LONDON – Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but other people’s opinions also matter when it comes
to the attraction between men and women, according to researchers.
They found women are more attracted to a man if other women like him too.
“We tend to think about things like attraction as reflecting a private decision or a personal choice, but our work shows that people’s attractiveness judgments can be influenced in pronounced ways by what other people appear to think of those individuals,†said University of Aberdeen psychologist Ben Jones.
Jones and his team tested the impact of the opinions of others by giving women a test in which they had to choose the more attractive of pairs of male faces and to rate how much more handsome they found them.
They were then shown a short video in which the same faces were displayed. But each face was being looked at by a woman smiling or one showing a bored or neutral expression.
After watching the video, the researchers repeated the initial test.
“We found that the slideshow caused women to become more attracted to the men who were being smiled at by other women,†said Jones.
The test had the opposite effect on men, however. When men were asked to look at the same male faces, those who got the approving female glances became less appealing.
“This shows that people are using cues to the attitudes of others toward individuals to shape their own attractiveness judgments of those individuals,†Jones told Reuters.