Does the face reveal athletic flair? Positions in team sports and facial attractiveness

Abstract

Athleticism is sexually attractive, indicating that it may serve as a sign of heritable fitness. We hypothesized that just as some sports may more honestly signal fitness than other sports, some positions within team sports may more honestly signal fitness than other positions, because success in such positions depends more strongly on traits associated with heritable fitness (e.g., agility, spontaneity, creativity). We conducted two studies in which women rated facial photographs of male soccer players and ice hockey players, and we found that the faces of goalkeepers/goalies and strikers/forwards were rated to be more attractive than the faces of their team mates. These results suggest that heritable fitness may influence athletes’ choice of (or assignment to) positions, and they generate a number of questions for additional research.