Physical Attractiveness: An Adaptationist Perspective

Abstract

How and why do our minds generate different levels of attraction to others? This chapter integrates life history, evolutionary psychology, and human biology approaches to address this question. Biological adaptations regulate a vast number of life history trade-offs that affect how we look, smell, sound, and behave. Selection produced adaptations that evaluate these cues and regulate our degree of attraction to others based on their relative probable social value to us in different contexts. This chapter outlinesthe alternative evolutionary explanations for the emergence of an attraction,basic components necessary for attraction systems to evolve, and sources of variation in attractiveness assessment. It identifies different domains of social value for which attractiveness assessment evolved, reviews evidence for some of the hypothesized attractiveness-assessment adaptations in those domains, and highlights avenues calling for increased attention. Finally, it calls for greater integration of evolutionary psychology, human biological research, and data from small-scale foraging societies to generate predictions about these domains of social value, the cues or signals associated with them, adaptations selected to regulate attraction to them, and the life history trade-offs involved in these processes. New research on body shape attractiveness is presented to illustrate these points.