Physical Attractiveness and Selection of Marriage Partners

Abstract

Physical attractiveness is becoming a psychological variable of increasing interest. A number of studies have shown it to be related to general attraction and to desirability as a spouse (Byrne, et al., 1970). If both men and women weight physical attractiveness in marital selection, one might expect a positive correlation between the attractiveness of husbands and of their wives. A positive correlation would also be expected if people aspired to a spouse who was at about their own level of attractiveness (Walster, et al., 1966). The present study was designed to investigate whether such a correlation between the attractiveness of husbands and their wives does exist. A set of 50 negatives of wedding photographs were obtained from a local newspaper, and from these, 36 couples were selected whose pose was approximately full face to the camera. The face of each partner was then printed separately in a 2-in. by 2%-in. vignette, to remove cues from background and dress, thus giving two sets of 36 prints, one comprised of husbands' faces and the other of wives' faces. Twenty male and 20 female first yezr psychology students were then asked to sort each set into 9 categories, with 4 faces in each category, according to how good-looking they judged the faces to be, the order in which the two sets were sorted being counterbalanced among Ss. Categories were assigned scale values from 1 to 9, and the mean scale value for each face was computed separately for male and for female Ss. However, since the correlation between the scale values for [he two groups of Ss was +0.94 for women's faces and +0.88 for men's faces, the scale values for the two groups were combined. A product-moment correlation between the scale values for husbands and their wives gave a value of +0.39 ( p < .05) , supporting the hypothesis. The correlation, though not spectacular, is noteworthy in that the sample of couples was small and not selected for attractiveness, while attractiveness was judged by strangers from photographs. Informal evidence from subsequent studies suggests that people do not expect a large disparity in the attractiveness of spouses, though whether this reflects a preference for simihrity or an evaluation of marital opportunity remains to be elucidared.