14 DAY TRIAL // It's common knowledge that each individual's friends influence his or her idea of what is attractive and what is not. This is true regardless whether the person in question is consciously aware of this or not. But a recent investigation comes to provide even more credence to past studies, which demonstrated that attractiveness is indeed relative. The data show that even the opinions of strangers influence our idea of attractiveness, which is something that has never been demonstrated before, LiveScience reports.
“Of course people care about what friends and family think of their potential romantic partners. Surprisingly, we showed that complete strangers also matter. If you walk into a party and don't know anyone, you might think, 'Why do I care what anyone here thinks?' In reality, we're paying close attention to what others in our social environment are thinking and doing,” explains Indiana University Department of Psychological and Brain Science expert Skyler Place, the lead investigator on the new research.
This type of behavior is not uniquely human, the experts say. In fact, it has been widely observed and reported in creatures such as birds and fish, and it's generally called “mate choice copying.” For some time, researchers have been trying to figure out whether this type of actions were present in humans as well, and the new work is relevant especially because it conducted practical experiments on 80 test participants. Half of them were male, and the other half female, and all watched videos of high-speed interactions, or mini-dates, each of them lasting about three minutes. Afterwards, the study subjects were asked to mark on a piece of cardboard whether they wanted to meet the person on the screen or not.
It was revealed after result analysis that male participants who rated the woman they saw in the speed-interaction videos as attractive became even more interested in them if they saw clips in which the woman's partner also showed more interest in her. What separated men from women was the fact that, while men remained interested in a woman even if her video partner was not, women tended to lose their own interest if the ones in the video did not appear to be all that into their male partner. It was additionally discovered that the males' interest peaked when the man speaking to the woman in the video looked good.
“For men, relative attractiveness of the people they're watching matters – not just anyone can influence their behavior, just other men they think are at least as attractive as they are. Humans don't exist in a vacuum. From an evolutionary standpoint, it makes sense that we have evolved mechanisms that let us take advantage of the additional social information in our environment,” Place explains.