Darwinian Theory Of Beauty

Cross-cultural research suggests that what is considered “beautiful” is similar across different cultures. Describe the evidence and discuss the implications of this.

The maxim Beauty is in the eye of the beholder asserts that each person has or may have their own standards of beauty and that therefore people shouldn 't agree on what is beautiful or attractive. As different cultures presumably have different beauty ideals, it follows that this claim should be valid all the more across cultures (Langlois, Kalakanis, Rubenstein, Larson Hallam & Smoot, 2000). However, numerous studies indicate high agreement among raters form distinct cultures upon the attractiveness of female faces. The findings of such studies will be presented and discussed,

Culture is socially transmitted, whereas genetic information is genetically transmitted ( Kashima & Gelfand, 2011). It is a popular view that people 's sense of beauty is an arbitrary social convention - even Darwin favored this hypothesis (Rhodes, 2006). He stated that 'it is certainly not true that there is in the mind of man any universal standard of beauty with respect to the human body ' (1871, in Cunningham, et al., 1995). Evolutionary psychology, however, extrapolates the findings of the Darwinian theory, that all species have evolved to increase fitness for survival and reproduction (and therefore all the aspects of the human body can be explained in relation to its adaptation process), to explaining the mechanisms of the human psyche (Dutton,

In the first study, native Asian and Hispanic students and White Americans judged photographs of Asian, Hispanic, Black, and White women. For the second study, Taiwanese attractiveness ratings were correlated with the foregoing Asian, Hispanic and American ratings. In the last study, Black and white American men rated the attractiveness of Black female bodies and faces. The subjects were presented pictures of unacquainted women, who had been participants in an international beauty contest -being, therefore, considered beautiful by the members of their own culture. For every study, mean facial attractiveness ratings were highly correlated (r=.93, r=.91, r=.94), while Blacks and Whites varied in judging bodies (Cunningham, et al.,