Thanks to Lew Rockwell at LRC.
Researchers have found that men tend to overestimate how
attractive a woman is based on just a brief glimpse, whereas women who catch a
glance of a man are more likely to underestimate his handsomeness.
The findings,
published last month in the Evolution and Human Behavior journal, suggest the
cliche about ‘falling in love at first sight’ only goes one way. The study
appears to confirm the concept of ‘first-impression bias’ in both men and
women.
Conducted
in Australia, researchers asked around 400 volunteers to evaluate the
attractiveness of strangers from the opposite sex based on a blurry photo
without a clear view of their facial features, and then again from a clear
image.
The
researchers also randomized the order of presentation, switching between first
showing participants a blurry image or a clear image. Through this method, they
were apparently able to “isolate the unique effects of uncertainty” –
which was only identified when volunteers saw the blurred images first.
“When people have only incomplete information
about a potential partner, they must make inferences about their desirability,
leading to possible errors in judgment,” the researchers noted.
The
study looked at how people “balance the risks” of these errors of
misjudgment, and the differences between how men and women respond to this
uncertainty.
The
potential risks were described as either engaging in “regrettable mating behavior” when overestimating
desirability or “missing
a valuable opportunity” when under-perceiving attractiveness.
The
results showed that men, on average, give women the benefit of the doubt when
it comes to judging attractiveness, while the opposite held true when the roles
were reversed.
Further
analysis suggested “more
nuanced biases” in that men appeared to specifically
overestimate the attractiveness of unattractive (but not attractive) women,
while women exhibited a bias against attractive (but not unattractive) men.
While
noting that this was an “important finding,” the team said these were “broad quantitative effects” that
needed to be studied further to understand why “first-impression bias” existed to begin with.
They also highlighted the importance of conducting algorithm-based studies into
cognitive biases.
The
study noted that earlier research on perception bias, including examinations of
men overestimating how interested a woman was in them sexually, had emphasized “between-sex” differences.
Reprinted with permission from RT News.
