Page 68 - Demo

Chapter 366finds a similar strong effect of visual attractiveness on date outcome shows how important facial attractiveness is, and at the same time suggests it is unlikely that potential demand characteristics underlie our main result.Furthermore, the effect of auditory attractiveness on dating outcomes might be obfuscated by voice modulation and interpersonal dynamics during speeddates. People modulate the pitch of their voice when addressing a desirable partner (Fraccaro et al., 2011; Leongómez et al., 2014; Pisanski et al., 2018). In addition, the presence and sound of other people, and a camera recording the interaction, might have further affected the mental states of the participants and, consequently, their voices. Therefore, it is likely that participant’s spoke differently (e.g., different pitch) during the audio recordings and the actual dates, leading to the discrepancies in perception of the recorded voice and the voice that was heard on the date on the rater’s end. Thus, using an isolated rating task for voices might have slightly obscured the importance of voice during the actual dates. Future research should compare how isolated measures of vocal attractiveness relate to vocal attractiveness in an explicitly social context such as a date.We found a small effect of olfactory attractiveness on willingness to date again for women, but not for men. Interestingly, the relationship that we found for women was negative: they were less likely to want to go on another date with men whose smell they rated as attractive. This direction of the effect is surprising given previous evidence suggesting that scent plays an important role in mate selection for women (Havlíček et al., 2008). It is unclear why this effect might have occurred. One possible explanation is a methodological one: the olfactory samples employed in the present study should be perceived as indicators of diplomatic body odour (Gaby & Zayas, 2017). Diplomatic body odour samples might be more ecologically valid than natural body odour samples, as odours are heavily affected by the use of hygiene products and personal habits in real life, which may interfere with olfactory cues for mate choice (Allen et al., 2016; Gaby & Zayas, 2017; Sorokowska et al., 2016). With regard to the negative correlation we found, it can theoretically be possible that men who know they have a strong body odour used extra hygiene products when wearing the t-shirt, even though they were instructed not to. This would then result in high attractiveness ratings for odour, while the actual smell perceived on the date would be unpleasant. Note that this explanation does assume that women actually perceived the natural odour during the date. Because we have no compliance data for the t-shirt preparation, we can unfortunately not exclude this explanation. Such potential Tom Roth.indd 66 08-01-2024 10:41