Abstract
Over the last 25 years, a large amount of research has been dedicated to identifying men's preferences for women's physical features, and the evolutionary benefits associated with such preferences. Today, this area of research generates substantial controversy and criticism. I argue that part of the crisis is due to inaccuracies in the evolutionary hypotheses used in the field. For this review, I focus on the extensive literature regarding men's adaptive preferences for women's waist-to-hip ratio (WHR), which has become a classic example of the just-so storytelling contributing to the general mistrust toward evolutionary explanations of human behavior. The issues in this literature originate in the vagueness and incompleteness of the theorizing of the evolutionary mechanisms leading to mate preferences. Authors seem to have rushed into testing and debating the effects of WHR on women's attractiveness under various conditions and using different stimuli, without first establishing (a) clear definitions of the central evolution concepts (e.g., female mate value is often reduced to an imprecise concept of “health-and-fertility”), and (b) a complete overview of the distinct evolutionary paths potentially at work (e.g., focusing on fecundability while omitting descendants' quality). Unsound theoretical foundations will lead to imprecise predictions which cannot properly be tested, thus ultimately resulting in the premature rejection of an evolutionary explanation to human mate preferences. This paper provides the first comprehensive review of the existing hypotheses on why men's preferences for a certain WHR in women might be adaptive, as well as an analysis of the theoretical credibility of these hypotheses. By dissecting the evolutionary reasoning behind each hypothesis, I show which hypotheses are plausible and which are unfit to account for men's preferences for female WHR. Moreover, the most cited hypotheses (e.g., WHR as a cue of health or fecundity) are found to not necessarily be the ones with the strongest theoretical support, and some promising hypotheses (e.g., WHR as a cue of parity or current pregnancy) have seemingly been mostly overlooked. Finally, I suggest some directions for future studies on human mate choice, to move this evolutionary psychology literature toward a stronger theoretical foundation.
Highlights
The ratio between the waist and the hips circumferences (Waist-to-Hip Ratio, or waist-to-hip ratio (WHR)) is a physical characteristic often used as an example to show that evolution shaped human mate preferences
Mate value is attached to the concept of reproductive success: a woman with a high mate value will increase the reproductive success of her mate(s)
I review each hypothesis found in the literature to see if it could, in theory, support an adaptive role of the preference for a low WHR
Summary
The ratio between the waist and the hips circumferences (Waist-to-Hip Ratio, or WHR) is a physical characteristic often used as an example to show that evolution shaped human mate preferences It is an example of just-so storytelling in evolutionary psychology. In 1993, Devendra Singh suggested that WHR represents a strong predictor of women’s physical attractiveness (Singh, 1993a) He argued that men’s preference for a mate with a low WHR is adaptive, because a low WHR reflects a woman’s high mate value. The survival and the quality of these children will directly impact their own reproductive success, and the number of grandchildren in the generation, influencing the reproductive success of the grandparents. The question is which of these components of reproductive success are linked to a mate’s
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