Verified by 
The world is currently immersed in the glory and drama of the World Cup (see my 2010 Psychology Today article on fans’ testosterone levels as a function of their favorite teams’ performances). Not surprisingly, many top soccer players have beautiful wives because they possess several important attributes desired by many women. See my earlier Psychology Today articles on the link between men’s dancing abilities and their morphological features (but see the ignoble epilogue of the body symmetry paper here), the relationship between NFL quarterbacks’ abilities and their facial attractiveness, and women’s preference for men who compete in aggressive sports (hence women’s admiration for soccer players).
In today’s post, I’d like to further examine the link between men’s athletic prowess and perceived facial attractiveness. In a forthcoming paper in Biology Letters, Erik Postma tested whether the performances of Tour de France cyclists were associated with their facial attractiveness. The researcher took 80 portraits of riders from Website Letour.fr and then randomly created two online surveys comprised of 40 photos each (I suppose that it might be onerous to ask people to evaluate 80 faces). The photos were standardized to ensure that they were maximally similar. Participants (n = 816; 72 percent female) viewed one of the two sets of photos and rated the riders in terms of their attractiveness, masculinity, and likability. I will restrict my discussion to the attractiveness data, which was measured using a 1-5 scale (higher score means more attractive). Information was also collected on female participants’ menstrual cycle, and whether they were taking contraceptive pills. Attractiveness scores that corresponded to instances where participants proclaimed that they recognized a given rider were removed (282 out of 32,468 total ratings). Athletes’ performances were coded using the time that it took them to complete several events (prologue and two individual time trials) as well as the full race (minus the times for the latter three events). It is important to reiterate that the objective of the study was to determine whether high-performance athletes are actually more attractive (i.e., attractiveness scores are given without any knowledge of an athlete’s performance).
Without getting into all of the statistical details (including the use of rider-specific and rater-specific variables within the various analyses), Postma estimated the slope of the relationship between performance and attractiveness for four group of participants: 1) women who were in the fertile phase of their menstrual cycles and not using a contraceptive pill; 2) women who were in the non-fertile phase of their cycles and not using a contraceptive pill; 3) women who were taking the contraceptive pill; 4) men. To those not versed in statistics, larger slopes imply a stronger association between performance and attractiveness scores. The key findings:
1) The slopes of all four groups were significantly positive, meaning that there was a positive correlation between riders’ performances and how they were evaluated in terms of their attractiveness across all four groups.
2) The slopes across the four groups were not equal. In other words, the relationship between performance and attractiveness was not equally strong across the four groups. The slopes of the two no-pill female groups were larger than those of men and pill-taking women. The slopes of the two no-pill groups of women (fertile and non-fertile phases) were not significantly different from one another. Furthermore the slopes of the men and the pill-taking women were not significantly different from one another.
Bottom line: All groups yielded a statistically significant relationship between attractiveness of riders and their performances, and this effect was particularly strong for women who were not taking the pill (irrespective of their fertile status). It would seem that part of a man’s athletic prowess (at least his long-distance endurance) might be captured via facial cues that are otherwise perceived as attractive.
Source for Image:
