Thread by @datepsych

There is an implication in this very famous chart that I think many men miss - it is that women are simply more attractive than men. 🧵

I see this often interpreted as "women are wrong."

The assumption being that that the ratings must fall on a normal distribution around the midpoint.

And that women are wrong because they didn't rate men around a 3/5.

There is no cosmic law that this must be the case.

If you use a decile scale (or 1-5 in the case of OKCupid here) or a Likert scale, you shouldn't just assume or expect that the distribution will be normal.

Very often it will not be.

Because many things are not normally distributed.

Distribution of psychopathy, eg:

Take a moment to think about what physical attractiveness is and how we measure it.

For heterosexual relationships, it is women rating men. Men rating women.

Does it exist independently of male/female ratings, floating out there in a Platonic world of forms?

Maybe. You could say it is a collection of organized physical features. And right now, AI/algorithms have gotten very good at rating facial attractiveness.

But how do we know they are really "good?"

Because they correlate highly with human ratings!

So, we have a sort of Protagoran "man is the measure of all things."

Ultimately attractiveness in this sense is a score.

As such there is no case where female or male ratings can be "wrong."

Your physical attractiveness is what other people think it is.

And this is not to say it is subjective - at least not the way people often use "subjective," by which they really mean "random" or "equally likely."

There is fairly high agreement on what an attractive face is.

Yes, there will be individual variation in what an attractive face is perceived to be. There will be exceptions. But the agreement is there. Universality, shared taste, etc. don't have to mean total agreement.

Let's look at this chart again.

Another point - people confuse the midpoint of a scale for the average.

The average is determined by your data. It is what it is.

Most women rating men a 2 is not most women rating men "below average."

2/5 is the male average.

3/5 is the midpoint of the scale and it is entirely arbitrary. It is determined by the researcher. There was never any reason to expect the distribution to fall around it.

If you ask people to rate men or women as "average," people will interpret "average" colloquially to mean "neither attractive nor unattractive."

The OKCupid data did not actually do this (it was "1-5").

But important to keep in mind that it is a bad way to phrase a question.

It really doesn't matter in either case - because again there is no cosmic law that says women can't find most men unattractive.

Nor that men can't actually be less attractive - which is fundamentally the same thing.

And that is what the data in this dataset show.

Let's bring this around to the first Tweet - women are more physically attractive than men are.

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion on who they find attractive.

But when speaking on the data - speaking in averages - this is what it shows.

Sex differences in attractiveness is a feature of sexually dimorphic species.

Sexual dimorphism - physical differences across the two sexes - makes males and females of a given species look very different.

Few would dispute the male peacock is more beautiful than the female.

In most cases it seems to be the male.

But occasionally females are more beautiful. In the redback spider:

Female - big, round, bright red abdomen.

Male - small, boring, does not lift.

Sometimes animals can be dimorphic and look pretty similar. Male rats are larger, but you probably couldn't tell one apart from a facial photo.

And low sexually dimorphic animals usually look very similar.

Gibbons.

Different colors - is the female more beautiful?

Morphologically very similar nonetheless.

That women are the "fair sex" - not only in behavior but also in looks - is an ancient narrative in Western culture.

We regularly go through periods of culture where men who care about their appearances are seen as less masculine. The "metrosexual" of the late 90s for example.

Similarly, the most masculine faces are usually not the ones rated as most attractive. Not by humans or AI.

There seems to be a facial attractiveness premium to sexual dimorphism.

(Even if masculinity makes men attractive in other ways.)

datepsychology.com/women-dont-fin…

And evolutionary psychology has been (somewhat) consistent in showing that men value physical attractiveness in women more than women value physical attractiveness in men.

An important selection pressure that may explain women becoming more attractive than men.

Beautiful women have more children - between 6 and 16% - while highly attractive men do not.

We see the selection pressure for female beauty more than male beauty even today.

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21151758/

Additionally, highly attractive men father more girls than boys. The least attractive men are more likely to father boys.

The evolution of more attractive women comes from the mother and the father.

Chart from paper above, but also elsewhere:
(pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16949101/)

People say women are "picky" and that this is a recent phenomenon driven by social media.

But the entirety of evolutionary psychology expects women to be highly picky! It is not new at all.

And they are picky. They should be; it is in their interests.

Women will be less physically attracted to you than you are to them. Not in every single case, but in general.

This is a totally normal and expected sex difference.

And it is understandable that this can be blackpilling.

But this cuts both ways, because women are also much more attracted to behavior and the nonphysical than men are.

Women care about what you do, how you act, and what you are like.

That men care less about this than women do is also a highly consistent sex difference.

And I think men don't realize that this is also blackpilling for women.

The (not entirely incorrect) perception that "he only cares about my appearance."

Despite sex differences in attractiveness and the prioritization of it in mate selection, most men and women still form relationships.

And perhaps surprisingly - more important - a large majority of those relationships are actually happy.

https://twitter.com/datepsych/status/1607884388217540608?t=hZHSG8HxbHj6f7di4t8lPA&s=19

Anyway let me conclude with this - sex differences in attractiveness are real. It isn't an illusion of "women are wrong" nor driven by recent trends.

We are a dimorphic species and it had to be us or them.

Another quick observation - when you read research on facial attractiveness if you look at the raw male ratings (when available), it's actually very rare to find highly attractive men in any datasets at all.

It's common on the other hand to find low attractive men.

This is why you will often see means of 2-3 when a 7 point Likert scale is used.

Basically the OKCupid distribution seems to be reflected across other research to some extent.

Even when using very controlled faces.

Similar to this - I used the Chicago Face Database for a recent project.

This is a database of faces that are all standardized and normalized. They come pre-rated for attractiveness and other features.

I was shocked to find there were no attractive male faces.

It was rare to see a rating over a 5. Perhaps less important for much research using faces that isn't about attractiveness.

Women had higher ratings.

But if you wanted to conduct research on highly attractive male faces, you would have to look elsewhere.

And as far as I know there is a huge gap in the literature on highly attractive men. They show up organically much less in datasets than highly attractive women.

https://twitter.com/datepsych/status/1608943125250330626?t=DFRKV-3ztWF_DC4vXWlzmg&s=19