Journal of Personality and Social Psycholology, 1990 Jul;59(1):61-72

What do women want? Facialmetric assessment of multiple motives in the perception of male facial physical attractiveness.*

Cunningham MR, Barbee AP, Pike CL
Department of Psychology, University of Louisville, Kentucky 40292.

The multiple motive hypothesis of physical attractiveness suggests that women are attracted to men whose appearances elicit their nurturant feelings, who appear to possess sexual maturity and dominance characteristics, who seem sociable, approacheable, and of high social status. Those multiple motives may cause people to be attracted to individuals who display an optimal combination of neotenous, mature, and expressive facial features, plus desirable grooming attributes. Three quasi-experiments demonstrated that men who possessed the neotenous features of large eyes, the mature features of prominent cheekbones and a large chin, the expressive feature of a big smile, and high-status clothing were seen as more attractive than other men. Further supporting the multiple motive hypothesis, the 2nd and 3rd studies indicated that impressions of attractiveness had strong relations with selections of men to date and to marry but had a curvilinear relation with perceptions of a baby face vs. a mature face.
and (c) ingratiating lies were more successfully detected than were noningratiating lies, particularly when told to attractive targets. Furthermore, when senders talked to opposite-sex (relative to same-sex) targets, their lies were most easily detected from the three channels that included nonverbal cues. For ingratiating (relative to noningratiating) lies, detectability was greatest for the channels that included visual nonverbal cues. Senders addressing attractive targets were perceived as less sincere than senders addressing unattractive targets, both when lying and when telling the truth, and this difference in the degree of sincerity conveyed was especially pronounced in the channels that included nonverbal cues. Results are discussed in terms of the effects of motivation on verbal and nonverbal communicative success.

*Reproduced with permission of the APA - Journal of Personality and Social Psychology