Tall and Good-Looking?

Abstract

While there has been much emphasis on the objective properties of beautiful faces, some theories of physical attractiveness implicate norm-based coding of faces and experience-dependent preferences (e.g., Langlois & Roggman, 1990 ; Rhodes, Jeffery, Watson, Clifford, & Nakayama, 2003 ). This study further explored experiential influences by correlating a person’s standing height with his/her ideal vertical location of the internal features in computerized faces. Taller raters created faces with larger ratios of forehead height to chin height–resulting in a larger forehead and a smaller chin, presumably caused by their biased exposure to faces from above eye level. Faces produced by shorter raters had a smaller forehead and a larger chin. The moderate correlation was maintained after controlling for age and gender (i.e., semipartial r = .41; N = 39), and rater height alone explained 24% of the variance in preferred location of the internal facial features. These results point to individual differences in perceptions of attractiveness, accounted for to some degree by the facial proportions encountered in everyday interactions.