Nora Nickels

Explaining financial and prosocial biases in favor of attractive people: Interdisciplinary perspectives from economics, social psychology, and evolutionary psychology.

Financial and prosocial biases in favor of attractive adults have been documented in the labor market, in social transactions in everyday life, and in studies involving experimental economic games. According to the taste-based discrimination model developed by economists, attractiveness-related financial and prosocial biases are the result of preferences or prejudices similar to those displayed toward members of a particular sex, racial, ethnic, or religious group. Other explanations proposed by economists and social psychologists maintain that attractiveness is a marker of personality, intelligence, trustworthiness, professional competence, or productivity. Evolutionary psychologists have argued that attractive adults are favored because they are preferred sexual partners. Evidence that stereotypes about attractive people are causally related to financial or prosocial biases toward them is weak or nonexistent. Consistent with evolutionary explanations, biases in favor of attractive women appear to be more consistent or stronger than those in favor of attractive men, and biases are more consistently reported in interactions between opposite-sex than same-sex individuals. Evolutionary explanations also account for increased prosocial behavior in situations in which attractive individuals are simply bystanders. Finally, evolutionary explanations are consistent with the psychological, physiological, and behavioral changes that occur when individuals are exposed to potential mates, which facilitate the expression of courtship behavior and increase the probability of occurrence of mating. Therefore, multiple lines of evidence suggest that mating motives play a more important role in driving financial and prosocial biases toward attractive adults than previously recognized.

Interest in Babies Negatively Predicts Testosterone Responses to Sexual Visual Stimuli Among Heterosexual Young Men

Men’s testosterone may be an important physiological mechanism mediating motivational and behavioral aspects of the mating/parenting trade-off not only over time but also in terms of stable differences between mating-oriented and parenting-oriented individuals. In this study, we tested the hypothesis that self-reported interest in babies is inversely related to testosterone reactivity to cues of short-term mating among heterosexual young men. Among 100 participants, interest in babies was related to a slow life-history strategy, as assessed by the Mini-K questionnaire, and negatively related to testosterone responses to an erotic video. Interest in babies was not associated with baseline testosterone levels or with testosterone reactivity to nonsexual social stimuli. These results provide the first evidence that differential testosterone reactivity to sexual stimuli may be an important aspect of individual differences in life-history strategies among human males.

The relationship between morningness–eveningness, psychosocial variables, and cortisol reactivity to stress from a life history perspective.

Consistent with the hypothesis that some of the psychological, behavioral, and physiological characteristics of morning- and evening-types may represent adaptations to slow and fast life histories, respectively, this study investigated variation in time perspective (i.e., being present- vs. future-oriented), impulsivity, cooperation and competition, self-perceived social status, and cortisol and testosterone concentrations in baseline conditions and in response to psychosocial stress in relation to morningness–eveningness. Study participants were 60 male and 60 female young adults, mostly college students. Questionnaires were used to collect demographic information and to assess morningness–eveningness, impulsivity, time perspective, and self-perceived social status. Cooperative and competitive tendencies were assessed with an Ultimatum Game, an iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma Game, and a Prosocial Risk-Taking Task. Half of the study participants underwent a standardized procedure that elicits psychosocial stress (the Trier Social Stress Test) and half served as controls. Three saliva samples were obtained before and after the TSST or the control condition and later assayed for testosterone and cortisol concentrations. Consistent with our hypotheses, morning-types were more future-oriented, more cooperative in the Prisoner’s dilemma (men, not women), and perceived themselves to be of lower social status than evening-types. Furthermore, morning-types had a significantly greater cortisol response to stress than evening-types. Some of our findings support the functional interpretation of morningness–eveningness from a life history perspective. In particular, higher physiological reactivity to psychosocial stress among morning-types may be associated with their reported lower extraversion and be one of the factors contributing to some aspects of their slow life history strategy, including their avoidance of short-term mating strategies, lower sexual competitiveness, and lower social status.

Moving forward with interdisciplinary research on attractiveness-related biases

In our response, we review and address the comments on our target article made in the 25 commentaries. First, we review and discuss the commentaries that recognized the value of our approach, accepted the main premises and conclusions of our target article, and suggested further avenues for research on attractiveness-related biases. We then respond to commentators who either misinterpreted some parts of our target article or made statements with which we disagree. These commentaries provided us with an opportunity to clarify some aspects of our target article, for example, the fact that we address both the functional significance of attractiveness-related biases and their underlying mechanisms. We provide a rebuttal to two commentaries, in which we are accused of poor scholarship. We conclude our response by addressing two commentaries that discussed the societal implications of the occurrence of attractiveness-related biases in the labor market by briefly discussing the relationship between scientific research and social policy.