Physical attractiveness

• Buss's research on partner preferences in different cultures demonstrated that men in particular place great importance on physical attractiveness when choosing a mate. Physical appearance is an important cue to a woman's health and hence her fertility and reproductive value.
• The 'matching hypothesis' (Walster and Walster, 1969) claims that, when initiating romantic relationships, individuals seek out partners whose social desirability approximately equals their own. According to this view, when choosing a partner, individuals must first assess their own 'value' in the eyes of a potential romantic partner and then select the best available candidates who would be most likely to be attracted to them.
• Walster et al.'s procedure:

  Walster et al. advertised a 'computer dance', 177 males and 170 females were randomly selected to take part in the study. When they came to pick up their tickets, 4 student accomplices rated each of them for physical attractiveness. The participants were then asked to complete a questionnaire and told that the data gathered would be used to allocate their ideal partner for the dance. However, the pairing was done completely randomly.
• Walster et al.'s findings:

  The findings from this study did not support the matching hypothesis. Once participants had met their dates, and regardless of their own physical attractiveness, they responded more positively to physically attractive dates and were more likely to subsequently try to arrange dates with them if they were physically attractive.
• AO3 - Speed dating and the challenge to traditional views of attraction:

  Eastwick and Finkel (2008) although men place more importance on physical attractiveness than women, these differences may not predict real-life partner choice. Prior to the speed-dating, participants showed traditional sex differences when stating the importance of physical attractiveness and earning prospects. However, at the event, no significant sex differences emerged in the degree to which judgements of targets' physical attractiveness or earning prospects influenced speed daters' romantic interests in targets.
• AO3 - Complex matching:

  Sprecher and Hatfield suggests research often fails to find evidence of matching physical attractiveness due to complex matching. A person may compensate for a lack of physical attractiveness with other desirable qualities such as kindness. In this way people are able to attract partners far more physically attractive than themselves by offering compensatory assets.
• AO3 - Research support for sex-differences in the importance of physical attractiveness:

  Meltzer et al. (2014) found that objective ratings of wives' attractiveness were positively related to levels of husbands' satisfaction at the beginning of the marriage and remained that way over at least the first four years of marriage. Contrastingly, objective ratings of husbands' physical attractiveness were not related to wives' marital satisfaction.
• AO3 - Matching may not be that important in initial attraction:

  In a study of online dating patterns, Taylor et al. (2011) found no evidence that daters' decisions were driven by a similarity between their own and potential partners' physical attractiveness. Instead they found evidence of an overall preference for attractive partners, suggesting that people do not take their own physical attractiveness into account in the initial stages of attraction, but instead aim for someone more desirable than themselves.