Scientists are finally succeeding where so many men have failed: in understanding why women find some guys handsome and others hideous

Do you mean to say you need serious research to figure all this out?

More wasteful research into the obvious - women like cleanliness and musculine guys. Wow!

And how about a sense of humour? My wife has shown me countless surveys saying that the women rate the ability of a man to make her laugh as the most important feature when choosing a bloke. I'm not very funny though... it must be my crooked nose, freckled face and pointy chin.

But at what time of the month did the women find (or, specifically, smell) the men handsome, when fertile or not? There might be evidence that sexual selection operates in both ways, so that women prefer to have sex with handsome guys when fertile, but the rest of the time they prefer to marry steady guys who take care of kids (not theirs, it happens). On this theory, there should be a difference in geography, with tropical areas leading to polygamy, but high latitudes leading to more sexual selection favoring darker men and fairer women and monogamy (and cukoldry). Sexual selection in humans deserves much more study. For example, how is it that the (recessive) gene for blue eyes dominated in northern Europe beginning some 10,000 years ago (and is now fading in the population), is it associated with sexual selection by women for better health, for example Vitamin D production or protection against tuberculosis, or is there some other mechanism, such as pure natural selection?

what a waste of resources into research into irrationality without consideration of reciprocity and so many other socio economic factors...etc.

Blah,blah,blah, blah,blah,blah, blah,blah,blah,
and
Counter blah,blah,blah, blah,blah,blah, blah,blah,blah.

More research is required!

Is this The Economist or Vanity fair?

I guess this is intended for some light reading and chatting on Sunday afternoon. Not bad for that.

Men marry women thinking they won't change...
And they do!

Women marry men thinking we will change...
And we don't!

Anon

Hmmm..... What about the diamond and Ferrari factors?

The Economist seems to have a taste for these psychological studies of people's sexual attractions, which assume people are like peahens. As big a fan of the magazine as I am, I find them rather silly and, at this point, tiresome.

Are big jaws really correlated with aggression? Are men with big jaws really more promiscuous and worse fathers? Is testosterone really linked to aggression? Why do men with equal testosterone levels have such unequal levels of aggression? Have any of these points really been rigorously tested?

No study will ever accurately determine the male characteristics that attract women unless it also controls for size :)

There are two issues that need to also be looked at:
Height and build (you can after all be an aggressive shrimp, stage actors are often short, but more photogenic).
Why GNP, surely GDP would be more reflective of actual domestic incomes and wealth.

The premise that women in affluent countries are not as prone to a Brad Pitt as those in poor countries is not born out by empirical evidence. Go to any nightclub and tell me how many good looking women you see with wimpy looking guys. How many hunky guys are with unattractive women? No, people of both sexes have a built-in selection process that automatically attracts them to a mate of equivalent appearence. The attractive mate with the attractive and the unattractive mate with the unattractive. The only exception is when money is involved: A geriatric Hugh Hefner with his 20 year old rented 'girl friends'. But that's it.
As Mick Jagger said, 'If you can't get the one you love then love the one you get.'

Women marry prosperity period

Men have had their say; and I dont find any of them particularly appealing. Dont you have some articulate females in your office, why not let them have a go, rather than leave it to men to divine what females think?

why not research the reason behind men liking men!? dont see any evolutionary forces working there..

I think this falls under the category "answers to questions we already knew".

These findings are largely arbitrary, given that a good proportion of women in a post-feminist society deviate away from biological norms of psychosexual behaviour, outside of which anything goes in terms of the parameters of mate selection.

Being a PC publication, as with most media, these studies cannot take into account key confounding factors, and the most important one they've overlooked is the (increasingly socioculturally denied) notion of female submissiveness. Whether behaviour is biological or not, according to Cattell parameters, directly relates to the index of submissiveness in a woman.

As a general trend, the more attitudinally submissive the woman, the more attractive, healthier (mentally and physically) and fertile she is, the less she is interested in the physical characteristics of her partner (excluding obvious indicators of general health), and the more she is drawn to indicators of status and influence. In addition, the more likely she is to have an internalised "locus" of sexuality: ie. the motivation to primarily please her partner, sexually or otherwise, rather than to primarily seek to be pleased.

This accounts for the many instances, still prevalent today, in which attractive women seem to, from a feminist viewpoint, preferentially select for "uglier", richer and older men.

The converse, a woman who is overly concerned about the physical appearance of her partner (outside of the obvious indicators of health, that is) is actually seen as masculinised behaviour, and associated with poorer health outcomes and a lower index of attractiveness.

Front page news should have sample sizes that are relevant. 124 women and 117 men asked questions on 15 pictures, is not conclusive evidence to support foundational mate selection claims. Doctors inferring too much and publishing or reporting findings like these... For shame.

As in all pop-science articles, there are many aspects to this research that were not reported. These studies are testing predictions of an influential model of sexual selection in humans called trade-off theory. If anyone is interested in reading all of the scientific information on these studies, you can access the original research on cross-national differences here (http://facelab.org/Publications/abstracts?id=279) and the new paper on cross-state differences here (http://facelab.org/Publications/abstracts?id=328).

I'd like to reassure Zambino and MieczyslawJerzy that no money was spent on this research. Psychology research is often done on no budget and our work uses the internet to collect data from around the world.

Dogfeet, your comment suggests to me that you have no training in science or statistics. Statistics take sample size and effect size into account to determine whether findings are significant. You can access that study via http://facelab.org/Publications/abstracts?id=344 to assess the reliability of the claims in that study.

One half of psychology is pure fraud, the other is just bad observation.