“What Leads to Romantic Attraction: Similarity, Reciprocity, Security, or Beauty? Evidence From a Speed-Dating Study”, 2009-07 ():
Years of attraction research have established several “principles” of attraction with robust evidence. However, a major limitation of previous attraction studies is that they have almost exclusively relied on well-controlled experiments, which are often criticized for lacking ecological validity.
The current research was designed to examine initial attraction in a real-life setting—speed-dating. [n = 54 men + 54 women, Demographic Questionnaire, Physical Attractiveness, Political attitudes, Extrinsic values, Intrinsic values, personal interests/recreation, Big Five, PANAS, Rosenberg self-esteem, adult attachment]
…Physical Attractiveness: 8 members of the research team independently rated the physical attractiveness of each participant’s photo using a scale 1–7, with 1 being ‘very unattractive’, 4 being ‘average’, and 7 being ‘very attractive’. The interrater agreement was 0.86. The average across all 8 raters was used to indicate participants’ physical attractiveness.
…Social Relations Model analyses demonstrated that initial attraction was a function of the actor, the partner, and the unique dyadic relationship between these two. Meta-analyses showed intriguing sex differences and similarities. Self characteristics better predicted women’s attraction than they did for men, whereas partner characteristics predicted men’s attraction far better than they did for women. The strongest predictor of attraction for both sexes was partners’ physical attractiveness. Finally, there was some support for the reciprocity principle but no evidence for the similarity principle.
…We found men’s attraction was statistically-significantly correlated with 12 partner characteristics: partner’s age, weight, physical attractiveness, sport activity, conservatism, all Big 5 dimensions except openness, negative affect, anxiety, and self-esteem. These correlations suggest that men are more attracted to women who are older, lighter, physically attractive, athletic, conservative, extroverted, agreeable, and conscientious and who have high self-esteem. They are less attracted to women who are heavier, more neurotic, anxious, and grumpy. For women, only two partner characteristics showed a statistically-significant correlation with their attraction: physical attractiveness and sport activity, indicating that women are strongly drawn to men who are good-looking and athletic. We observe statistically-significant sex differences on 5 characteristics: age, neuroticism, extroversion, negative affect, and avoidance. In terms of the magnitude of these sex differences, there were 2 large effects (neuroticism and negative affect) and 10 medium effects (age, weight, intrinsic values, conservatism, extroversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, avoidance, and anxiety). On average, men had a mean correlation of 0.38, whereas women only had 0.20. The average size of sex difference was 0.31. These results provide strong evidence for sex difference on the link between partner characteristics and attraction, suggesting that we are much better able to predict attraction for men than for women using partner characteristics. It is particularly noteworthy that the only statistically-significant correlation that replicated across gender is on physical attractiveness, where both genders showed an extremely strong, positive correlation (rs > 0.80).