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My colleagues and I recently published a study entitled "Bodily attractiveness and egalitarianism are negatively related in males." It has received quite a bit of media attention, sometimes heralded with hyperbolic headlines like ‘Science Says: Hot Guys Are A-Holes’ or ‘Science May Have Just Explained Why Hot Guys Are Douchebags’.
I understand the need of journalists to use attention-grabbing headlines and am not here to whine about that. And anyway, once you get past the headlines, a lot of this coverage has been pretty accurate. However since I do have my own blog, I'll use it to clarify what our study really showed.
Although we didn’t show that "hot guys are douchebags," we did demonstrate that men who have more attractive bodies tend to be less altruistic and egalitarian than men with less attractive bodies.
To demonstrate this, we produced 3D body scans of 125 people (63 men and 62 women). We used these scans to measure what researchers regard as the most important determinants of bodily attractiveness: waist-chest ratio (v-shaped upper body) in men, and waist-hip ratio (hourglass figure) and thin-ness in women. We also generated 3D body models from these data, and created a video that rotated these models in 360 degrees so that they could be scored for attractiveness by opposite-sex raters.
We collected three kinds of data to measure the extent to which these 125 participants’ attitudes and behaviour were altruistic/egalitarian:
- Generosity in a ‘dictator game’ experiment. This is a standard experiment used in the field of behavioural economics. We provided each participant with £5 (about $8 US) and gave them the opportunity to share any portion of it (from £0 to £5) anonymously with another study participant. People who shared more and kept less for themselves were regarded as more altruistic/egalitarian.
- Responses to an ‘equity sensitivity’ scale. This is a standard scale used in the field of organizational psychology. Participants answered a series of questions that asked them whether, in the groups to which they belong, they tend to do what’s best for themselves or what’s best for their group. People who tended to favor their group over themselves were scored as more altruistic/egalitarian.
- Responses to questions about which economic system participants preferred more, ‘socialism’ or ‘capitalism’. People who preferred socialism more were scored as more altruistic/egalitarian.
Results indicated a moderate, statistically significant negative relationship in men between attractiveness and altruism/egalitarianism: men who had more attractive bodies (as assessed by others and as indicated by low waist-chest ratio) scored lower on altruism/egalitarianism (as indicated by a combination of the three measures described above). We did not find a significant relationship between bodily attractiveness and altruism/egalitarianism in women.
Finally, we asked a group of raters (a different group than that which rated the body models for attractiveness) to rate the models based on how altruistic and egalitarian they thought the people represented by the models would be in real life. In these results, altruism/egalitarianism associated negatively with attractiveness in both men and women: there was a strong tendency of raters to perceive that more attractive men and women would be less altruistic and egalitarian in real life.
Were the results surprising? Some commentators have suggested otherwise, noting that they would definitely have expected for better-looking men to be more selfish. These commentators, I've noticed, have often been women who reference their own experiences in relationships with very attractive, very selfish men. Perhaps (as a heterosexual man) my own experience in this regard has simply been limited, but I found our results to be less ‘obvious’ than these commentators suggest. After all, why wouldn’t we expect for attractive people to be less selfish and more altruistic? The world has treated them pretty well—attractive people enjoy advantages in many areas of life—so why wouldn’t we expect them to reciprocate this kindness?
In any case, I can’t pretend these results were too surprising to us, since we did after all hypothesize that most of them would be true. Our hypotheses were based on the theory that because attractive people tend to (a) be highly valued by others as mates and allies, and (b) benefit from inequality, they have reduced incentives to (a) increase their value to others by being altruistic and (b) support egalitarian norms.
Our results were also consistent with related research which has hinted at lower altruism among attractive people, and especially among attractive men. Why is this tendency more evident in men than in women? I can only speculate, but it may be related to the increased tendency of attractive males to pursue short-term, low-investment, low-empathy mating strategies. Because they are more appealing to women as short-term mates, attractive men are more likely to succeed with (and hence to pursue) such strategies [2]. Less attractive men, in contrast, need to be kinder and more high-investing in order to attract a mate. Women also can pursue either short-term or long-term mating strategies, but unlike men, their strategy of choice seems unrelated to how attractive they are to the opposite sex [3].
References
- Price M. E., Brown S., Dukes A., Kang J. (2015). Bodily attractiveness and egalitarianism are negatively related in males. Evolutionary Psychology 13: 140-166.
- Gangestad S. W., Simpson J. A. (2000). The evolution of human mating: Trade-offs and strategic pluralism. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 23: 573-587.
- Mikach S. M. & Bailey J. M. (1999). What distinguishes women with unusually high numbers of sex partners? Evolution and Human Behavior 20: 141-150.
Copyright Michael E. Price 2015. All rights reserved.
Image credit: Michelangelo's David, 1501-1504, Galleria dell'Accademia (Florence) / Jörg Bittner Unna / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 3.0
