ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2014
Human preferences for sexually dimorphic faces may be evolutionarily novel.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 60 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
60 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- A meta-analysis of the association between male dimorphism and fitness outcomes in humans.eLife · 2022Pooled it
- Navigating Practical, Political, and Ethical Challenges of Long-Term Human Biology Field Research: The Shuar Health and Life History Project.American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council · 2026Article
- The Shuar Health and Life History Project: Overview at 20 Years and Introduction to the Special Issue.American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council · 2026Article
- Self-reported social media use does not affect cross-cultural consensus in first impressions.Evolutionary human sciences · 2026Article
- Physical Strength Is Not Associated With Facial Sexual Dimorphism and Asymmetry in Either Czechs or Cameroonians.American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council · 2025Article
- Testosterone mediates life-history trade-offs in female mammals.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- Further evidence that averageness and femininity, rather than symmetry and masculinity, predict facial attractiveness judgments.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- A systematic review of the association between women's morphological traits and fertility.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- Time perception of attractive male faces and voices: The role of women's menstrual cycle.PloS one · 2025Article
- Sexual Dimorphism: The Interrelation of Shape and Color.Archives of sexual behavior · 2024Article
- Genetic effects on variability in visual aesthetic evaluations are partially shared across visual domains.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Article
- Assessing the roles of shape prototypicality and sexual dimorphism in ratings of the trustworthiness of faces.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Congruence in European and Asian perception of Vietnamese facial attractiveness, averageness, symmetry and sexual dimorphism.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Preference for Male Risk Takers Varies with Relationship Context and Health Status but not COVID Risk.Evolutionary psychological science · 2023Article
- Article
- The role of hormones in attraction and visual attention to facial masculinity.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- When he smiles: Attractiveness preferences for male faces expressing emotions.Evolutionary human sciences · 2023Article
- Understanding trait impressions from faces.British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953) · 2022Article
- Facial and body sexual dimorphism are not interconnected in the Maasai.Journal of physiological anthropology · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
22 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
A large literature proposes that preferences for exaggerated sex typicality in human faces (masculinity/femininity) reflect a long evolutionary history of sexual and social selection. This proposal implies that dimorphism was important to judgments of attractiveness and personality in ancestral environments. It is difficult to evaluate, however, because most available data come from large-scale, industrialized, urban populations. Here, we report the results for 12 populations with very diverse levels of economic development. Surprisingly, preferences for exaggerated sex-specific traits are only found in the novel, highly developed environments. Similarly, perceptions that masculine males look aggressive increase strongly with development and, specifically, urbanization. These data challenge the hypothesis that facial dimorphism was an important ancestral signal of heritable mate value. One possibility is that highly developed environments provide novel opportunities to discern relationships between facial traits and behavior by exposing individuals to large numbers of unfamiliar faces, revealing patterns too subtle to detect with smaller samples.
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