A Rival With Good Body Language Makes You Partner Look Uglier
Christopher Philip
Sandeep Mishra, Andrew Clark and Martin Daly, Department of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Behavior, McMaster University conducted research into simple nonverbal com- munication to measure their effect not just on the sender of the cues, but also on how people would rate their significant others.
In a pre-recorded video, a moderately attractive male and female actor was filmed separately in a mock interview. The actor behaved either “proceptively” or “unreceptively.”
In the proceptive condition, the actor smiled, looked at the camera, and generally acted as if she/he desired further interaction. In the unreceptive condition, the actor never smiled, let her/his gaze wander, and sounded bored. Otherwise, the actor had identical grooming and dress, while answering the innocuous questions similarly.
One set of subjects watched the proceptive condition and the other the unreceptive condition. At the conclusion, the subjects offered their impressions across multiple variables including physical attractiveness and estimated age.
The results showed that men and women both rated the actors photograph as significantly more attractive in the proceptive video condition rather than the unreceptive video. The effect was stronger for the men, than for the women. On the other hand, the age estimates were not affected by the positive nonverbal cues.
This is where it gets interesting. Men who were in a committed relationship downrated their partners on measures of overall partner attractiveness, but only after viewing the proceptive female interviewee. When unnattched men were shown photographs of strangers (collections of women’s photographs) they also rated them lower, but again, only if they viewed the proceptive female interviewee.
There was no such effect for women who viewed the proceptive versus unreceptive male actor. Both sets of women maintained their current ratings of their significant other’s as well as the ratings of strangers.
Drawing conclusions
When a woman behaves warmly, smiles, makes eye contact and seems interested she displays relevant cues to nearby men. The study shows that men pick up on these cues and use them to assess relevant mate characteristics.
The study is interesting in that men didn’t use the overall attractiveness of the women in their assessments. In this case, it was the positive body language, that is, the nonverbal behaviour, that strongly transferred to perceived physical attractiveness in the interviewee.
In other words, men read prosocial body language in assessing the degree to which they would allocate ‘mating effort.’
That men viewed positive cues in a “nearby” female, then proceeded to down-rate their current partners with respect to their physical attractiveness, is another story altogether.
It tells us that nearby women who flirt and act warmly are telling men that he’s got a shot, thereby influencing his impressions of the partner he has already attracted.
This is an important conclusion for women who wish to keep their partner’s loyalty. Likewise, I suppose, this is equally as valuable to women that wish to potentially poach men from other women. On a more positive note, it also provides women with a source of power in attracting single men into a relationship. In other words, very simple body language can significantly boost the overall attractiveness of women in a courtship context.
Prosocial behaviour was relevant to men and women, but it had a much stronger effect in men suggesting that acting warmly, smiling and maintaining eye contact is much more effective for women in soliciting attention from men than vice versa.
This is to be expected, as women are generally considered to be the limiting factor in courtship.
A Side-note
Also worth mentioning, is that the cues are relevant when observed on a television screen – as done in this study! It seems our human wiring is not able to discern real from fiction, though I would presume that having a live human being perform similarly, would strengthen the effect significantly.
As a side-note, and one that the researchers also draw upon is that one might wonder how the effects of widespread effects born out of mass media showcasing significant levels of readily available prosocial nonverbal signals bombarding men daily in their overall ratings of their partners, would affect their overall satisfaction in a committed relationship. Perhaps seeing a great many variety of women, particularly attractive women, displaying positive body language, even if on a screen, leads to a much reduced levels of personal satisfaction.
Incidentally, previous research supports this idea. Male high school teachers and college professors have an unusually high incidence of divorce!
How media plays into this equation is not clear, but the effects seen in this study are worth keeping in mind. Certainly, “the psychology of Homo sapiens did not evolve in
an environment laden with simulated social stimuli of the sort we experience today,” conclude the authors of the study.
Image Credit: Walt Stoneburner
Resources
Kanazawa, S., & Still, M. C. (2000). Teaching may be hazardous to your marriage. Evolution and Human Behavior, 21, 185–190.
Mishra, Sandeep; Andrew Clark and Martin Daly. One Woman’s Behavior Affects The Attractiveness Of Others. Evolution and Human Behavior. 2007 28: 145-149.