The Most Attractive Trait in the World
One weird trick to turn a frog into a prince
Discovering that someone is willing to protect you from physical harm makes them vastly more attractive. Conversely, discovering that someone is unwilling to protect you turns them into a hideous troll. Interestingly, this is true for both women and men.
Those are the headline findings from recent research by Michael Barlev, Sakura Arai, the late John Tooby, and Leda Cosmides. Across seven experiments involving more than 4,500 participants in total, people read vignettes describing scenarios in which a date or a friend either protected or failed to protect them. They were then asked to rate the person’s attractiveness as a romantic partner or friend.
The main results are captured in the following three graphs.
The first one shows how people rate other-sex individuals as romantic partners based on two factors: their willingness to protect them from a violent attack and their physical strength. The main takeaway is that willingness to protect boosts attractiveness over and above strength.
This is an important result, because it rules out a simple alternative explanation for the protectiveness finding - namely, that it’s not protectiveness per se that people find attractive but rather physical strength, and they just assume that anyone willing to protect them must be strong. Strength is attractive, especially in men. But so is protectiveness. In fact, protectiveness turns out to be more attractive than strength! Notice as well that unwillingness to protect is much more off-putting to women rating men than to men rating women.
The second graph shows something even more intriguing: that a potential partner’s willingness to protect you increases their attractiveness even when they fail to do so. Participants read a vignette in which they were on a date when a drunk approached and tried to hit them. The date either successfully intervened, tried but failed, or didn’t try at all. As the graph below shows, trying and failing was almost as attractive as successfully intervening. Simply showing willingness to step in signals protectiveness, which we apparently find deeply appealing.
The third and final graph adds a new wrinkle: Not only does willingness to protect boost a date’s attractiveness even when the attempt fails, but it even boosts attractiveness when the date accidentally harms you in the attempt. Once again, what seems to matter is the underlying intention rather than the outcome in this particular case.
As mentioned, the three graphs come from a recent paper by Barlev et al. Here’s the abstract.
Ancestrally, physical violence from conspecifics was a recurrent adaptive problem. Did selection favor preferences for partners who are both strong (highly able) and willing to protect us from violence? Strength and willingness are interrelated, so dissociating their effects is necessary. Here we assessed both inferences and preferences. In 7 experiments (N = 4,508 U.S. adults recruited via MTurk), we systematically varied the willingness of a date or friend to physically protect you from an attack, compared to scenarios where you do not have this information. We also varied that person’s strength. Discovering that a person is willing to protect greatly increased their attractiveness as a romantic partner or friend, regardless of their strength. This held for both women and men raters, and when evaluating both opposite- and same-sex dates and friends. In fact, partners who were willing to protect were attractive even if they tried to do so but failed, and even if you were harmed because of their failure. Discovering that a partner is unwilling to protect decreased their attractiveness, and was a deal-breaker for women evaluating a male date. Unwillingness decreased attractiveness more when the rater was a woman, when the target was a man, and when the target was being evaluated as a date versus friend. Women placed some importance on a male date’s strength, but this was mostly due to inferences about his willingness to protect them. Surprisingly, we found only weak evidence that differences in strength, independent of willingness, increased the attractiveness of a partner.
You can access the Barlev paper here or request a free version here.
For more on human mating psychology, check out my book The Ape That Understood the Universe. You can read the first chapter here for free.
For more on the evolution of sex differences, you can preorder my forthcoming book, A Billion Years of Sex Differences, here. Note that paid subscribers to The Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche Newsletter can read exclusive excerpts from the book before the official publication date.
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