The Laws Of Lust: Men Predictable, Women Not So Much

It's true, men are predictable.

And women? They don't know what they want.

You've heard the clichés before. But the well-worn stereotypes aren't far off base, at least when it comes to the laws of lust, according to research by Dustin Wood, a Wake Forest University psychology professor, who said that men tend to agree on what makes someone attractive, while women's tastes in mates are more likely to vary.

Wood's study involved about 4,000 men and women who were asked to rate the attractiveness of strangers in photographs. His research was published in the June issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. He worked with Claudia Chloe Brumbaugh, a psychology professor at Queens College in New York.

Among their findings: about 60 percent of heterosexual women showed a preference for thin men, compared with about 95 percent of men who preferred thin people.

About 75 percent of women favored people who exuded confidence, compared with about 90 percent of men.

"Men seem to have more consensus about who they find attractive," Wood said. "If you're a man and you go to a bar, and you find someone attractive, chances are you'll have more competition."
The preferences transcend sexual orientation. Homosexual and heterosexual men favor similar qualities -- thinness, confidence and a tidy look, Wood said.

"These findings are not a result of who they were attracted to but a general quality of men and women. Women had more idiosyncratic preferences. You couldn't really predict one woman's rating from another woman's rating ... as well as you can for men.

"There are some ideas bouncing around in the evolutionary literature that women have a more varied preference for what they are looking for in mates ... For women it's supposed to be a little more important that men will invest resources in you. Signals such as sensitivity and warmth and the ability to provide resources -- these become more important to women."

Wood and Brumbaugh set up an online survey through a research portal, http://www.yourpersonality.net. Participants found the site when they did Web searches for "online attraction test."

Once they go to the site, participants were asked to look at 98 photos of men or women, then rate them on a scale of 1 to 10. Participants gave people with the most attractive photos a 10; the ones with least attractive photos got a 1.

Wood said that the photos were collected by a research assistant from http://www.hotornot.com, a Web site where people rate photos "and meet hot singles from around the world or in your local area," according to the site.

The researchers coded the photos for qualities such as thinness and confidence, which they used to interpret the participants' rankings.

Wood said he thinks men's attraction to thin rather than heavyset women could explain why heterosexual women and homosexual men are more prone than heterosexual men to eating disorders and a poor body image.

"It's in part socialized. There are basically large rewards for people who are thin," Wood said.

Heterosexual men are less likely to be concerned with social norms of attractiveness, he added, because women are less predictable in what they like. But heterosexual women who want to attract men will likely have to conform.

"There are some characteristics where pretty much everyone agrees," he said. "Thinness and confidence are kind of the big two. And to a slightly lesser extent, good grooming."

Wood wasn't surprised by his findings. "I actually view a lot of my research as validating common sense," he said. "This kind of gives some empirical validity to sayings like 'men only want one thing.'"

"It's not the greatest news. The implications are a little unfortunate."

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