Is there such thing as being too attractive? Apparently so, as we look at a thesis by Mehng on a unique case of Debrahlee Lorenzana who was fired for distracting workers by being 'too attractive.' However, the details of the case aren't as simple as they seem, and if Debrahlee was both attractive but also narcissistic in her personality, then that would make her seem extremely unlikeable, leading us to a theory where being attractive but having a poor personality, has more of a 'double effect' on a persons likeability than being regular in looks but with negative personality traits. 

• Timming, A.R., Baumann, C., & Gollan, P.J. (2021). Employee voice and perceived attractiveness: are less attractive employees ignored in the workplace?
• When physical attractiveness does not benefit: Focusing on interpersonal relationship, target employee personality, and career success. Si Ahn Mehng University of North Carolina at Pembroke

This week, we look at the opposite of Ep.12 which suggests that averageing faces results in more attractive looking composites. Much of the benefits of averaged faces are that they have unusually higher rates of symmetry and perfectly clear skin (as a byproduct of the compositing process). However, as other researchers have found, averageness in your facial appeal only gets you so far, and to be truly unique and striking, your face needs features that deviate away from the average and into the extremes of dimorphism and proportion.

• Langlois, Judith H.; Roggman, Lori A.; Musselman, Lisa (1994). WHAT IS AVERAGE AND WHAT IS NOT AVERAGE ABOUT ATTRACTIVE FACES?. Psychological Science, 5(4), 214–220. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.1994.tb00503.x
• Alley, Thomas R.; Cunningham, Michael R. (1991). AVERAGED FACES ARE ATTRACTIVE, BUT VERY ATTRACTIVE FACES ARE NOT AVERAGE. , 2(2), 123–125. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.1991.tb00113.x

When it comes to assessing facial attractiveness, 'Facial Attractiveness: Evolutionary Based Research ' by AC Little has proposed three tenants: Symmetry, Dimorphism and Averageness; it is the last point that is seldom discussed and even less understood.

An averaged face is one produced as a composite of many other faces. If we were to get many faces, all of a similar ethnic or racial group and overlay their faces together, then the Averageness Hypothesis suggests that the produced face will be more attractive than the sum of its parts, i.e. more attractive than those faces by themselves. This is because averaged faces have greater symmetry and clearer skin, but then the real question to answer becomes is averageness (koinophilia) desired because it is attractive by itself or is it desired because it makes the faces more symmetric (is symmetry the real driving force for why we prefer averageness)?

• Tim Valentine; Stephen Darling; Mary Donnelly (2004). Why are average faces attractive? The effect of view and averageness on the attractiveness of female faces. , 11(3), 482–487.

Being unattractive is a disadvantage in many social interactions if you do the wrong thing or act out of line. These unusual behaviours are called 'norm violations' and as it turns out, there is a double devil-effect at play when physically unattractive people behave in an unattractive way. The devil effect is the opposite of the more commonly known halo effect where negative cognitive biases are placed on a person based on their physical characteristics. As such, we expect an unattractive person committing norm violations such as making a potentially risque remark towards a woman in the workplace to be percieved as very repelling behaviour; a double devil effect.

• Gibson, Jeremy L.; Gore, Jonathan S. (2015). You’re OK Until You Misbehave: How Norm Violations Magnify the Attractiveness Devil Effect. Gender Issues, 32(4), 266–278. doi:10.1007/s12147-015-9142-5

It's undeniable that intelligence is attractive, but the question still remains whether it is attractive enough to outweigh physical beauty. In this episode, we take a deep dive into the importance of physical attractiveness and what role it plays against other commonly praised traits such as intelligence and more importantly, how this affects men and women asymmetrically.

• Egebark, J., Ekström, M., Plug, E., & van Praag, M. (2021). Brains or beauty? Causal evidence on the returns to education and attractiveness in the online dating market. Journal of Public Economics, 196, 104372.

Body proportions matter a surprising amount in the context of dating but much of it is only able to be understood in a realistic field study. In today's episode, we go over a unique speed-dating study with a large sample size to confirm that physical features such as shoulder-width ratio and waist-hip ratio matter in making someone appear more physically attractive and how this relates to appearances of social dominance contrasting with femininity (i.e. sexual dimorphism).

• Sidari, Morgan J.; Lee, Anthony J.; Murphy, Sean C.; Sherlock, James M.; Dixson, Barnaby J. W.; Zietsch, Brendan P. (2020). Preferences for Sexually Dimorphic Body Characteristics Revealed in a Large Sample of Speed Daters. Social Psychological and Personality Science, (), 194855061988292

You may have heard of the phrase that attraction cannot be negotiated and in this episode it couldn't be truer. As we explore through the research of White Et al, unattractive participants in the dating market pay a heft 'unattractive tax' where undesirable characteristics (dealbreakers vs dealmakers) are disproportionately weighted against less attractive daters. 

Also, in the absence of physical attraction, women and men behave differently. Women tend to strongly enforce their cutoff threshold for what they find desirable in a partner and do not compromise for a person they have already deemed as unattractive. Men on the other hand do compromise their standards for the sake of casual short term relations. It would seem then that women enforce a hard threshold of what they desire in a mate whereas men have a soft threshold which can sway depending on additional factors such as dealmaking traits (green flags). In short, in the absence of physical attraction, women enforce requirements, men enforce preferences due to the evolutionary cost of false negatives, such that building a domestic life with someone who is unable to cater for the offspring or is genetically weak is a high risk, i.e. Error Management Theory.

• White, K.P., Jonason, P.K. & Al-Shawaf, L. Mating Decisions in the Absence of Physical Attraction. Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology
• P. K. Jonason; J. R. Garcia; G. D. Webster; N. P. Li; H. E. Fisher (2015). Relationship Dealbreakers: Traits People Avoid in Potential Mates.

Tattoos have gone from a social taboo to the upper echelons of high fashion with Jean Paul Gaultier experimenting with tattoo designs in much of his work in the early 90s. In this episode we discuss the social perception of tattoos and the following research suggesting that tattoos have a sensitive cost-benefit ratio of providing some masculine edginess (for both men and women) which correlates to increased desirability but comes at a hit in terms of long term mate characteristics such as stability, reliability and trustworthiness. 

The effects of tattoos are also asymmetrical across genders with women being sterotyped more negatively than men who actually gain a benefit. The hypothesised reasons for why this is the case, the sterotyping pitfalls and how tattoos change your physical aesthetic are all discussed right here in this episode!

• Molloy, Karlyn; Wagstaff, Danielle (2021). Effects of gender, self-rated attractiveness, and mate value on perceptions tattoos. Personality and Individual Differences, 168(), 110382–. doi:10.1016/j.paid.2020.110382