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Do the faces in the results section all look the same to anyone else?

Not sure if this means the study was questionable or if I have some kind of face blindness.

They don't look the same to me but something about the models seems really oversimplified to me, in the sense that the variation they're modeling doesn't come anywhere near capturing real-world variation affecting sexual and romantic behavior. To me it feels like there's huge dimensions of facial variation that are just being completely ignored.

When I think of masculine looking women I know, just for example, they look nothing like the masculinized photos. It's like they're focusing on the averages , and a bunch of important variation is being collapsed in the process.

> doesn't come anywhere near capturing real-world variation affecting sexual and romantic behavior.

I haven’t even looked at the images myself. But just speaking from personal experience - sometimes one can feel more attracted to the person who doesn’t look as conventionally attractive. Some people see a person who looks like a supermodel and they immediately think “I have zero chance” and so they don’t really feel any attraction. Then they see someone of (judged by conventional standards) more average looks and they feel like they actually might have a chance with them, and that feeling makes them feel attracted to them.

I don't think it's that. "Super models" are kind of weird looking to begin with. They're picked because they have some quirk. You might like that or you might not, I don't think it's to do with "chance". Then there's people that have all the right features but ultimately look kind of bland. Maybe chance is a factor. Maybe you read something into their personality from their facial expressions. Some people just look like bitches even if they're kind of hot, and that affects attraction too.

I agree, they all look very similar. The more masculine man has a slightly narrower head I think and slightly different eye shape. The more feminine woman looks weird to me, a bit goblin-like with the cheeks and eyes. It would be more interesting to see the actual photos that these are averages of.

GP asked about the "Results" section. The ones in "Materials and methods" are much easier to distinguish.

Yes, they look so similar that you'd have to stare at them a while to notice any differences.

EDIT: After looking at them for a while I notice some subtle differences in the male images, but very subtle. And less differences in the female images.

I can see that some of these faces are slightly wider than others etc, but otherwise they're pretty much the same. You would get a bigger difference than that by photographing the same face with different focal length.

In regards to Figure 3 I think the most easily observable difference, particularly by comparing men's short-term prediction and women's long-term preference, is the inner eyebrows' tilt and upper eyelid height.

Also the chin is slightly shorter and less sharp in the women's preference in both short and long-term cases. But yeah it's true that the women's replies seem to not deviate that much from the neutrally dimorphic male face.

Otoh it's surprising to see how both men and women thought the preferred female faces have to possess more than double the neutral dimorphic one.

They look arguably same to me.

Except in the women's faces. The ones women predicted look more fat to me (they're supposed to look more thin). So, to me, they look opposite of what they're supposed to be.

Maybe it's dark mode, but they all look the same to me too. Barely noticable differences, but can't read any emotional charge, other then some being harder/milder.

Not identical, but fairly close. Much closer than the examples in the first image would suggest based on the numbers presented.

Take a look at figure 1 (in methods) to get a better sense of what range of features the participants were working with.

Facial structure alone tends to be fairly androgynous. You're used to a lot of other cues from hair, height, body shape, clothing, and voice.

And skin! Not sure how people overlook skin: cheeks color, smoothness, freckles, tanned/not tanned. Sends so many signals

Movement. Feminine way of moving is astonishingly soft and curvy in tons of ways.

I can see a difference in the female pictures but not the male pictures. I am a straight male if that has any significance.

I could not distinguish them in the slightest. I have autism and struggle with faces.

Same I can't see anything

It's like asking which white NPC from The Sims is the hottest.

We don't even perceive colors the same way.

I would say the differences are subtle at best.

What is this, Elder Scrolls science? Those are some terribly low-quality uncanny valley face models... if I were in the study I'd answer whatever I had to just to get out.

I've seen more appealing orcs in Morrowind.

Seriously. I don't know how this study works when the options range from "Maybe if I was really drunk. And blindfolded." to "Sorry, I think we'll just have to go extinct."

Maybe after a little skooma.

Hey, whatever floats your boat. :D

Not a single Redguard... (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

We don't just model ourselves to attract a mate. Men often wish to appear more masculine so as to intimidate other men, for example. This effect is absent from most discussions about preferences and self-image.

This is an interesting take. When I taught low-income Muslim students from North Africa I was told that having a beard (which I already had) would help to establish myself as a figure of authority, as they would associate it with their conception of what a "scholarly figure" looks like. Similarly, women in both Academia and the corporate world have told me that they had chosen not to dye their graying hair in order to consolidate their image as a "serious, professional woman".

I think phrases along the lines of "Women don't wear makeup for men, but for other women" or "Guys lifting weights ends up doing it to impress the guys at the gym, not girls at the club" are thrown around and are in line with the effect you say is absent about preference and self image.

Women definitely respond a lot to muscle

This is why the most dangerous men often don’t look like much. Because they don’t need to use their appearance to defend themselves through intimidation.

I’m not following this. While intimidation certainly has many dimensions, I don’t see why not looking like much makes them better able to defend themselves? Or be dangerous?

Unless you’re talking poisoners and embezzlers and the like who don’t need to warn because they don’t engage in direct conflict.

Knowing how to fight or carrying a deadly weapon doesn’t require you to look threatening.

Yes, but the expected outcome of being in a fight or pulling a deadly weapon is much worse than the expected outcome of not being in a fight in the first place.

I get you; someone can look helpless but be packing a Desert Eagle .50 and prepared to use it in any trouble. I don’t see how that is an advantage over not looking helpless, unless the idea is to attract trouble and then kill it.

It doesn’t have to be an advantage, it just is what it is.

It depends on how you define dangerous—some of the most dangerous men in history have been dangerous in part because of how insecure they are. That's how you get men like Putin, putting on an extremely self-conscious show of masculinity while slaughtering hundreds of thousands.

Obviously not every schoolyard bully gets an army and a navy to play with, but they're all dangerous in their own ways, and that danger often stems from a self-conscious desire to project power.

Some Western leaders who killed hundreds of thousands including Bush II, Obama etc did not have to put on a masculinity display. The web of lies weaved by traditional media and vested interests gave a good enough cover.

I don't think that's the lesson from Putin.

Putin's propaganda features these absurd strongman displays of masculinity because it works, it's a very well known and ancient exploit in the human mind and societies as a whole.

I'm sure Putin would prefer to do the evil things he does without having to do the whole song and dance of propaganda.

Would be interesting if they also recorded steroid hormone contraceptive use by the women, and perhaps their menstrual cycle phase.

There seems to be some dispute whether strong daily doses alter preferences.

I wonder if any of this misperception would go away if you found a way to use revealed preference instead of asking people what they prefer.

Okcupid (the old fashioned dating site) used to have an amazing blog on the data science of dating before Match.com bought them and shut it down :(

I think this is a simplistic take, reminds me a bit of a passage in the wonderful quote by Henry Beston in The Outermost House:

"…man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion."

I think other parts of the body play a huge part in how we interpret a persons face.

The body can make the face appear more masculine or feminine; as can clothes, haircut, tattoos etc.

I can only echo the feeling of 'corporate wants you to find the difference" meme, for both sexes. At least I can distinguish which is the male and which is the female template.. Also, I can appreciate that the 'source data' in materials-and-method seem to vary a bit. My naive take-away is, that when you take the average of everything, you get "grey" or "0.5".

Probably uncorrelated, the findings though match with 'everything not taken in moderation/to extremes, fail to achieve the desired result". Singing too loud doesn't sound nice. Putting on too much makeup achieves the opposite effect of the intention of using makeup. Becoming skeletal anorexic thin is not attractive to most, and growing grotesque muscles neither.

> The discrepancy between own and ideal sexual dimorphism

yay, sexual dimorphism discussed in the context of humans!

I'm a proponent of doing this more often, most features we find attractive and even behaviors that we find frustrating are clearly being selected for, reproducing and selected for again. The complexity of our social fabric has no steering against this except for different traits to be selected for at the same time by the broad population than which other traits the broad population would have gone for at the same time. This renders any uniqueness of human selection to be moot, leaving only congruence with other species on this planet.

> our social fabric has no steering against this

Arranged marriages. This is why they are popular in some cultures. And reasonably successful also.

Does this explain bucal fat removal, duck lips and trout pout? I thought it was body dysmorphia from filters.

The hypothesis is interesting, and even likable. But the methods and everything afterwards just didn't align with any interpretation of the philosophy of science. I'm disheartened in seeing research like this taken seriously.

I'm not against studies like this I guess?

but the amount of variables you would need to control for to get meaningful data is a sneeze in a hurricane.

Seems like they picked some unusual lighting for the face models. It looks like the nose casts a shadow on each side.

For anyone interested this is probably the software they used

https://facegen.com/artist.htm

The comments suggesting “subtle differences at best” remind me of visual design discussions with people (usually engineers) who have low awareness or different perception of visual nuance. Working in photography grading and graphic design, as I have, can attune your visual sensitivity to notice the space between the eyes and brow as significant. However, I would say the range of variation is low.

Why does the most attractive male face appear suspiciously similar to Zuck?

This is what peak performance looks like, which you might not appreciate :-/.

For figure 5, is it just me or is there some sort of uncanny effect going on, because the woman's prediction of male preferences looks monsterous to me.

I'm not saying they look unattractive, im saying they look not quite human.

This kind of research should be forced to include the cultural background of the suveyed audience, as many conclusions could easily be turned upside down if the same research is conducted in a different part of the world.

“White European heterosexual men and women were asked to choose their own and ideal face shape…” It’s the 5th sentence.

Yep, point being it should be part of the title, as that's the degree to which it impacts results, and the title is what has the biggest impact.

No. The title is the title, not the context. If people do not read the first 5 sentences of the introduction, you cannot help anyway.

If the title doesn't tell you differently you can assume it's WEIRD.

A related observation that I've made is that young people sometimes make the mistake of trying to make making themselves attractive in a way that would apply to the opposite sex.

As a random example, young women will often wear black fingernail polish, which is on average making them less attractive. It looks like damage, as if they had banged on their fingers with a rock and hurt themselves! Damaged, sick, or injured females are unattractive, but scarred males are more attractive. This is because a woman's health is critical to the health of the offspring, but even a dying old male's sperm can just as good as anyone else's. Scars and physical damage is attractive in men because it indicates that they're a "fighter" and didn't die in the process. Fencing scars on the face were a "thing" for centuries! Not on women though. Only on men.

You see these errors get corrected as young men and women grow up, they figure these things out through trial and error. You almost never see any woman over 30 with black fingernails unless they're a lesbian.

I think the origin of this is each person knows what they find attractive. If a girl looks at a boy, they know what makes that boy attractive, even if on a subconscious level. When they look in the mirror they see someone "unattractive" because if they're not gay, then someone of the same sex is by definition not attractive to them! Hence they try to "fix" this defect they see by making the person in the mirror attractive again... accidentally copying traits they would like to see in the opposite sex onto themselves.

Before mirrors, this would not have occurred in nature, expect perhaps for the rare times someone happened to live next to a very still lake they could observe themselves in regularly.

Interesting take, but one correction: sperm from old men isn't "just as good" as sperm from a young man.

The older the father, the more DNA mutations he's accumulated (I've heard the estimate of 2-3 mutations per year). This increases the risks of all sorts of things, from autism to cancer.

While the overall likelihood is still fairly low, comparatively, it's still strictly worse.

Interesting, wasn't aware of this. Should we freeze our sperm as soon as we hit puberty to improve health of the overall population? I'm only half joking, would the cost be offset by the drastic cost reduction due to less need of health care for those complex genetic conditions?

Honestly I don't know. In theory it would reduce some conditions, but in practice I assume most people will prefer conception the old fashioned way.