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Absolutely not. In fact, my own research focuses on appearance discrimination in both the workplace and in cultural markets, such as the fashion industry. Happiness is more important than money, but income inequality and social stigma and bullying are both serious issues that need to be addressed.
We need to change our culture at all levels to accept and celebrate bodily diversity, and our legal system needs to recognize appearance discrimination as an issue of civil rights. I tell my students to stop wasting their time and energy on the latest fad diet, and to instead channel those resources towards more reliable self-care projects and especially towards activism.
These images and messages contribute to poor body image and eating disorders, and we need to hold advertisers and social media influencers accountable for the damage they cause. Absolutely not, again! I personally love playing around with fashion and makeup. Self-expression matters. Identity matters. What is seen as attractive in one culture may not be seen as attractive in another, and what is attractive in a culture at one time may not be attractive at another time.
However, the norm of thinness has not always been in place. The preference for women with slender, masculine, and athletic looks has become stronger over the past 50 years in Western cultures, and this can be seen by comparing the figures of female movie stars from the s and s with those of today. You might wonder whether men and women find different mates attractive.
The answer is yes, although as in most cases with gender differences, the differences are outweighed by overall similarities. For men, however, the physical attractiveness of women is most important; women, although also interested in the attractiveness of men, are relatively more interested in the social status of a potential partner. The differences between the preferences of men and women for opposite-sex romantic partners have been demonstrated in archival research that has analyzed the ads placed in the classifieds of newspapers and online profiles.
The personal ads that men place when they are searching for women tend to focus on the preferred physical appearance of the desired partner. These findings seem to be due to universal preferences of men and women, because similar patterns have been found across cultures, and also in ads seeking same-sex partners Buss, Age also matters, such that the preference for youthful partners is more important for men than for women. Women have been found to be more likely to respond to personal ads placed by relatively older men, whereas men tend to respond to ads placed by younger women—men of all ages even teenagers are most attracted to women who are in their 20s.
Another research finding consistent with the idea that men are looking for cues to fertility in their partners is that across many cultures, men have a preference for women with a low waist-to-hip ratio i. On the other hand, women prefer men with a more masculine-appearing waist-to-hip ratio similar waist and hip size; Singh, ; Swami, And when asked about their regrets in life, men are more likely to wish they had had sex with more partners, whereas women more often than men wished they had tried harder to avoid getting involved with men who did not stay with them Roese et al.
These differences may be influenced by differential evolutionary-based predispositions of men and women. Because they do not need to invest a lot of time in child rearing, men may be evolutionarily predisposed to be more willing and desiring of having sex with many different partners and may be less selective in their choice of mates.
Women on the other hand, because they must invest substantial effort in raising each child, should be more selective. But gender differences in mate preferences may also be accounted for in terms of social norms and expectations. Overall, on average, across the world as a whole, women still tend to have lower status than men, and as a result, they may find it important to attempt to raise their status by marrying men who have more of it.
Men who, on average, already have higher status may be less concerned in this regard, allowing them to focus relatively more on physical attractiveness.
You might find yourself wondering why people find physical attractiveness so important when it seems to say so little about what the person is really like as a person. One reason that we like attractive people is because they are rewarding.
We like being around attractive people because they are enjoyable to look at and because being with them makes us feel good about ourselves. Attractiveness can imply high status, and we naturally like being around people who have it.
As we touched on earlier in our discussion of the what is beautiful is good heuristic, we may also like attractive people because they are seen as better friends and partners.
These assumptions about the internal qualities of attractive people also show some cross-cultural consistency. For example, individuals from Eastern and Western cultures tend to agree that attractiveness signifies qualities like sociability and popularity.
The opposite was found in regards to traits stressing independence. One outcome of favorable evaluations of and behaviors toward attractive people is that they receive many social benefits from others. We are all of course aware of the physical attractiveness stereotype and make use of it when we can.
We try to look our best on dates, at job interviews, and not necessary, we hope! As with many stereotypes, there may be some truth to the what is beautiful is good stereotype. These results are probably partly the result of self-fulfilling prophecies. Because people expect attractive others to be friendly and warm, and because they want to be around them, they treat attractive people more positively than they do unattractive people.
However, as with most stereotypes, our expectations about the different characteristics of attractive and unattractive individuals are much stronger than the real differences between them. Although it is a very important variable, finding someone physically attractive is of course often only the first stage in developing a close relationship with another person.
If we find someone attractive, we may want to pursue the relationship. And if we are lucky, that person will also find us attractive and be interested in the possibility of developing a closer relationship. At this point, we will begin to communicate, sharing our values, beliefs, and interests, and begin to determine whether we are compatible in a way that leads to increased liking.
Relationships are more likely to develop and be maintained to the extent that the partners share external, demographic characteristics, and internal ones like values and beliefs. Research across many cultures has found that people tend to like and associate with others who share their age, education, race, religion, level of intelligence, and socioeconomic status Watson et al.
One classic study Newcomb, arranged for male undergraduates, all strangers, to live together in a house while they were going to school.
The men whose attitudes were similar during the first week ended up being friends, whereas those who did not initially share attitudes were significantly less likely to become friends. Similarity leads to attraction for a variety of reasons.
For one, similarity makes things easier. You can imagine that if you only liked to go to action movies but your partner only liked to go to foreign films, this would create difficulties in choosing an evening activity. Things would be even more problematic if the dissimilarity involved something even more important, such as your attitudes toward the relationship itself. These dissimilarities are going to create real problems.
Romantic relationships in which the partners hold different religious and political orientations or different attitudes toward important issues such as premarital sex, marriage, and child rearing are of course not impossible—but they are more complicated and take more effort to maintain.
In addition to being easier, relationships with those who are similar to us are also reinforcing. Imagine you are going to a movie with your very best friend. The movie begins, and you realize that you are starting to like it a lot. At this point, you might look over at your friend and wonder how she is reacting to it.
One of the great benefits of sharing beliefs and values with others is that those others tend to react the same way to events as you do. Odds are that if you like the movie, your friend will too, and because he or she does, you can feel good about yourself and about your opinions of what makes a good movie. Sharing our values with others and having others share their values with us help us validate the worthiness of our self-concepts. Many people want to have friends and form relationships with people who have high status.
They prefer to be with people who are healthy, attractive, wealthy, fun, and friendly. But their ability to attract such high-status partners is limited by the principles of social exchange. It is no accident that attractive people are more able to get dates with other attractive people, for example.
Of course, there are exceptions to every rule, and although it seems surprising to us when one partner appears much more attractive than the other, we may well assume that the less attractive partner is offering some type of perhaps less visible social status in return. There is still one other type of similarity that is important in determining whether a relationship will grow and continue, and it is also based on the principles of social exchange and equity.
The finding is rather simple—we tend to prefer people who seem to like us about as much as we like them. Imagine, for instance, that you have met someone and you are hoping to pursue a relationship with that person. You begin to give yourself to the relationship by opening up to the other person, telling him or her about yourself and making it clear that you would like to pursue a closer relationship.
You make yourself available to spend time with the person and contact him or her regularly. You hope that he or she feels the same amount of liking, and that you will receive the same type of behaviors in return. If the person does not return the openness and giving, the relationship is not going to go very far. Relationships in which one person likes the other much more than the other likes him or her can be inherently unstable because they are not balanced or equitable.
An unfortunate example of such an imbalanced relationship occurs when one individual continually attempts to contact and pursue a relationship with another person who is not interested in one. It is difficult for the suitor to give up the pursuit because he or she feels passionately in love with the other, and his or her self-esteem will be hurt if the other person is rejecting. Such situations are not uncommon and require that the individual who is being pursued make it completely clear that he or she is not interested in any further contact.
There is a clear moral to the importance of liking similarity, and it pays to remember it in everyday life. If we act toward others in a positive way, this expresses liking and respect for them, and the others will likely return the compliment. Being liked, praised, and even flattered by others is rewarding, and unless it is too blatant and thus ingratiating, as we saw when we discussed self-presentation we can expect that others will enjoy it.
In sum, similarity is probably the most important single determinant of liking. And there is no question that such individual characteristics matter. But social psychologists realize that there are other aspects that are perhaps even more important. Consider this:. There are about 7 billion people in the world, and you are only going to have the opportunity to meet a tiny fraction of those people before you marry.
Although meeting someone is an essential first step, simply being around another person also increases liking. People tend to become better acquainted with, and more fond of, each other when the social situation brings them into repeated contact, which is the basic principle of proximity liking. Festinger, Schachter, and Back studied friendship formation in people who had recently moved into a large housing complex.
They found not only that people became friends with those who lived near them but that people who lived nearer the mailboxes and at the foot of the stairway in the building where they were more likely to come into contact with others were able to make more friends than those who lived at the ends of the corridors in the building and thus had fewer social encounters with others.
The mere exposure effect refers to the tendency to prefer stimuli including, but not limited to, people that we have seen frequently.
Consider the research findings presented in Figure 7. At the end of the term, the students were shown pictures of the confederates and asked to indicate if they recognized them and also how much they liked them. As predicted by the mere-exposure hypothesis, students who had attended more often were liked more.
Richard Moreland and Scott Beach had female confederates visit a class 5, 10, or 15 times or not at all over the course of a semester.
Then the students rated their liking of the confederates. The mere exposure effect is clear. Data are from Moreland and Beach The effect of mere exposure is powerful and occurs in a wide variety of situations Bornstein, This also is expected on the basis of mere exposure, since people see their own faces primarily in mirrors and thus are exposed to the reversed face more often.
Mere exposure may well have an evolutionary basis. When the stimuli are people, there may well be an added effect—familiar people are more likely to be seen as part of the ingroup rather than the outgroup, and this may lead us to like them even more. Keep in mind that mere exposure applies only to the change that occurs when one is completely unfamiliar with another person or object and subsequently becomes more familiar with him or her.
Thus mere exposure applies only in the early stages of attraction. Later, when we are more familiar with someone, that person may become too familiar and thus boring.
You may have experienced this effect when you first bought some new songs and began to listen to them. If this has happened to you, you have experienced mere exposure. But perhaps one day you discovered that you were really tired of the songs—they had become too familiar.
You put the songs away for a while, only bringing them out later, when you found that liked them more again they were now less familiar.
People prefer things that have an optimal level of familiarity—neither too strange nor too well known Bornstein, The results showed that as long as a man was considered attractive or moderately attractive, both mothers and daughters would pick the guy who had the most desirable personality traits.
But when an unattractive male was paired with the most highly desirable personality profile, neither daughters nor mothers rated him as favorably as a potential romantic partner, compared with better-looking men with less desirable personalities.
Both young women looking for men and mothers seeking boyfriends for their daughters consider a minimum level of attractiveness to be an important criterion in a potential mate, the researchers concluded. She explained that physical attractiveness appears to act as a gatekeeper for potential mates.
If a man meets a required level of physical attractiveness, then women are willing to consider his personality characteristics, the study revealed. This is not true of men, she said.
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