Abstract
SummaryFacial attractiveness confers considerable advantages in social interactions,1,2 with preferences likely reflecting psychobiological mechanisms shaped by natural selection. Theories of universal beauty propose that attractive faces comprise features that are closer to the population average3 while optimizing sexual dimorphism.4 However, emerging evidence questions this model as an accurate representation of facial attractiveness,5, 6, 7 including representing the diversity of beauty preferences within and across cultures.8, 9, 10, 11, 12 Here, we demonstrate that Western Europeans (WEs) and East Asians (EAs) evaluate facial beauty using culture-specific features, contradicting theories of universality. With a data-driven method, we modeled, at both the individual and group levels, the attractive face features of young females (25 years old) in two matched groups each of 40 young male WE and EA participants. Specifically, we generated a broad range of same- and other-ethnicity female faces with naturally varying shapes and complexions. Participants rated each on attractiveness. We then reverse correlated the face features that drive perception of attractiveness in each participant. From these individual face models, we reconstructed a facial attractiveness representation space that explains preference variations. We show that facial attractiveness is distinct both from averageness and from sexual dimorphism in both cultures. Finally, we disentangled attractive face features into those shared across cultures, culture specific, and specific to individual participants, thereby revealing their diversity. Our results have direct theoretical and methodological impact for representing diversity in social perception and for the design of culturally and ethnically sensitive socially interactive digital agents.
Highlights
We started our analysis by modeling each participant’s preference—i.e., face features (i.e., 3D shape and L*a*b* complexion) that modulate perceptions of attractiveness. Using these 3D face models, we asked two key questions: is facial attractiveness a universal face average and is it an exaggeration of sexual dimorphism? Having shown that it is neither, we reconstructed a more-accurate representation of the feature space of facial attractiveness
We show that attractiveness preferences vary within and across cultures and that cultural preferences transfer to faces of other ethnicities
Modeling individual facial attractiveness preferences in two cultures we modeled individual’s preferences with young males known to rely on physical appearance when judging attractiveness[13,14,15,16] from two distinct cultures—i.e., 40 white Western Europeans (WEs) and 40 Chinese East Asians (EAs)
Summary
Modeling individual facial attractiveness preferences in two cultures we modeled individual’s preferences with young males (median age, 23 years old) known to rely on physical appearance when judging attractiveness[13,14,15,16] from two distinct cultures—i.e., 40 white Western Europeans (WEs) and 40 Chinese East Asians (EAs) (see Participants in the STAR Methods). We controlled face ethnicity as a between-participant factor, with half of the participants in each culture (i.e., 20 out of the 40 participants) rating faces of their own ethnicity and half the other ethnicity
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