Compatibility of basic social perceptions determines perceived attractiveness
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The human body's shape and motion afford social judgments. The body's shape, specifically the waist-to-hip ratio, has been related to perceived attractiveness. Early reports interpreted this effect to be evidence for adaptation, a theory known generally as the waist-to-hip ratio hypothesis. Many of the predictions derived from this perspective have been empirically disconfirmed, leaving the issue of natural selection unresolved. Knowing the cognitive mechanisms undergirding the relationship between judgments of attractiveness and body cues is essential to understanding its evolution. Here we show that perceived attractiveness covaries with body shape and motion because they cospecify social percepts that are either compatible or incompatible. The body's shape and motion provoke basic social perceptions, biological sex and gender (i.e., masculinity/femininity), respectively. The compatibility of these basic percepts predicts perceived attractiveness. We report evidence for the importance of cue compatibility in five studies that used diverse stimuli (animations, static line-drawings, and dynamic line-drawings). Our results demonstrate how a proximal cognitive mechanism, itself likely the product of selection pressures, helps to reconcile previous contradictory findings.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".