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ABSTRACT
By comparing photos of portraits of the faces of Renaissance courtesans to photos of attractive contemporary women’s faces this study estimates the importance of sociocultural factors in the personal perception of faces. Physical attractiveness is an important causal factor in choosing a sex partner, so the difference between averaged attractiveness judgments, a focus of attractiveness research, and individual attractiveness judgment, most relevant to choosing a sex partner, is important. Except for modesty and faithfulness, 13 normally attractive contemporary models were rated much more positively by college student participants (N = 189) than were eight celebrated Renaissance courtesans, both in attractiveness (contemporary stimuli 63%; Renaissance courtesans 31%) and in personality traits. All of the Renaissance courtesan trait ratings showed more variability than the contemporary stimuli. This study supports the view that once a relatively low baseline level of biological attractiveness is surpassed, latent and explicit sociocultural factors, culturally relative gender role appearance expectations, culturally relative aesthetic judgment factors, individual differences, and interpersonal dynamics are major determining factors of judgments of pretty and/or beautiful showing large subcultural and cultural individual differences. Pretty and beautiful may be discrete concepts, with beautiful strongly culturally determined. These data suggest that sociocultural and subcultural factors are important determiners of attractiveness.
Acknowledgments
I thank Bob Wellman, Curt Bergstrand, Matt Bronstad, Michael Cunningham, Dave Kenny, Bob Korn, Maggie Meloy, Hank Rothgerber, Bill Tietjen, Tom Wilson, and Christy Wolfe for their ideas, advice, and helpful comments and Amanda Bower for sharing her data on HAMS and NAMS. The views expressed are those of the author. A version of part of this research was presented as a poster, “Historico-Cultural Factors in Beauty Judgments: 16th Century Courtesans Judged Against 21st Century Media Ideals,” at the 18th Annual Association for Psychological Science Convention in New York, May 2006. I acknowledge the use of images under the fair use for research provision of stimuli from Merle Norman Cosmetics, Victoria Jackson Cosmetics, and Mademoiselle magazine for before/after makeover photos of contemporary women. Similarly, I acknowledge the use of photos from Lynn Lawner’s book Renaissance Courtesans. A list of web sites where those images may be viewed is in the Appendix.