Cross-Cultural Agreement in Facial Attractiveness Preferences: The Role of Ethnicity and Gender

Previous work showed high agreement in facial attractiveness preferences within and across cultures. The aims of the current study were twofold. First, we tested cross-cultural agreement in the attractiveness judgements of White Scottish and Black South African students for own- and other-ethnicity...

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Main Authors:	Coetzee, Vinet, Greeff, Jaco M., Stephen, Ian D., Perrett, David I.
Format:	Online
Language:	English
Published:	Public Library of Science 2014
Online Access:	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4079334/

id	pubmed-4079334
recordtype	oai_dc
spelling	pubmed-40793342014-07-08 Cross-Cultural Agreement in Facial Attractiveness Preferences: The Role of Ethnicity and Gender Coetzee, Vinet Greeff, Jaco M. Stephen, Ian D. Perrett, David I. Research Article Previous work showed high agreement in facial attractiveness preferences within and across cultures. The aims of the current study were twofold. First, we tested cross-cultural agreement in the attractiveness judgements of White Scottish and Black South African students for own- and other-ethnicity faces. Results showed significant agreement between White Scottish and Black South African observers' attractiveness judgements, providing further evidence of strong cross-cultural agreement in facial attractiveness preferences. Second, we tested whether cross-cultural agreement is influenced by the ethnicity and/or the gender of the target group. White Scottish and Black South African observers showed significantly higher agreement for Scottish than for African faces, presumably because both groups are familiar with White European facial features, but the Scottish group are less familiar with Black African facial features. Further work investigating this discordance in cross-cultural attractiveness preferences for African faces show that Black South African observers rely more heavily on colour cues when judging African female faces for attractiveness, while White Scottish observers rely more heavily on shape cues. Results also show higher cross-cultural agreement for female, compared to male faces, albeit not significantly higher. The findings shed new light on the factors that influence cross-cultural agreement in attractiveness preferences. Public Library of Science 2014-07-02 /pmc/articles/PMC4079334/ /pubmed/24988325 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0099629 Text en © 2014 Coetzee et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
repository_type	Open Access Journal
institution_category	Foreign Institution
institution	US National Center for Biotechnology Information
building	NCBI PubMed
collection	Online Access
language	English
format	Online
author	Coetzee, Vinet Greeff, Jaco M. Stephen, Ian D. Perrett, David I.
spellingShingle	Coetzee, Vinet Greeff, Jaco M. Stephen, Ian D. Perrett, David I. Cross-Cultural Agreement in Facial Attractiveness Preferences: The Role of Ethnicity and Gender
author_facet	Coetzee, Vinet Greeff, Jaco M. Stephen, Ian D. Perrett, David I.
author_sort	Coetzee, Vinet
title	Cross-Cultural Agreement in Facial Attractiveness Preferences: The Role of Ethnicity and Gender
title_short	Cross-Cultural Agreement in Facial Attractiveness Preferences: The Role of Ethnicity and Gender
title_full	Cross-Cultural Agreement in Facial Attractiveness Preferences: The Role of Ethnicity and Gender
title_fullStr	Cross-Cultural Agreement in Facial Attractiveness Preferences: The Role of Ethnicity and Gender
title_full_unstemmed	Cross-Cultural Agreement in Facial Attractiveness Preferences: The Role of Ethnicity and Gender
title_sort	cross-cultural agreement in facial attractiveness preferences: the role of ethnicity and gender
description	Previous work showed high agreement in facial attractiveness preferences within and across cultures. The aims of the current study were twofold. First, we tested cross-cultural agreement in the attractiveness judgements of White Scottish and Black South African students for own- and other-ethnicity faces. Results showed significant agreement between White Scottish and Black South African observers' attractiveness judgements, providing further evidence of strong cross-cultural agreement in facial attractiveness preferences. Second, we tested whether cross-cultural agreement is influenced by the ethnicity and/or the gender of the target group. White Scottish and Black South African observers showed significantly higher agreement for Scottish than for African faces, presumably because both groups are familiar with White European facial features, but the Scottish group are less familiar with Black African facial features. Further work investigating this discordance in cross-cultural attractiveness preferences for African faces show that Black South African observers rely more heavily on colour cues when judging African female faces for attractiveness, while White Scottish observers rely more heavily on shape cues. Results also show higher cross-cultural agreement for female, compared to male faces, albeit not significantly higher. The findings shed new light on the factors that influence cross-cultural agreement in attractiveness preferences.
publisher	Public Library of Science
publishDate	2014
url	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4079334/
_version_	1612109058696806400

Cross-Cultural Agreement in Facial Attractiveness Preferences: The Role of Ethnicity and Gender

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