I was looking at some data on how attractiveness is perceived and I thought the findings were worth sharing.
The median male’s attractiveness is rated 5.9/10. If you think this is low, it means your calibration is off. A 5.9 is not ugly, but average! If someone’s appearance is rated 5.9/10, they are more attractive than half the population. In comparison, the median woman’s attractiveness is rated a 6.5/10. The distinction should be meaningless as in practice, attraction is not objectively scored, but subjective based on how one compares to all other people of their gender. However, the difference in ratings does suggest that men are more attracted to women, than women are to men.
More importantly, the data shows that variation in how attractive one is perceived follows a bell curve distribution. This is mind-blowing to me. I previously thought that the world had agreed that some people were just attractive and others not; this is wrong.
If someone’s attractiveness is rated as a 7/10, there is no uniform agreement that they are a 7, but that an equal number of people think they are more attractive than a 7 and less attractive than a 7.
The data shows that the standard deviation in perceived attractiveness is 0.4. This means there is great variance in how people will judge one’s attractiveness. While everyone knows this to some extent, I never internalized what it means. The bell curve distribution doesn’t just mean some people will think you are a little more or less attractive than everyone else; it means that most people will think you are a little more or less attractive than your average rating, but that a small number of people will think you’re far more attractive than your average rating.
Being average does not mean everyone finds you average. In fact, very much the opposite. If you’re average, statistically many people will find you absolutely beautiful.
If you are average, over 20% of people will find you in their top 20th percentile of attractiveness; more than 5% of people will find you in their top 5 percentile of attractiveness; and more than 1% of people will find you in their top 1% of attractiveness.
To me, this finding is significant. Think of the most beautiful people you know; if you are average looking, you will almost certainly be that attractive to some other people you know.
Given that perceived attractiveness follows a bell curve, the math is clear. No matter how you rate out of 10, there will always be many people who find you gorgeous, it’s just a question of finding a large enough sample.
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All data can be found here which was collected by Ray Fishman and Sheena Lyengar for the paper Gender Differences in Mate Selection: Evidence From a Speed Dating Experiment
Note: I don’t think people are defined by physical attractiveness, and I certainly don’t think people can be defined by one number. However, I do think that some people spend a substantial amount of time thinking about physical beauty, and it causes some people insecurity and anxiety. I wrote this article as an attempt to show people to worry less, and to have more confidence in their appearance.
For those who still do worry about their level of physical attractiveness, my suggestion is to follow the findings of this paper: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886914003626 which demonstrate that being a kind and good person increase one’s level of physical attractiveness.
keep in mind different people use the 1-10 scale differently. for example, maybe I rate most people in the 5-6 range, and my friend uses the 4-7 range mostly, so a 7 for him is a 6 for me even though our subjective level of attraction is the same.
The link to the paper does not appear to work, so I cannot comment on it.
I have done first-hand research on speed dating results over 10 events myself, and read lots of relevant papers around five years ago. Practically all results from that time gave a very different results, so I would approach this paper with a grain of salt.
There is no reason to believe that attractiveness ratings would have changed dramatically towards more equality after I did my research. In fact anecdotal evidence from Tinder etc. suggest that the change is in the opposite direction.
It is not possible to average attractiveness scores men give to women and vice versa like you appear to be doing in this post. For example, women tend to be doubly selective in speed dating events as compared to men. I don’t know if the idea of conflating the attractiveness ratings of diffrent sexes stems from the original paper or based on your own interpretation.
In general, I found that the attractiveness of men to women does not appear follow a bell curve, but a curve based on the power law. On the other hand, the attractiveness of women to men appears to follow a bell curve.
I have not seen research that would analyze the underlying mechanisms, but we can deduce from the different distributions that the psychological mechanism of attractiveness evaluation — and if we belive that the people are not lying, also how they perceive the attractiveness of the opposite sex — is different between men and women.
Specifically, for anything that follows the power law, the underlying factor must based on something that follows so called preferential attachment. One classic example of preferential attachment is linking between blogs. Any new blog prefers to link to the successful ones, and as a consequence, the popular blogs get relatively more popular over time.
In the case of physical attractiveness evaluation, that could mean for example, that women perceive the attractiveness of men based on how attractive they estimate that others perceive the attractiveness of the person in the pool of potential partners. We can call this “status”.
On the other hand, the psychological mechanism how men perceive the attractiveness of women appears to be more direct, as it follows the bell curve. So we can call this “beauty”.
This explains the anecdotal evidence that the dating market is getting more unequal for men. The bigger the pool for selection, the more it favors the popular men. The pool for selecting partners is getting bigger due to incresing popularity of the internet dating sites.
For anything following a power law, taking an average does not tell much. It can even hide the real phenomenon, like this paper appears to be doing. But even the average results of attractiveness can tell us something, if we look at the results over time. If the average scores are dropping for men but not for women, then it means that there is in fact a change in the dating market that increases the unequality experienced by most men.
The comment above about different ratings mixes individual evaluation of attraction with statistical analysis of combined results of attractiveness evaluation. For example, everybody agrees that there is a “market price” for houses in the housing market, even if people have very different preferences of what kind of houses they like or where they want to live.
In physical attractiveness, the individual criterion appears to be less random than when buying the house. For example, we cannot find people whose honest attractiveness scales would be completely opposite of the statistical results. I say honestly, because people are not always completely aware of how they rate the attractiveness — their actions are different from how they claim to think.
That is why we cannot put too much value on how people report the attraciveness, but we need to look at their actions, such as who they select at speed dating events, who they send messages or reply to on internet dating sites, or who they choose to dance with in couples dancing events.