Men - does being ripped make you a more attractive partner?

I was perusing the news over lunch today when this article caught my eye (I can't imagine why!),

I had a read and my eyes began to involuntarily roll. This was another of those terrible evo-psych papers I've written about in the past, wasn’t it? After having read the paper the article is based on, and after rescuing my eyes after they fell out of my head and onto the floor from rolling so much, I regret to inform you that yes, it is.

The basic set up for the research is that they have a series of photos of men and they ask people to judge the strength of the man in the photo based on the physique of his torso and rate his attractiveness. (I'll get to the 'why' later). The first thing to note is that it's all a bit of a mess. I will try and be brief with the explanation of the method as I know it's incredibly tedious to read, but it really has to be seen to be believed. They have two separate sets of photos, both taken from prior research. The first set comprises 61 men who were recruited from the University of California, Santa Barbara gym in, or prior to, 2009. These men were photographed shirtless. The second set comprises 131 men who were students at University of California, Santa Barbara who participated in research for partial course credit in, or before, 2010. These men were photographed wearing a standardised tank top. I have no idea why they decided to use two sets of photos, or why they decided to choose one set clothed and the other not, but there you go.

Next we have the people assessing their attractiveness. Both sets of photos are judged on two criteria - strength and attractiveness - and both sets are judged by men and women, and the raters "estimated either the men’s physical strength or their physical attractiveness" [p2]. Why they don't have the same people rating strength and attractiveness I don't know. Normally you would divide up your participants equally but instead, well, see for yourself...

Yeah, I have no clue what the logic behind that is either.

So what did they find? They found that,

Like previous research, ratings of strength were good predictors of actual strength [p3]

Though it has to be said that their R² values are actually pretty poor: the highest is 0.37 which isn't anything to brag about for such a supposedly simple correlation. It's also worth noting they haven't provided plots of these data and a suspicious mind might surmise that it's because they don't want to draw attention to how scattered the data actually is [their data is available as .sav files for SPSS, which isn't a program I use]. They also found that there's no difference between men and women's ability to assess strength (though no data is given to back this up).

Next they looked at how people related strength and attractiveness and found a good correlation between perceived strength and attractiveness (R² of up to 0.73). Given how low the R² values for perceived vs actual strength are I was curious to see how attractiveness plotted against actual strength which they seem to address later in the paper,

"...ratings of strength were better predictors of actual observed strength than were attractiveness ratings; i.e. attractiveness correlated with actual measured strength at r=0.38 (Set 1: front), 0.39 (Set 1: side) and 0.25 (Set 2: front), all p [less than] 0.01" [p6]

Now, unless I'm even more confused than I think I am, they've switched from using R² to r without warning or explanation. And if R² is, if I remember my statistics correctly, r x r then those values equal R² of 0.14, 0.15 and 0.06 respectively. No wonder they're hiding them! [If I'm wrong in my understanding or my calculations please let me know. ETA it seems I am wrong here but am off to bed so will amend in the morning]

OK, so we've gone through their results and they can be summarised as 'people are pretty good (or not) at assessing people's strength from photos. People correlate perceived strength with attractiveness (though it's all a bit dubious when you look at actual strength)'. But why have they done this? What's the point of it all?

Well, it's all to do with evolution. Supposedly.

You see, the way it goes is that back to our hunter-gatherer days [actually they say 'ancestral' times but their description sounds like they mean pre-civilised times], strong men would catch lots of big game and keep his family safe, so he was be seen as attractive to the opposite sex, and so had lots of sex and lots of children and passed his genes for strength on to them and the result of this is that women are now evolutionarily predisposed to be attracted to strong men.

Unfortunately, there are a few problems with this chain of logic. Not least because hunter-gatherer societies don't work like that. As this piece from Psychology Today explains, hunter-gatherer societies are, by necessity, actively egalitarian. Food is shared, so even if a strong man was better at capturing game (which ignores all the other skills involved in hunting), then it wouldn't make any difference because he'd have to share it with the others anyway, and wouldn't be allowed to boast about how awesome he was for catching it. And as this audio interview explains, while men were responsible for big game hunting which was sporadically successful, it was actually the women who provided the bulk of the routine protein through catching small game, so the whole idea of women needing a man to provide for them is as incorrect and insulting to women then and it is now.

So, maybe the idea that a strong man will provide food and protection isn't as well-founded as first thought, but we can't deny that strong men are attractive. Well, no. But what do we mean by attractive? Physically attractive and attractive as a potential partner and father to my children aren't necessarily the same thing. I may lust over any one of the Chris's currently active in Hollywood but that doesn't mean I want to settle down with any of them. Equally I think we can all (at least in eurocentric cultures) agree on what is considered conventionally attractive, but that still doesn't mean that a conventionally attractive physique is what actually turns an individual. If it did then every woman who wasn't blonde, with big boobs and a tiny waist would be perennially single and (thankfully) this isn't the case.

The authors' premise is that strong men are attractive to women and this has an evolutionary advantage that holds today. But even if this premise were true (and I hope I have convinced you that at the very least it's highly dubious) I don't think their data is proving that at all.

The biggest problem can be found in that table above. You will note they have data for both men and women's ratings of strength and attractiveness. The authors mentioned that men and women were equally good at assessing strength but there is a deafening silence on the matter of men's ratings of attractiveness. If this is all about reproduction and not, say, a measure of biases towards cultural norms of attractiveness, then you would arguably expect there to be no correlation for the men. But we don't know if that's the case because they haven't provided the data. There's also a dearth of information on the sexuality of those assessing the photos. Lesbian women are not looking for a male partner and as such shouldn't be as good at rating attractive men, yet there has clearly been an assumption made that all the women are heterosexual with no data (or at least none given) to show if this assumption is valid. Again, if the researchers were assessing cultural norms of attractiveness then sexual orientation wouldn't make a difference, but it would if they were assessing what a person is actually looking for in a partner. I know that neither male participants or the likely percentage of lesbian participants are large, but they would provide an interesting counterpoint to the straight female data and allow for a refutation or corroboration of the hypothesis that this is sexual selection at play.

Another issue relates to that correlation between perceived and actual strength. I'd argue that the study hinges on this correlation and the hinge breaks with such a low R². In evolutionary biology there is a field called signalling theory which looks at how individuals communicate with each other, particularly in matters of attracting a mate. The authors are supposing that the strength of the men in the photos is an example of an honest signal, a trait that honestly conveys information that is relevant to a prospective mate. In this case, the physique would be honestly conveying the information that the owner of that physique is strong and therefore a worthy partner. But, that pesky R² comes back to haunt us. As do those r values when attraction is compared with actual strength. They're all so low! They seem to be saying that the signal being perceived isn't honest, it isn't conveying the true strength of the men. And if this is the case then attractiveness is not a proxy for strength and the whole premise falls down flat.

A final point to note is that, like so many of these studies, the research participants are all self-selected students from the universities of the researchers. Why researchers consider university-going 18-25 year olds as sufficiently representative to provide universal truths about human behaviour I have no idea.

So, what to conclude? Well, the authors feel that their data runs contrary to popular theories that say that some women prefer less formidable, less dominant or less masculine men by showing that the stronger the man the more attractive he is. I, however, don't really know what to conclude. It's all a bit of a mess really. They haven't explained what they mean by attractiveness, they haven't shown that this attractiveness is at all related to choosing a sexual partner, and the data at the centre of their argument seems unable to support their claims.

In case it isn't clear by now I really hate evo-psych research. The premise is good - that our evolutionary past has clues to our current behaviour - but it always seems to end up being 'just so' stories based on poor understandings of people now and in the past. It is almost always based on college students who, while an increasingly diverse population, are still not at all representative of humanity as a whole and it completely ignores (often very evolutionarily recent) cultural biases. It is a simplification of human behaviour and often seems to end up 'proving' that men should be big and strong and women should be meek, child-bearing, doormats. And as you might imagine, I have some fundamental issues with that.