In romance, looks matters most to the beautiful
Updated: 2008-02-15 09:37
In the world of romance, we seek out partners who are just as "hot" or "not hot" as we are.
A new study supports the idea that super models flock together while individuals lacking the perfect face and body also stick together.
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"Beautiful people marry beautiful people and less beautiful people marry less beautiful people," said Dan Ariely, a professor of behavioral economics at MIT's Program in Media Arts and Sciences and Sloan School of Management.
But that doesn't mean less-attractive people are destined to lives of unrequited love and feelings of just settling for the mediocre. The study results, which will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science, suggest people who lack looks place more stock in non-physical features, such as sense of humor, than in physical beauty.
Guys, however, are less concerned with their own looks when deciding whom to date, the findings suggest. So while a man might have no qualms about going after someone much better looking than he is, a woman will tend more to choose partners with compatible looks.
Another recent study suggests that, in general, for both men and women physical attractiveness guides cupid's arrow. This research did not account for each individual's own looks.
Hot or not
What makes for a "hot" appearance? Research has shown that people have essentially universal standards of beauty, including large eyes, "baby face" features, symmetric faces, so-called average faces, and specific waist-hip ratios in men versus women.
They focused on a 10-day period in August 2005 to figure out how an individual's attractiveness rating affected how that person rated others' physical attractiveness on a scale from 1 to the hottest value of 10. Then, the researchers compared the average hot-or-not ratings for each person with the number of dating requests.
On average, participants paired up with others having compatible attractiveness. Compared with the ladies, guys were most influenced by physical attractiveness when requesting dates, but their own appearance ratings had less effect on their date choices.
"Males are less affected by how attractive they themselves are than females," Lee said in a telephone interview. Guys were more likely than ladies to request dates out of their league.
Individuals who slid furthest down the hot-or-not scale seemed more desperate, as they were the most likely to respond "yes" to any date requests. For every unit decrease on the 10-point scale of the member's own attractiveness the member was 25 percent more likely to say "yes" to a potential date.
The hot-rated members were choosier, tending to accept only dates from others in their attractiveness neighborhood.
Beauty in the eye of the beholder?
The researchers wondered whether beauty standards varied depending on a person's own outward appearance.
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