Cross-Cultural Agreement in Facial Attractiveness Preferences: The Role of Ethnicity and Gender

PLOS ONE, Dec 2019

Previous work showed high agreement in facial attractiveness preferences within and across cultures. The aims of the current study were twofold. First, we tested cross-cultural agreement in the attractiveness judgements of White Scottish and Black South African students for own- and other-ethnicity faces. Results showed significant agreement between White Scottish and Black South African observers' attractiveness judgements, providing further evidence of strong cross-cultural agreement in facial attractiveness preferences. Second, we tested whether cross-cultural agreement is influenced by the ethnicity and/or the gender of the target group. White Scottish and Black South African observers showed significantly higher agreement for Scottish than for African faces, presumably because both groups are familiar with White European facial features, but the Scottish group are less familiar with Black African facial features. Further work investigating this discordance in cross-cultural attractiveness preferences for African faces show that Black South African observers rely more heavily on colour cues when judging African female faces for attractiveness, while White Scottish observers rely more heavily on shape cues. Results also show higher cross-cultural agreement for female, compared to male faces, albeit not significantly higher. The findings shed new light on the factors that influence cross-cultural agreement in attractiveness preferences.

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Cross-Cultural Agreement in Facial Attractiveness Preferences: The Role of Ethnicity and Gender

Perrett DI (2014) Cross-Cultural Agreement in Facial Attractiveness Preferences: The Role of Ethnicity and Gender. PLoS ONE 9(7): e99629. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0099629 Cross-Cultural Agreement in Facial Attractiveness Preferences: The Role of Ethnicity and Gender Vinet Coetzee 0 Jaco M. Greeff 0 Ian D. Stephen 0 David I. Perrett 0 Cheryl McCormick, Brock University, Canada 0 1 Department of Genetics, University of Pretoria , Pretoria , South Africa , 2 Department of Psychology, Macquarie University , Sydney , Australia , 3 School of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of St Andrews , St Andrews, Scotland Previous work showed high agreement in facial attractiveness preferences within and across cultures. The aims of the current study were twofold. First, we tested cross-cultural agreement in the attractiveness judgements of White Scottish and Black South African students for own- and other-ethnicity faces. Results showed significant agreement between White Scottish and Black South African observers' attractiveness judgements, providing further evidence of strong cross-cultural agreement in facial attractiveness preferences. Second, we tested whether cross-cultural agreement is influenced by the ethnicity and/or the gender of the target group. White Scottish and Black South African observers showed significantly higher agreement for Scottish than for African faces, presumably because both groups are familiar with White European facial features, but the Scottish group are less familiar with Black African facial features. Further work investigating this discordance in cross-cultural attractiveness preferences for African faces show that Black South African observers rely more heavily on colour cues when judging African female faces for attractiveness, while White Scottish observers rely more heavily on shape cues. Results also show higher cross-cultural agreement for female, compared to male faces, albeit not significantly higher. The findings shed new light on the factors that influence cross-cultural agreement in attractiveness preferences. - Funding: VC was supported by a South African National Research Foundation Scarce Skills Postdoctoral Fellowship (Grant nr: 76454). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Facial attractiveness plays a crucial role in a variety of social interactions, from dating [1] to voting behaviour [2]. Historically, different cultures were believed to have different standards of physical attractiveness (e.g. [3]). More recent work, including a meta-analysis of facial attractiveness preferences, found high consistency between peoples judgements of facial attractiveness within and across cultures, leading to the conclusion that raters agree about who is and is not attractive, both within and across cultures [4]. Most of the studies of adults included in the crosscultural part of the meta-analysis tested agreement between people of different ethnic origins currently living within a single country. Nevertheless, a few studies tested agreement across different cultural and ethnic groups living in different countries [59], providing a more stringent test of the universality of attractiveness standards. We will focus only on these latter studies here. Three studies, Zebrowitz et al. [8], Jones and Hill [6] and Zebrowitz et al. [9], are especially noteworthy because of the quality and size of their image sets. Zebrowitz et al. [8] collected black and white yearbook images of 24 Korean, 20 White American and 24 African American male college students and had all the images rated for facial attractiveness by members of the same three ethnic groups. The Korean raters resided in Korea, while the White and African American raters resided in America. They found high inter-rater reliability in attractiveness judgements across the Korean and American groups (Cronbach a.0.8; [8]). Reliability statistics by themselves do not, however, provide a complete picture of the relationship between the perceptions of different groups of judges [10]. Zebrowitz et al. [8] also tested the correlation between the mean attractiveness judgements of the different ethnic groups, to assess interracial agreement in attractiveness judgements. They found that judges agreed more strongly on what is attractive in own-race faces (calculated by randomly dividing each group of raters in half and correlating the mean ratings of the two subgroups), compared to other-race faces [8]. Jones and Hill [6] collected standardised male and female facial images of White American college students, Brazilian college students and adult Paraguayan Indians. Members from the same three populations, Russian college students and adult Venezuelan Indians rated all the facial images for attractiveness. They found high inter-rater reliability in attractiveness judge (...truncated)


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Vinet Coetzee, Jaco M. Greeff, Ian D. Stephen, David I. Perrett. Cross-Cultural Agreement in Facial Attractiveness Preferences: The Role of Ethnicity and Gender, PLOS ONE, 2014, 7, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0099629