Self-enhancement and Self-protection Motivation: From the Laboratory to an Evolutionary Context

Abstract

Facial attractiveness strongly affects person perception, with attractive individuals judged more favourably than, and preferred to, their less attractive peers. But what makes a face attractive and where do our preferences come from? Are they shaped by Madison Avenue and the media or have they evolved over millennia to enhance reproductive success? Good candidates for evolved preferences include preferences for average faces, symmetric faces, and faces with extreme sex typical traits. I will focus here on our preference for average faces. I will present evidence that average faces are attractive, and then consider how such a preference could have evolved. Preferences can evolve for traits that signal mate quality, and preferences can emerge as by-products of more general information-processing mechanisms. I will present evidence that both mechanisms contribute to the preference for average faces. Finally, I consider the role of experience in shaping our preference for average faces. This is an important role, because what is average depends on the particular population of faces we experience. I will present recent results showing that what looks average, and therefore attractive, can be rapidly modified by exposure to consistently distorted faces. I conclude that our preference for average faces reflects the operation of evolved mechanisms, which are tuned by experience.