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. 2025 Jul-Sep;23(3):14747049251376924.
doi: 10.1177/14747049251376924. Epub 2025 Sep 8.

No Evidence That Women's Sociosexuality or Self-Perceived Mate Value Predict Their Preferences for Men's Face-Shape Masculinity

Pengting Lee  1 , Jingheng Li  1 , Benedict C Jones  1 , Victor K M Shiramizu  1
Affiliations

No Evidence That Women's Sociosexuality or Self-Perceived Mate Value Predict Their Preferences for Men's Face-Shape Masculinity

Pengting Lee et al. Evol Psychol. 2025 Jul-Sep.

Abstract

Researchers have suggested that men with more masculine facial characteristics have stronger immune systems but are perceived to be less likely to invest resources in partners and offspring. How women resolve this putative trade-off between the costs and benefits of choosing a masculine mate have previously been reported to be associated with women's openness to uncommitted relationships (i.e., their sociosexuality) and self-perceived mate value. However, not all studies have reported these links and the methods used to assess masculinity preferences in studies reporting these patterns of results (forced-choice tests using stimuli in which masculinity was experimentally manipulated) have recently been criticized for having low ecological validity. Consequently, we tested whether sociosexuality or self-perceived mate value predicted women's masculinity preferences when masculinity preferences were assessed using ratings of individual natural (i.e., unmanipulated) male faces. Our analyses show no evidence that individual differences in women's sociosexuality or self-perceived mate value significantly predicted masculinity preferences. Thus, our results do not support the proposal that sociosexuality and/or self-perceived mate value are important sources of individual differences in women's preferences for male facial masculinity.

Keywords: facial attractiveness; masculinity; mate preferences; mate value; sociosexuality.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of Conflicting InterestsThe authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
The Interactions Between SOI-R and Face-Shape Masculinity (top Panel) and Between MVS and Face-Shape Masculinity (Bottom Panel).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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