Gaze study: women look longer at attractive faces of both sexes

Where does the gaze go when two faces appear side by side? A team led by Johanna M. Bellue and Tom S. Roth, an assistant professor at Utrecht University, examined this using eye-tracking; the study was published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, the specialist portal PsyPost reported on 19 October. According to the Spanish science magazine Quo, researchers from the Netherlands and Germany took part. Participants were recruited at a science festival in Utrecht; the analysis covered 65 women and 37 men with an average age of 38, 87 of them heterosexual. In 36 trials they saw two faces of the same sex for three seconds each – one previously rated as attractive, one as less attractive. They were told the study was about face perception in general.

At first glance, attractiveness played no role: in about 78 percent of cases participants looked at the left image first. Differences emerged in how long they looked. Women looked at the more attractive face about 55 percent of the time – regardless of whether it belonged to the sex they are attracted to (55.4 percent) or not (54.7 percent). Men lingered on attractive faces of their preferred sex 54.9 percent of the time, but only 52.0 percent for the other sex – a value not reliably different from chance. A direct comparison between the sexes narrowly missed the significance threshold. Whether someone was in a committed relationship had no meaningful effect.

"We find that men and women differ in their attractiveness bias," Roth said, according to PsyPost. The results, however, should not be interpreted as evidence of sexual interest in both sexes. The study measured only gaze, not desire or partner preferences. The sample was small, self-selected and not representative – mostly heterosexual, highly educated and urban; only photos of white adults were shown, and the festival setting was noisy. The reports gave no information on funding.