Sexually Selective Cognition: Beauty Captures the Mind of the Beholder

Across 5 experimental studies, the authors explore selective processing biases for physically attractive others. The findings suggest that (a) both male and female observers selectively attend to physically attractive female targets, (b) limiting the attentional capacity of either gender results in biased frequency estimates of attractive females, (c) although females selectively attend to attractive males, limiting females’ attentional capacity does not lead to biased estimates of attractive males, (d) observers of both genders exhibit enhanced recognition memory for attractive females but attenuated recognition for attractive males. Results suggest that different mating-related motives may guide the selective processing of attractive men and women. Think back to the last time you walked across a college campus or down a crowded city street. Did you find yourself looking at some people more than others, and are there some people in particular you could now pick out of a line up? Are the answers to these questions determined merely by random characteristics of the people you passed or are the ways we selectively process others linked to theoretically important constraints on how the mind works? In this article, we report some initial investigations into how biases in social information processing might be linked to fundamental adaptive motivations. Because social environments can be quite complex, selective cognitive attunements can lead to biases in the way people process social information (cf. Haselton & Buss, 2000). For example, a newcomer walking across a large university campus for the first time may be exposed to thousands of unfamiliar strangers. One can imagine that such a person might selectively attend to the most attractive of his or her new schoolmates. Because one’s ability to encode and remember people is influenced by the degree to which one attends to them, this new student might consequently overestimate the proportion of attractive students at that university. This, in turn, might influence the student’s relationship decisions and behavior (Guttentag & Secord, 1983). Functionalist evolutionary theories often posit the existence of adaptively tuned cognitive mechanisms (Klein, Cosmides, Tooby, & Chance, 2002). However, research inspired by such theories has at times fallen short of directly investigating these mechanisms and determining at what stage of information processing they occur (e.g., Kenrick, Neuberg, Zierk, & Krones, 1994). Such research often focuses more directly on overt preferences, judgments, and evaluative outcomes, leaving unexplored the more basic-level cognitive mechanisms assumed to underlie them. In contrast, social cognitive researchers have used rigorous methods to examine these more proximate mechanisms, but have focused less on the role of specific types of stimulus content and on the ultimate motives leading people to selectively process some kinds of social information more than others. The present research merges functionalist and social cognitive perspectives by investigating selective processing biases within the domain of mating. Across five experimental studies, we explore selective cognitive attunements to physically attractive others at different levels of processing. First, we examine whether limiting participants’ attentional capacity might result in biased frequency estimates of attractive targets. Second, we use an eyetracking method to investigate the extent to which observers selectively attend to physically attractive male and female targets. Third, we examine whether observers exhibit recognition memory biases for attractive faces.