Kerri Johnson: UCLA Communication Studies

In the 1950s, Doris Troy famously sang, “Just one look…that’s all it took,” implying that attraction can begin
with little more than a glance. Contemporary research in person construal generally corroborates this
observation, but debate continues about precisely how physical cues come to convey attractiveness. One
unresolved question centers on whether objective indices of masculinity and femininity predict perceived
attractiveness. Attempts to answer this question have been frustrated by contradictory results. In this talk, I
will argue that masculinity and femininity are better defined as subjective judgments of the gender-typicality of
a trait, not as objective indices of sexual dimorphism. I will present data suggesting that once sex
categorization has occurred, sexually dimorphic traits are interpreted to be either masculine or feminine, the
typicality of which strongly predicts perceptions of attractiveness. Masculine men and feminine women are
perceived as attractive; feminine men and masculine women are not. This perspective has several important
implications. First, this perspective implies that the accuracy or error in the cognitive representations of sexual
dimorphism will systematically skew gender judgments and thereby affect perceived attractiveness. At times,
this may result in preferences that appear quite extreme by objective standards. At other times, this may even
yield preferences for traits that are gender atypical by objective standards. Second, this perspective
acknowledges the importance of cultural and ecological factors as moderators of the relation between cues
and attractiveness. Perceptions of masculinity/femininity are likely to vary systematically with culture and
ecology, and perceived attractiveness should vary accordingly. In sum, my talk will describe how perceptions
of masculinity and femininity provide the evaluative interpretation of biologically relevant cues – engendering
rapid and ready judgments of attractiveness from “just one look.”
http://www.bec.ucla.edu/Johnson&Tassinary(2007).pdf