The DOI matches its Crossref record; 15 of the 15 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
The Evolutionary Psychology of Facial Beauty
Abstract
What makes a face attractive and why do we have the preferences we do? Emergence of preferences early in development and cross-cultural agreement on attractiveness challenge a long-held view that our preferences reflect arbitrary standards of beauty set by cultures. Averageness, symmetry, and sexual dimorphism are good candidates for biologically based standards of beauty. A critical review and meta-analyses indicate that all three are attractive in both male and female faces and across cultures. Theorists have proposed that face preferences may be adaptations for mate choice because attractive traits signal important aspects of mate quality, such as health. Others have argued that they may simply be by-products of the way brains process information. Although often presented as alternatives, I argue that both kinds of selection pressures may have shaped our perceptions of facial beauty.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Attitudinal Effects of Mere Exposure
Zajonc, R. B. (1968) · Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · doi:10.1037/h0025848 · Cited by 6,745
Mate selection—A selection for a handicap
Zahavi, A. (1975) · Journal of Theoretical Biology · doi:10.1016/0022-5193(75)90111-3 · Cited by 5,251
Sex differences in human mate preferences: Evolutionary hypotheses tested in 37 cultures
Buss, D. M. (1989) · Behavioral and Brain Sciences · doi:10.1017/s0140525x00023992 · Cited by 4,484
Dion, K., Berscheid, E., & Walster, E. (1972) · Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · doi:10.1037/h0033731 · Cited by 3,865
PINKER, S. (1999) · Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1111/j.1749-6632.1999.tb08538.x · Cited by 3,738
Parasites, Bright Males, and the Immunocompetence Handicap
Folstad, I., & Karter, A. J. (1992) · The American Naturalist · doi:10.1086/285346 · Cited by 2,799
Maxims or myths of beauty? A meta-analytic and theoretical review
Langlois, J. H., Kalakanis, L., Rubenstein, A. J., Larson, A., Hallam, M., & Smoot, M. (2000) · Psychological Bulletin · doi:10.1037/0033-2909.126.3.390 · Cited by 2,429 · cited 8×
“Agreement about which faces are attractive not only occurs between men and women, but also between people from different cultures (e.g., Langlois et al. 2000).”
BackgroundInfluentialExposure and affect: Overview and meta-analysis of research, 1968–1987.
Bornstein, R. F. (1989) · Psychological Bulletin · doi:10.1037/0033-2909.106.2.265 · Cited by 1,970 · cited 1×
“A preference for average (and symmetric) faces could also be a by-product of their subjective familiarity and a preference for familiar stimuli (Bornstein 1989, Halberstadt et al. 2003, Langlois & Roggman 1990, Langlois et al. 1994, Light et al. 1981, Rhodes et al. 2001a, Zajonc 1968).”
BackgroundEagly, A. H., Ashmore, R. D., Makhijani, M. G., & Longo, L. C. (1991) · Psychological Bulletin · doi:10.1037/0033-2909.110.1.109 · Cited by 1,875
Sources of human psychological differences: the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart
Bouchard, T. J., Lykken, D. T., McGue, M., Segal, N. L., & Tellegen, A. (1990) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.2218526 · Cited by 1,373
Grammer, K., & Thornhill, R. (1994) · Journal of Comparative Psychology · doi:10.1037/0735-7036.108.3.233 · Cited by 1,110
Beauty in a smile: the role of medial orbitofrontal cortex in facial attractiveness
O’Doherty, J., Winston, J., Critchley, H., Perrett, D., Burt, D. M., & Dolan, R. J. (2003) · Neuropsychologia · doi:10.1016/s0028-3932(02)00145-8 · Cited by 898
Pathogen prevalence and human mate preferences
Gangestad, S. W., & Buss, D. M. (1993) · Ethology and Sociobiology · doi:10.1016/0162-3095(93)90009-7 · Cited by 521
Sex-typicality and attractiveness: are supermale and superfemale faces super-attractive
Rhodes, G., Hickford, C., & Jeffery, L. (2000) · British Journal of Psychology · doi:10.1348/000712600161718 · Cited by 226 · cited 5×
“…thin lips, square chins, and small eyes) were preferred to feminized ones (Keating 1985), but more recent studies using photographic sex continua generally show a preference for feminized male faces (Penton-Voak et al. 2004, Perrett et al. 1998, Rhodes et al. 2000; but see Johnston et al. 2001).”
BackgroundInfluentialSelf-citationValentine, T., Darling, S., & Donnelly, M. (2004) · Psychonomic Bulletin & Review · doi:10.3758/bf03196599 · Cited by 147
Cited by
Wang, Y., & Kosinski, M. (2018) · Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · doi:10.1037/pspa0000098 · Cited by 766
Social Psychological Face Perception: Why Appearance Matters
Zebrowitz, L. A., & Montepare, J. M. (2008) · Social and Personality Psychology Compass · doi:10.1111/j.1751-9004.2008.00109.x · Cited by 672
The Human Face as a Dynamic Tool for Social Communication
Jack, R. E., & Schyns, P. G. (2015) · Current Biology · doi:10.1016/j.cub.2015.05.052 · Cited by 405
The Architecture of Reward Value Coding in the Human Orbitofrontal Cortex
Sescousse, G., Redouté, J., & Dreher, J.-C. (2010) · The Journal of Neuroscience · doi:10.1523/jneurosci.3501-10.2010 · Cited by 353
A comparative view of face perception.
Leopold, D. A., & Rhodes, G. (2010) · Journal of Comparative Psychology · doi:10.1037/a0019460 · Cited by 311
Self-citation
Metadata
- Authors
- Rhodes, G.
- Venue
- Annual Review of Psychology
- Publisher
- Annual Reviews
- Published
- 2006-01-01
- Volume
- 57
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 199-226
- ISSN
- 0066-4308 (ISSN-L)
- 1545-2085
- OpenAlex
- W2166711410
- Cited by
- 1,750
- References
- 15
- FWCI
- 9.08
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
