15 TASSINARY

Recent research has led to increasingly sophisticated conjectures as to the roles that genetic heritage, prior experience, and environmental context play in the production and maintenance of complex behaviors. The field of evolutionary psychology was born of such conjectures (Stanley, 1895) and now serves as a niche for a growing number of researchers (Buss, 1995; Kenrick, 1994). One of the more provocative lines of experimental research to emerge from this alembic derives from the linkage of evolutionary theories of human mate selection with definitions of physical attractiveness based on somatic characteristics that simultaneously signal attractiveness and predict reproductive potential (Buss, 1989). The waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) has been purportedly demonstrated to be a robust example of just such an invariant perceptual cue (e.g., Henss, 1995; Singh, 1993a). Here, we report that judgments of attractiveness and fecundity can be either unrelated or related, positively or negatively, to the WHR depending on waist size, hip size, and weight, and are thus inconsistent with the evolutionary argument that human physical attractiveness is fundamentally a sign of mate value. Recent studies have demonstrated that simple variations in female body shape and size are potent determinants of perceived attractiveness, age, reproductive potential, health status, and personality (Henss, 1995; Singh, 1993a, 1993b, 1994a, 1994b, 1994c; Singh & Luis, 1995; Singh & Young, 1995), and these results have captured the attention of scientists as well as the lay public (Cowley, 1996; Stanish, 1996). These experiments varied the weight and waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) of two-dimensional representations of a female figure and consistently found that both men and women find a figure of moderate weight with a WHR of approximately 0.7 to be the most attractive and fecund. When combined with the evidence that the WHR is a predictor of actual fecundity (e.g., Zaadstra et al., 1993), these results have been interpreted to provide support for a utilitarian model of human mate selection in which attractiveness is a marker for mate quality and have been extolled as necessary for the development of biologically credible explanations of evaluation (Tesser & Martin, 1996). Videlicet, the specification of a "social" stimulus (Arnoult, 1963) has advanced the science of social psychology by allowing a quantitative function to be defined over objectively describable stimuli and observable responses. Unfortunately, despite the allure of the argument, nearly all previous studies have employed the same set of stimuli, which confounded weight with hip size, as well as WHR with relative waist size. In addition to these limitations, no studies have systematically examined WHRs of less than 0.7. WHRs smaller than 0.7 are of theoretical interest because of the potential to test runaway models of human mate selection in which attractiveness is a marker for arbitrary but noncapricious aesthetic preferences (Kirkpatrick & Ryan, 1991). To overcome these limitations, we constructed a new set of simple stimuli in which we systematically and independently varied weight, waist size, and hip size (cf. Brandon, 1994; Platt, 1964).