Ressourcen und deren Auswirkungen auf die Attraktivität bei Mann und Frau

Eine interessante Studie aus dem Jahr 2017 zu der alten Frage, wie anziehend Ressourcen sind:

Parental investment hypotheses regarding mate selection suggest that human males should seek partners featured by youth and high fertility. However, females should be more sensitive to resources that can be invested on themselves and their offspring. Previous studies indicate that economic status is indeed important in male attractiveness. However, no previous study has quantified and compared the impact of equivalent resources on male and female attractiveness. Annual salary is a direct way to evaluate economic status. Here, we combined images of male and female body shape with information on annual salary to elucidate the influence of economic status on the attractiveness ratings by opposite sex raters in American, Chinese and European populations. We found that ratings of attractiveness were around 1000 times more sensitive to salary for females rating males, compared to males rating females. These results indicate that higher economic status can offset lower physical attractiveness in men much more easily than in women. Neither raters‘ BMI nor age influenced this effect for females rating male attractiveness. This difference explains many features of human mating behavior and may pose a barrier for male engagement in low-consumption lifestyles.

Quelle: Different impacts of resources on opposite sex ratings of physical attractiveness by males and females

Bei einer chinesischen Studie ist eine gewisse Zurückhaltung angebracht, weil es in China sehr üblich ist, dass ein Mann jedenfalls ein Haus mit in die Ehe bringen muss und dort die Frau dann nicht arbeitet. Das könnte die Ergebnisse natürlich beeinflussen. Es waren aber immerhin nicht nur Chinesen involviert:

111 males (Chinese: 47; European: 62, American 10). 196
female subjects (Chinese: 76; European: 92, American 28)

Zu den Ergebnissen:

Der Text dazu:

Figure 1. Relationship between annual income (log 10) and deviation of attractiveness score between images including and excluding annual income information in each population. The x-axis is the log10 annual income of Texas (Where we recruited the American population), Beijing (where we recruited the Chinese population), mean (log10 annual income) of log 10 annual income in Aberdeen and Lithuania (where we recruited
the European populations) and). The y-axis refers to deviation that using attractiveness score including annual income information minus attractiveness score excluding income. For male images, when the x changed by 1 (10 times change in annual income), the deviation will be changed by 1.5 in American , 2.6 in Chinese and 1.8 in European population respectively. For female image, the deviation will be changed by 0.2, 0.6 and 0.5 in American, Chinese and European population separately

Wie man sieht steigt auch bei Männern die Attraktivität mit dem Einkommen, aber weitaus weniger stark als bei den Frauen. Wenn ich es richtig verstehe, dann führt auch bei den Männern nur ein wesentlich geringeres Einkommen zu einer Abwertung, bei den Frauen ist die Abwertung deutlicher und hält auch länger an, während die Werte auch mit dem höheren Einkommen deutlicher steigen. Bei Europaern (was ja deutlich verschiedenere Länger umfasst als Amerika und auch ärmere und reichere) ist es den Männern noch egaler, den Frauen etwas weniger wichtig und bei den USA ist ein niedriges Einkommen der Frau fast neutral und ein höheres auch nicht so stark von Bedeutung, während bei Frauen doch noch ein deutlicher Abzug und Anstieg vorhanden ist.

Hier noch die gemeinsamen Daten:

Und der Text dazu:

Figure 2. Relationship between annual income (log 10) and deviation of attractiveness score between images including and excluding annual income information in all the populations (pooled sample). In pooled sample, for male images, when the x changed by 1 (10 times change in annual income), the attractiveness score will be changed by 1.92. For female image, it will be changed by 0.47. The salary effect is around 4 times (1.92/0.47) in male attractiveness than female

Der Trend zeichnet sich jedenfalls sehr deutlich ab.

Aus der Studie:

The focus by males on high consumption as a costly signal of resource availability may have some important consequences beyond the world of sales and marketing. In particular it may provide a barrier to reducing consumption as part of a low-consumption lifestyle (Brooks & Wilson, 2015) and stigmatization of low cost environmentally friendly behaviors. Men are currently less likely to embrace low-consumption sustainable products (Brough, Wilkie, Ma, Isaac, & Gal, 2016) and this is seen as a predominantly ‘feminine’ activity. This might be understood because demonstrations of low consumption may evoke low status which would be more important for male attractiveness than for females. On the other hand at some point the high cost of ‘green’ products may make them attractive to males as a mechanism to demonstrate wealth status (Griskevicius, Tybur, & Van den Bergh, 2010). This suggests encouraging males into low consumption lifestyles may require gender targeted marketing strategies that do not conflict with their desire to demonstrate mate value.

Auch ein interessanter Hinweis und wahrscheinlich auch ein Grund, warum die Grünen viele gut verdienende Wähler haben. Öko muss man sich leisten können.

Und die Beschränkungen der Studie:

 

Our study has several limitations. The ratings of attractiveness were made of twodimensional soft tissue DEXA images which is clearly not a real world scenario.  raters were all relatively young and hence the focus on resources may not generalize to other ages. Subjects had to rank the images, which precluded them rating individuals as equally attractive. However, in a previous study we compared rankings with ratings and these were not significantly different (Wang et al., 2015). Another limitation that we did not exclude anyone according to their sexual orientation that may influence the analysis. Moreover, subjects were told directly what the salaries of the people in the images were and such information is likely to also not be directly available in most real world situations. The range of salaries we used and the range of levels of attractiveness were bounded and hence we cannot rule out the possibility that outside these limits the effect of salary on attractiveness wanes. That is it may be possible to be so unattractive that no level of salary can compensate, or so beautiful that salary also cannot improve on perfection. Already the effect is non-linear (linear against logged salary) and hence progressively greater and greater sums are necessary to achieve the same marginal improvement in attractiveness. The sample of subjects from the USA was also relatively small when compared with the other countries. Any differences between the US and the other countries may then be an artefact of the low sample size. In conclusion, we found that females were four times more sensitive than males to economic status cues when rating opposite sex attractiveness. This effect was not modulated by the raters’ BMI or age. The disparity underpins large sex differences in human mating behavior, with implications for marketing and sales strategies, and has wider consequences for example in adoption of sustainable lifestyles.

Es hat insbesondere auch weitreichende Folgen in Bezug auf die Jobwahl, den Gender Pay Gap und die Motivation von Leuten für viel Gehalt viel zu investieren.

siehe auch:

• Versorgereigenschaften als Attraktivitätsmerkmale und Gründe für die Paarbindung
• Verheiratete Männer verdienen mehr als Single-Männer, die etwa soviel verdienen wie Frauen
• Männer bevorzugen schöne Frauen, Frauen bevorzugen intelligente, ambitionierte Männer gleicher Hautfarbe
• Weltweite Gemeinsamkeiten bei der Partnerwahl
• Männer finden körperliche Schönheit attraktiv, Frauen finden sozialen Status attraktiv
• „Einen reichen Mann finden“
• Erfolgreiche Frauen, Beziehungen und Status
• Reichtum und Attraktivität
• Luxusartikel und Fitness Indikatoren
• Geoffrey Miller: Konsum und Evolution
• Großzügigkeit in Anwesenheit des anderen Geschlechts
• Costly Signals und Kultur
• Der Verlobungsring als Costly Signal
• Evolutionäre Thesen zur Partnerwahl aus “Evolution of Desire” von David Buss
• Geld, Attraktivität und Partnerwahl
• Weibliche Partnerwahlkriterien
• Die umgekehrte Versorgerrolle und die Liebe