Have you heard about HOTorNOT.com? It’s a dating site that allows members to vote on other members’ attractiveness. You carry your own attractiveness score with you and how hot you are becomes part of your profile. Researchers in the science of beauty and human attraction call this a data paradise. Here are some of the things researchers have been able to discover using HOTorNOT.com’s magical numbers:
• Men are 240 percent more likely to accept a date offer than women.
• With each one-point gain in hotness (on a scale of 1 to 10), a person’s chances of being accepted for a date increase by 130 percent.
• People who are themselves less attractive tend to undervalue attractiveness in others, preferring to instead prioritize personality traits like kindness and sense of humor.
• As you’d expect, people are more likely to accept date offers from people with hotness scores greater than their own. But when the person requesting a date is more than four points hotter than the person being propositioned, the likelihood of acceptance tapers. Is this due to intimidation?
• Members’ own attractiveness had no influence on how hot they perceived other members. In other words, less attractive members didn’t delude themselves about their dates’ attractiveness.
iDread
Alektorophobia: fear of chickens.
Wild Kingdom: Chickens Like Models
If humans of all attractiveness levels recognize the same standards of beauty, the obvious question is what about chickens? To answer this important question, researchers in Stockholm taught male chickens to peck images of average human female faces. They then presented chickens with faces of varying beauties. Which faces did the chickens notice and thus peck more often? The same symmetrical, beautiful faces that male undergrads noticed.
Similar studies with similar results imply that animals across the evolutionary spectrum recognize and appreciate the same standards of beauty: Apparently symmetry implies genetic fitness.
