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Fear of violence amongst Colombian women is associated with reduced preferences for high-BMI men

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Date
15/09/2019
Author
Borras Guevara, Martha Lucia
Batres, Carlota
Perrett, David Ian
Keywords
Violence
BMI
Mate choice
Intrasexual competition
BF Psychology
DAS
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Abstract
Recent studies reveal that violence significantly contributes to explaining individual’s facial preferences. Women who feel at higher risk of violence prefer less-masculine male faces. Given the importance of violence, we explore its influence on people’s preferences for a different physical trait. Masculinity correlates positively with male strength and weight or body mass index (BMI). In fact, masculinity and BMI tend to load on the same component of trait perception. Therefore we predicted that individuals’ perceptions of danger from violence will relate to preferences for facial cues to low-BMI. In two studies in Colombia, men and women from Bogota, Medellin, and surrounding communities were shown pairs of faces transformed to epitomize the shape correlates of men with high or low-BMI. The images were of European, Salvadoran, or Colombian men. Participants were asked to choose the face they considered most attractive. Subsequently, participants answered a survey about their health (e.g., frequency of illnesses the past year), media access (e.g., frequency of Internet use), education level (e.g., graduating from high school), and experiences/perceptions of violence in study 1 and about specific types of violence (public and domestic) in study 2. Results from both studies showed that women who experienced/perceived higher levels of violence preferred faces of low-BMI Salvadoran men. Preferences for low-BMI facial cues were significantly explained by violence (public or domestic), even after controlling for all other variables (including age, education, health, and media access). These results may reflect women’s strategy to avoid male partners capable of inflicting harm.
Citation
Borras Guevara , M L , Batres , C & Perrett , D I 2019 , ' Fear of violence amongst Colombian women is associated with reduced preferences for high-BMI men ' , Human Nature , vol. 30 , 341–369 . https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-019-09350-8
Publication
Human Nature
Status
Peer reviewed
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-019-09350-8
ISSN
1045-6767
Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © The Author(s) 2019. Open Access. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
Description
Funding: This work was supported in part by Colciencias (Call 646), St Leonard's College, University of St Andrews, Scotland and The Russell Trust Postgraduate Award (Call: May 2016).
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  • University of St Andrews Research
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/18247

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