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Chapter 122With regard to the second assumption, attractive humans seem to have more reproductive success, although the results are somewhat equivocal and the underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. Some studies report a positive association between attractiveness and proxies of reproductive success, such as number of sexual partners (Rhodes et al., 2005), sexual activity (Karraker et al., 2017), probability of marriage (Prokop & Fedor, 2011), and number of offspring (Jokela, 2009; Pflüger et al., 2012; Prokop & Fedor, 2011). However, other studies report no association. For example, Sorokowski et al. (2017) found no significant difference in reproductive success between arranged marriages and non-arranged marriages in three indigenous societies, and Silva et al. (2012) even found a negative association between attractiveness and reproductive success in one population. Altogether, these results suggest that attractiveness and reproductive success are linked in humans, but the results are somewhat inconsistent.One potential reason for the inconsistent findings on the topic of attractiveness and reproductive success is that human mate choice is a multifaceted phenomenon. One can imagine human mate choice as an enormous jigsaw puzzle, with attractiveness being just one of the pieces. To better understand the role of attractiveness in human mate choice, I will consider human mate choice as a two-stage process (Dixson, 2012; Fisher, 1998; Figure 1). When two potential mates meet, they will first judge each other on easily observable cues. This first stage can be considered an initial filter, and is especially driven by fast perception and appraisal of attractiveness (Dixson, 2012). Passing this first filter is required for attraction (Fisher, 1998). Ample evidence indeed shows that humans employ such a first filter when choosing a partner (Asendorpf et al., 2011; Eastwick & Finkel, 2008; Luo & Zhang, 2009; Sidari et al., 2021). Consequently, this first filter is also where we expect sexually selective cognition (e.g., or attention, memory, and implicit associations) to play a large role. The importance or threshold of the first filter may differ between individuals. For instance, previous research has suggested that men and women might differ in the strength of their initial attraction-filter. More specifically, differential evolutionary costs are at play for men and women, resulting in different priorities during mate choice (Buss & Schmitt, 1993). One common conclusion from crosscultural studies is that men value attractiveness more than women, while women put a stronger emphasis on resources (Buss, 1989; Li & Meltzer, 2015). While some studies indeed find indications of sex differences in cognitive biases towards Tom Roth.indd 22 08-01-2024 10:41