Think your preferences are purely your own? Think again. According to a study, attraction to masculine men and feminine women is more of a habit, emerging only in urbanized societies.
Twelve populations around the globe were surveyed by biologists, anthropologists, and psychologists from Brunel University London, ranging from the most developed to the most primitive. Survey results showed that preference for masculine men and feminine women only manifests in the most urbanized and industrialized environments.
A universal appreciation for masculine men and feminine women apparently doesn't exist. To arrive at this conclusion, psychology lecturer Andrew Clark from Brunel University London and his colleagues digitally manipulated photographs of people to become masculine and feminine. Using these photographs, researchers were able to learn about the choices that people from small societies make.
"We found that they didn't place the same emphasis on 'sex typicality', that is, on highly feminine women and highly masculine men. In fact, they often favoured the neutral face, and sometimes the least 'sex-typical' one," explained Clark.
It was also revealed that the level of aggressiveness that a masculine male is associated with is directly proportional to the level of urbanization. This means that the more urbanized a society is, the more aggressive masculine men will appear to members of that society.
The study involved 962 participants, with each one shown sets of three digitally manipulated, opposite-sex composites. Five ethnic groups were represented in every set. After being shown the photographs, participants were told to identify which faces they found most attractive and which ones appeared to be the most aggressive.
Clark adds that the results of their study takes on the idea that exaggerated traits specific to sexes are important for sexual and social selection. Preference for faces typical of sexes is a novel phenomenon that was only observed in urban environments and is not consistent throughout history.
How did this preference for masculine men and feminine women in urbanized societies come about?
The researchers suggest that well-developed environments have large and dense populations that may have exposed individuals to a wider range of unfamiliar faces. As such, this provided the opportunity and motive to look for subtle relationships between behavior and facial traits for identification purposes.
Called "Human preferences for sexually dimorphic faces may be evolutionary novel," the study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
