Familiarity with Own Population's Appearance Influences Facial Preferences

Overview

Journal Hum Nat

Specialties Psychology
Social Sciences

Date 2017 May 19

PMID 28516361

Citations 4

Authors

Carlota Batres

Mallini Kannan

David I Perrett

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Previous studies have found that individuals from rural areas in Malaysia and in El Salvador prefer heavier women than individuals from urban areas. Several explanations have been proposed to explain these differences in weight preferences but no study has explored familiarity as a possible explanation. We therefore sought to investigate participants' face preferences while also examining the facial characteristics of the actual participants. Our results showed that participants from rural areas preferred heavier-looking female faces than participants from urban areas. We also found that the female faces from the rural areas were rated as looking heavier than the female faces from the urban areas. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that familiarity may be contributing to the differences found in face preferences between rural and urban areas given that people from rural and urban areas are exposed to different faces.

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