The relative contributions of waist-to-hip ratio and body mass index to judgements of attractiveness
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper explores the relative contributions of waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) and body mass index (BMI) to ratings of female physical attractiveness. Computer-altered photographic stimuli representing three levels of WHR (low, 0.66; average, 0.72; high, 0.78) and three levels of BMI (underweight, 17.0; average weight, 22.6; overweight, 28.2) were presented to university students in both between and within subjects designs. The manipulations of WHR and BMI were based on normative data such that the strength of manipulation was equivalent for the two independent variables. Thinner models were consistently judged to be more attractive, while WHR impacted attractiveness ratings only for the within subjects design, where a BMI × WHR interaction was found. A lower WHR was only preferred when paired with a low or average body weight. Thus, this research suggests that when manipulated equivalently, BMI plays a greater role in perceptions of female physical attractiveness than WHR, consistent with sociocultural theories of attractiveness in Western culture. Evolutionary theories emphasizing the role of WHR also received some support, however, indicating that when figures are viewed simultaneously, lower WHRs are preferred for thinner bodies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".