Men and women react differently to attractive faces: during prolonged, conscious viewing, men fix their gaze only on those who match their sexual orientation, while women fix it on attractive faces of both sexes. This is indicated by the results of a study published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior.
In psychology there is a concept of "attentional bias" - the tendency of the visual system to single out some objects among others. Facial attractiveness, that is, the subjective assessment of its aesthetic quality, strongly draws the gaze. Scientists divide attention into two stages: involuntary, instantaneous, and voluntary, when a person consciously decides where to look next. It is apparently the second stage that is linked to beauty.
The experiment involved 105 adult visitors to the Betweter science festival in Utrecht (Netherlands). After excluding three non-binary participants, 102 people remained: 65 women and 37 men, average age 38. The majority (87 people) are heterosexual, 63 are in a steady relationship, on average about 12.6 years.
Each was shown pairs of same-sex portraits with neutral facial expressions: one person was clearly more attractive than the other. The pairs were displayed for three seconds, and an infrared eye tracker (a device for tracking eye movements) recorded gaze direction 300 times per second. Participants did not know that attractiveness was being studied: they were told that face perception was being investigated.
The first, automatic glance at an attractive face was practically independent of beauty. For example, women looked first at the attractive face in 50.0% of cases when it matched their preferred sex, and in 50.7% when it did not. In men the difference was also insignificant. However, participants in 78% of cases looked first at the left photograph - this is a known feature of how the brain's hemispheres work.
A different picture emerged from the analysis of voluntary attention - the total share of time spent viewing the attractive face over three seconds. Women devoted 55.4% of the time to it for the preferred sex and 54.7% for the non-preferred sex - both figures are statistically above 50%, that is, equal viewing. Men, meanwhile, spent 54.9% on an attractive face of the preferred sex, but only 52.0% on a face of the non-preferred sex, and this difference no longer differed reliably from chance.
"We found that men and women differ in their bias toward attractiveness," explained one of the authors, Tom S. Roth. "Men are interested in attractive faces that match their orientation, while women have a general inclination toward beautiful faces of both sexes." At the same time, contrary to some evolutionary hypotheses, men's bias toward the "own" sex did not turn out to be stronger than women's.
Relationship status, to the researchers' surprise, did not affect the duration of gaze at attractive faces. Participants in steady relationships looked at them as much as single people. The authors suggest: perhaps the "relationship protection" effect manifests itself only in the early stages or when a person is first primed to think about romance.
The scientists caution: only gaze direction was measured, not the desire to date or sexual attraction. In addition, the sample was volunteer-based, with an overrepresentation of women and people in relationships, and the photographs were only of white people. Individual differences turned out to be large: according to the authors' estimates, for a new female participant the probability of looking longer at attractive faces of both sexes is about 80%, for a new male participant - 76% for the preferred sex and only 62% for the non-preferred sex.