Speaker 1
And a lot of people from different cultures agree on what is attractive in a face. There's been so many studies that have shown that people across the world find the same types of faces very attractive and even infants show this. They prefer the same photographs of adults and they're often the attractive adults, which I think is really interesting in terms of whether attraction to certain features is made even biological and linked to that health and well-being kind of perspective. So attraction towards physical features may be where the idea of love at first sight has come from. We see it in movies and in books, it's a classical archetype of love, of seeing someone and falling in love with them, knowing the other one. But is this really real? Is this a real thing? I think a more important mechanism by which humans become captivated by someone is due to your love map. This was a concept created by a sexologist called John Money, very good name. So long before you fixate on a specific person that you find attractive for various reasons, you've developed a map. It's kind of like a template within your brain that determines what arouses you sexually, what drives you to fall in love with one person rather than another, what drives you to be friends with one person rather than another to find someone attractive, basically. And these love maps vary from one individual to the next. So some people get turned on by a business suit or a doctor's uniform, large boobs, more feet, laughter. It's all kind of varied, but that averageness and that notion of symmetry still wins out. So in this one study, these psychologists selected 32 faces of Caucasian women only. And using computers, they averaged all of their features. And then they showed these images to college peers. And of the 32 photographs of real female faces, only three of them were rated as more appealing than these mixed photos of all the averaged features. So that's really interesting. This kind of idea of averageness and symmetry is really important and they don't really know why. Obviously, the world does not share the same sexual ideals of Caucasian students from some university in America. But like I said, despite widely dissimilar standards of beauty and sex appeal, there are some of those common traits, like the symmetry of the face, the small nose, the large eyes, good complexion. People are also drawn to partners and attracted to people who they regard as clean, which makes sense because you don't want to date someone who has poor hygiene, that is really grossed. And men in most places, they generally prefer plump-wide hip-to-wim into slim ones, women prefer broad-sholded men. So it looks really count in attraction. And so does money, which makes sense. Obviously, the initial attraction, you might not be able to determine how much someone is worth, maybe by the value of their clothes or something like that.