be a better index of mate value than past immunocompetence. This is particularly likely in populations where pathogenic fluctuation is fast relative to host life history. As life history is slow in humans, there is reason to expect that, among humans, condition-dependent traits might contribute more to attractiveness than relatively stable traits such as masculinity. To date, however, there has been little rigorous assessment of whether, in the presence of variation in other cues, masculinity predicts attractiveness or not.Methodology/Principal FindingsThe relationship between masculinity and attractiveness was assessed in two samples of male faces. Most previous research has assessed masculinity either with subjective ratings or with simple anatomical measures. Here, we used geometric morphometric techniques to assess facial masculinity, generating a morphological masculinity measure based on a discriminant function that correctly classified >96% faces as male or female. When assessed using this measure, there was no relationship between morphological masculinity and rated attractiveness. In contrast, skin colour – a fluctuating, condition-dependent cue – was a significant predictor of attractiveness.Conclusions/SignificanceThese findings suggest that facial morphological masculinity may contribute less to men's attractiveness than previously assumed. Our results are consistent with the hypothesis that current condition is more relevant to male mate value than past disease resistance, and hence that temporally fluctuating traits (such as colour) contribute more to male attractiveness than stable cues of sexual dimorphism.
Highlights
Many researchers studying non-human mate choice have observed that exaggerated sex-typical male traits, such as large antlers and peacock’s tails, are attractive to females [1]
Authors have suggested that the growth of such traits is mediated by immune-stressing steroids such as testosterone, and that as only high quality males can ‘‘afford’’ exposure to immune stress, these traits signal high levels of immunocompetence [2,3,4,5,6,7]. Such perspectives have generated similar expectations regarding human mate choice – i.e. that masculine males should be attractive, and that this attractiveness is attributable to immunocompetence [8]
Even if masculinity does signal past disease resistance, it is unclear that females will, in general, benefit from attending to this signal, if cues to current condition are available
Summary
Many researchers studying non-human mate choice have observed that exaggerated sex-typical male traits, such as large antlers and peacock’s tails, are attractive to females [1]. Recent mathematical models of mate choice suggest that in most environments, females can reliably derive substantial fitness advantages from attending to current condition, but may gain little, if any, further benefit from simultaneously selecting mates on the basis of past immune function [21,22] Stable traits such as masculinity, which are not influenced by short-term fluctuations in adult health, should be of less importance to attractiveness than other more condition-responsive cues. Research on attractiveness and skin colour is a relatively recent phenomenon and as with masculinity research, has largely relied on subjective measures or morphing techniques [38,41] Those studies that have used objective measures of natural variation in skin colour, and tested whether they predict attractiveness in the presence of variation in competing cues, have been limited to female faces [40,42]. This information was entered into a regression model along with morphometric masculinity to determine the extent to which either one could predict attractiveness
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