Page 67 - Demo

Multimodal mate choice653it is therefore questionable whether such low correlations have any practical relevance. In addition, we did not find clear differences between sexes, while some of the previous studies only described such concordance of multimodal attractiveness ratings in a specific sex (e.g., Collins & Missing, 2003). Larger studies may be better suited to detect such nuances in future work.Our most prominent finding is that, from all three modalities, facial attractiveness showed the strongest correlation with willingness to date again across both genders. This is in line with previous findings from speeddate paradigms (Asendorpf et al., 2011; Luo & Zhang, 2009), and experimental paradigms incorporating multimodal attractiveness ratings (Foster, 2008). This finding is not surprising, given that humans are extremely visually-oriented beings, rendering sight the most conspicuous source of information in mate choice (Krupp, 2008). Thus, our results corroborate the relative importance of facial attractiveness compared to scent and sound during initial phases of partner selection. Indeed, in a busy public place, such as a bar or a speed-dating event for that matter, visual information is the most apparent and reliable cue upon first acquaintance, because auditory cues might be distorted by noise and olfactory cues will be difficult to perceive in isolation (Thomas-Danguin et al., 2014), given the fact that mixing with other people’s odour might obfuscate individual olfactory cues.In line with this notion, we found little evidence to support the multimodal nature of attractiveness during speed-dates. Auditory attractiveness seemed to slightly influence partner choice decisions in men: they were more likely to indicate their willingness to go another date if they rated their female partner’s voice as attractive. However, the effect was small, especially when compared to the effect that visual attractiveness had on male partner choice decisions. For women, no clear effect of auditory attractiveness on their partner choice decisions was observed in the partial model, although the independent model showed a similar pattern for both men and women. These findings are somewhat consistent with previous research (Asendorpf et al., 2011), that found a smaller effect of vocal attractiveness than visual attractiveness, although the effect of vocal attractiveness was significant. It is important to note, though, that Asendorpf et al. (2011) obtained visual and auditory attractiveness ratings from an independent group of raters, while we used individual attractiveness ratings to predict dating outcome. Therefore, it is not clear whether these findings are directly comparable. However, the fact that a study using independent raters Tom Roth.indd 65 08-01-2024 10:41