Men's preference for women's facial features: testing homogamy and the paternity uncertainty hypothesis

Abstract

Male mate choice might be based on both absolute and relative strategies. Cues of female attractiveness are thus likely to reflect both fitness and reproductive potential, as well as compatibility with particular male phenotypes. In humans, absolute clues of fertility and indices of favorable developmental stability are generally associated with increased women's attractiveness. However, why men exhibit variable preferences remains less studied. Male mate choice might be influenced by uncertainty of paternity, a selective factor in species where the survival of the offspring depends on postnatal paternal care. For instance, in humans, a man might prefer a woman with recessive traits, thereby increasing the probability that his paternal traits will be visible in the child and ensuring paternity. Alternatively, attractiveness is hypothesized to be driven by self-resembling features (homogamy), which would reduce outbreeding depression. These hypotheses have been simultaneously evaluated for various facial traits using both real and artificial facial stimuli. The predicted preferences were then compared to realized mate choices using facial pictures from couples with at least 1 child. No evidence was found to support the paternity uncertainty hypothesis, as recessive features were not preferred by male raters. Conversely, preferences for self-resembling mates were found for several facial traits (hair and eye color, chin dimple, and thickness of lips and eyebrows). Moreover, realized homogamy for facial traits was also found in a sample of long-term mates. The advantages of homogamy in evolutionary terms are discussed.

Figure 1. A typical screen shot during the evaluation of the women’s facial features by the raters in Study 1.

Women aged 18–25 were recruited and three facial photographs (triptych) were taken. A computer program was used to randomly present drawn pairs of triptychs to male raters. For each pair, the rater had to click on the picture depicting the woman that he found the most attractive. The pictures and information were used with each woman’s consent for publication.

Figure 2. An example of a quartet used in Study 2.

A Delphi-based computer program was used to present the virtual women’s faces. For a given rater, four faces of the same virtual woman were selected, depending on the rater’s own traits (initially recorded in the computer program by the observer; see table 1). These four faces corresponded to the four cases of preferences: homogamy (the face displayed similar character states as the rater), heterogamy (the face displayed opposite character states), recessivity (the face displayed recessive character states) and dominant (the face displayed dominant character states). The rater was instructed to click on the woman that he would prefer to build a family with. Images are from virtual subjects.

Figure 3. The raters' choices according to the artificial faces hypotheses in Study 2 (See figure 2). The raters predominantly preferred faces similar to their own.