"In your face" - male perception of female facial attractiveness (BioAnth project)

[LJBrown88]

"In your face" is a study forming part of the research of Laura J Brown, a 3rd year BSc Biological Anthropology student at the University of Kent, Canterbury, United Kingdom.

 

The aim of the study is to examine male perception of female facial attractiveness.

 

The only requirements of this study are that you are male and heterosexual (if you are female, feel free to pass the link on to any suitable male friends though!).

 

***Complete the study and you could be 1 of 3 guys to win a crate of beer!***

 

The online questionnaire shouldn't take more than 30mins to complete. Please note that some of the questions are of a sexual nature, so only take part if you are happy to answer questions of this kind.

You may withdraw at any point should you no longer wish to participate, by simply exiting the website.

 

The questionnaire will involve you being shown a series of female facial photographs (there are 45 in total) and answering a set of corresponding questions. Please answer them honestly. Your responses will be kept confidential.

 

You can take part by clicking this link:

"In your face" - male perception of female facial attractiveness

 

Feel free to pass on the study site to any male friends:

 

http://inyourfacestudy.athost.net

 

 

If you have any questions, please email me at lb219@kent.ac.uk.

 

Thanks for your time,

 

Laura J Brown

 

Research supervisor:

Dr Sarah Johns - S.E.Johns@kent.ac.uk

Room 162

Department of Anthropology.

Marlowe Building. University of Kent.

Canterbury, Kent. CT2 7NR.

United Kingdom

[lakmilis]

Shame I have lost a nice 'paper' some lads made at warwick... (I got it whilst I was studying there).. soooo nice.. real good realtionships, incl. beergoggle factor.. desperation factor.. etc etc. LOL

 

was amazing actually

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that took ages.. please put at least one decent , just one in . cheers. think like highest attractiveness i voted there was like 20%

[coke]

i agree lakmilis, not to be offensive, but i wish they had more attractive women in there

it might be something like women who don't like the way they look

 

maybe in real life they would look better, not in close up snapshots

but I would have put some very attractive women in there too, for comparison

 

some pages have broken javascript

 

1 in every couple pages, the number lines or whatever disappear... and so I can't answer, just press submit, and when you don't answer then the pictures come back around... so I can't see the results or whatever! Although my rating was maybe at most 15 for one of them

Edited March 31, 2009 by coke

[badchad]

Didn't seem to work on firefox on my mac.

 

The first pic popped up but I couldn't rate it. Lines of strikethrough text everywhere as well.

[DrP]

Site crashed half way(?) through - just when I got to the prettiest one as well.

[SH3RL0CK]

I haven't taken a look at the pics (and I won't for lots of reasons) but from the sounds of the above, perhaps the study should be about peoples reactions to broken javascript instead?

 

That might make more sense anyway, IMHO, as there is no way to analyze the people viewing the website in depth. How could the researchers determine if the viewers were actually who they say they are, for example? or that they were serious in their responses? Not meaning to be critical as I don't understand social sciences very well, but doesn't not knowing your participants make any conclusions...questionable?

[lakmilis]

ye coke... the site was horrendous.. i had to redo it BUNCH of times.. and in the end rerating the same all laong.. and hehe.. which one u gaev 15? I gave abt 5 on all but one (think indian looking with a ring thing) .. just enough to go up to 20 on the attractiveness just cos i felt like i had to put it on someone lol )

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hope ure not one of them laura.. if so.. it's not personal ^^

[coke]

Didn't seem to work on firefox on my mac.

 

The first pic popped up but I couldn't rate it. Lines of strikethrough text everywhere as well.

 

Same on internet explorer on windows, for one in every couple pictures,... text says something about javascript... even if i click where the lines should be and submit, it will come back around to that picture...although I just went through the pictures again, trying to find the indian girl lakmilis is talking about, and no javascript problems...

 

I just gave at most 15 on a fairly decent white girl, most of them I put less than 5 also...for attractivenss (around 0 for everything else and i definetely did not want to perform oral sex on them!)

I wonder if the girls I know, if you took a close up photo of their face if they would look that bad (no offense). Maybe I just don't focus on their face...

 

Sherlock, I don't think this is a very highly funded project- it's done on a free webhosting site by a university student (no offense laura)

Edited April 1, 2009 by coke
Consecutive posts merged.

[SH3RL0CK]

I understand the problems of funding...maybe Laura would be willing to come back and explain how she intends to account for possible bias due to the fact she is using the internet for the survey? Were there any attempts to screen the participants so that they took the survey only once? Were there any attempts to screen the participants so that they were who they claimed to be (hetero males)? etc., etc...

 

It would be even better for her to come back later with the results of her work (perhaps after it has been graded)?

[iNow]

By using the internet like she has, she can increase her N (population size) to a large enough degree that those outlier "insincere participants" you mention will effectively get washed out of the results as noise.

[YT2095]

I had the same problem with the lined out text and the questions appearing over the picture, seemed to be perfectly random too, Some pages worked, others had to be skipped.

 

glad to see it wasn`t something I was doing wrong again

[SH3RL0CK]

By using the internet like she has, she can increase her N (population size) to a large enough degree that those outlier "insincere participants" you mention will effectively get washed out of the results as noise.

 

 

iNow, that does not make sense to me. If by increasing population size she increases the "insincere participants" as well, then a larger population size won't wash out insincere results. In fact, I tend to believe a larger population size via the internet is more likely to add jokers in the mix than not.

 

I do suspect the original poster is not necessarily being "sincere" herself in that if I were to try a survey, the last place I would go would be an anonymous internet forum. I can't imagine how I could possibly screen for sex and sexual preference (as she explicitly requested) let alone account for other possible factors such as age, marital status, education status, etc. I admit, I'm cynical. I suppose it is possible that she might have ways to do such (at least sufficiently for her purposes) as I don't know enough about social sciences to say for certain.

 

I'd be most interested in how she plans on shipping the promised crate of beer to the winners in, say, Nigeria.

 

I do not consider it out of the question that the study might be about something other than the "relative attractiveness of faces"...or maybe this is actually spam disguised as a legitimate study. But I'm also not interested enough to click on the link.

[iNow]

iNow, that does not make sense to me. If by increasing population size she increases the "insincere participants" as well, then a larger population size won't wash out insincere results. In fact, I tend to believe a larger population size via the internet is more likely to add jokers in the mix than not.

That's a good point, but my experience with studies suggests otherwise. As a rule, the larger your population sample, the more stable and accurate are your results. The idea being that people, more often than not, will respond sincerely. So, despite the fact that a larger population will bring with it a larger group of insincere participants, the percentage of total made up by insincere participants goes down. The idea being that, for every (let's just say) 5 respondents, only one or less will be insincere.

 

We obviously cannot be certain either way, and I understand your reservations... I'm speaking in generalities, though. As a rule, the larger your N, the less you have to concern yourself with noise in the data.

 

 

 

I do suspect the original poster is not necessarily being "sincere" herself in that if I were to try a survey, the last place I would go would be an anonymous internet forum.

 

<...>

 

But I'm also not interested enough to click on the link.

We get a lot of students here trying to improve participation, so it's not outside of the realm of possibilities.

 

 

No biggie either way.

[SH3RL0CK]

I still don't buy that a larger sample size will reduce a bias if the selection method is inherently biased. If I survey the Boston Celtics, I suspect a very large percentage of them are capable of slam-dunking a basketball. Were I to expand that to the entire NBA, I'd probably get the same percentage. Even expanding to all of professional and college basketball might not reduce the percentage that much. It wouldn't be until my sample size exceeded the boundaries of the possible bias (there are not 50,000 people in professional and college basketball programs) that I could find a more "correct" percentage of people who could slam-dunk a basketball. Keeping only to an internet survey might be the equivalent of asking only NBA players if they could slam-dunk as there are definite biases in the demographics of internet users.

 

However, one other item I thought of after I posted was that she might well be doing other surveys as well (i.e. non-internet based). It would be the total work involved that goes into her report, of which only one datapoint, possibly only for supporting evidence, might be this internet survey. As such, the problems of nonrepresentative sampling, unverified qualifications of participants, duplicate responses, jokers, etc. might not impact the entirety of the study in a significant manner.

[iNow]

However, one other item I thought of after I posted was that she might well be doing other surveys as well (i.e. non-internet based). It would be the total work involved that goes into her report, of which only one datapoint, possibly only for supporting evidence, might be this internet survey. As such, the problems of nonrepresentative sampling, unverified qualifications of participants, duplicate responses, jokers, etc. might not impact the entirety of the study in a significant manner.

 

Bingo.

[lakmilis]

SHERLOCK.. im with you on this onw.. but then again.. I don't knwo about you guys.. but abt what 85% lol of 'scientific surveys 'coming out are just bollox anyway.. absilutely clueless.. we have now given the too much resources in the wealthy world contra the 'exploited' world, that so many get educated and end up having to do something.. but lmao.. I am sorry if I say that most of it of the 'professional' world just isn't. That someone comes here, as sherlock points out, is not surprising at all. And lol who said 'decent white one'? LOL... not ONE of them white ones came over 3 % I think.. only some of the non white made it up to like 10ish (and as I said before.. just to break the pattern I felt like giving 15-20 to one of them just to feel I didnt waste a part of my life on that ;p)

[feign_ignorence]

Site worked.

Hard to even determine the gender of some of those people given the closeness..

I rated about 12 women before i exited the browser out of guilt for rating these ladies so poorly:(

 

 

 

edit: also theres a girl in there with a piece of plastic nailed through her nose and looks like she should really seek medical attention