Evolutionary Psychology of Human Physical Appearance and Body Movement

• Applicant: Bernhard Fink, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Social Psychology, Industrial and Organisational Psychology
• Term: from 2007 to 2016
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 57382217

Human nature is to a large extent universal. This includes certain beauty standards and the ways in which males and females interact. The consensus of people’s judgments of physical attractiveness is consistent with the supposition that beauty is neither arbitrary nor culture bound, but that there are general biologically based standards of beauty, shaped by underlying evolutionary selection pressures. Given that some beauty standards are universal across cultures, it seems likely that human beings have evolved mechanisms for detecting and assessing honest cues of mate value, and still choose partners according to fundamental biological principles. Although there is some agreement among evolutionary psychologists on this perspective, a number of open questions in attractiveness research remain. Firstly, almost all studies on physical attraction have used static stimuli (images of faces and/or bodies). There is virtually nothing known about the attractiveness of body dynamics, such as gait or dance. Secondly, with the aid of modern computer technology, numerous approaches to the study of facial appearance have relied most frequently upon image morphing techniques (i.e. digital blending of images), thereby neglecting the importance of apparent skin condition for facial attractiveness. Thirdly, recent advances in the study of human facial form have demonstrated that the simple facial-metric approach (i.e. the measurement of distances in a face) cannot accurately grasp and depict the variation of facial form. New technologies, such as ‘geometric morphometric methodology (GMM)’, consider biological form as a single geometric whole, and are able to quantify and visualize shape variation in an innovative way. With the present application, I request funding for the establishment of a research group that will concentrate and further investigate these three aspects of human attractiveness in order to better understand the biology of physical attraction, its perception, and possible consequences for human mate selection. In view of the human obsession with beauty, particularly in the Western society, insights into the nature of the biology of physical attractiveness will have implications not only for the biological but also for the medical and social sciences.

• DFG Programme: Independent Junior Research Groups