Good-looking? If you think so

Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but other people’s opinions matter too.

Psychologist Ben Jones, of the University of Aberdeen, and his team gave women a test in which they had to choose the more attractive of pairs of male faces and to rate how much more handsome they found them.

They were then shown a short video in which the same faces were displayed. But each face was being looked at by a woman smiling or one showing a bored or neutral expression. The researchers repeated the initial test.

“We found that the slideshow caused women to become more attracted to the men who were being smiled at by other women,” Jones said.

But when men were asked to look at the same male faces, those who got the approving female glances became less appealing.

“This shows that people are using cues to the attitudes of others toward individuals to shape their own attractiveness judgments of those individuals,” Jones said.

The findings, which are reported in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B journal, are similar to mate choice copying seen in other species and are thought to be the first time it has been shown in humans.