MY WORLD OF TRUTH

Tuesday 2 January 2024

The qualities that are more attractive than our looks

 

While looks might matter for first impressions, there are other qualities that win people's hearts.


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Considering the attention given to appearances, and how quickly we form – and stick to – a first impression, it would be easy to assume that looks are what matter most in finding love. But, while physical attraction is coveted, it might really be what's inside that counts.

Appearance and sexiness rank middling on surveys of people's preferred characteristics, with material successes, such as financial security and owning a nice house, among the least important attractive qualities.

Instead, traits like agreeableness, extraversion and intelligence score consistently higher than physical attraction as things that men and women in same-sex and different-sex couples look for in a partner.

In surveys like this, social-desirability bias – or our tendency to give answers which we think make us look good in the eyes of others – might be skewing the results, says Greg Webster, a psychology professor at the University of Florida in the US. This might mean that self-reported surveys present slightly skewed data, but even so, people typically say they prefer qualities like intelligence to looks.

But when presented with a real-life date do we still choose personality over looks?

According to Jess Alderson, co-founder of the dating app So Syncd, which requires users to complete a psychometric test to measure personality traits, we do. Of a sample of more than 1,000 users made available to BBC Future, almost 90% preferred personality over looks.

More agreeable people tend to see other people as kind and friendly, research suggests (Credit: Getty Images)

More agreeable people tend to see other people as kind and friendly, research suggests (Credit: Getty Images)

Measuring someone's personality can be tricky. Psychometric tests, which usually take the form of a questionnaire, have been used for decades in psychiatry as a way to quantify personality. (These tests tend to measure how much people agree with statements like "I'm the life and soul of the party".)

Psychologists often use the Big Five test, which measures people on five traits – openness to new experiences, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. These five traits are thought to be quite common, but the Big Five is not without criticism. Looking only at five traits presents quite a limited view of what makes people tick, says Webster.

While imperfect, psychometric tests can show similarities and differences between people, and can paint broad pictures of people's personalities. And some parts of our personalities do seem to be better indicators of how suitable we are for serious relationships.

Of the Big Five, agreeableness, which is an indicator of someone's interpersonal skills (or how caring and compassionate they are), plays a strong role for both sexes in the initial assessment of a date's desirability, is the strongest predictor of current and future relationship satisfaction, and the only significant predictor of relationship dissolution. For both men and women, physical attractiveness must be coupled with agreeableness to predict desire for a serious relationship.

Being a nice person is "indispensable for harmonious long-term relationships", says Webster. "Agreeableness is kind of a necessity," he says, adding that entering into a relationship with someone you thought was unkind would be problematic.

Webster says that our perception of our own and other people's personalities are shaped by our frame of reference. More agreeable people, for example, tend to see other people as kind and friendly, and vice versa, and we are attracted to people who share similar values to us. It might be the case then that we match with people who have very similar personalities to ourselves.


excitement," says Alderson. "I would caveat this by saying that any personality type pairing can work and there are definitely advantages and challenges to each. If you are too similar, it can be a little bit boring. And then if you're too different, it can just not be that fun on a daily basis."

In relationships, agreeableness coupled with other attractive traits can bring the best out of people, says Webster. In a study he co-authored with social psychologists Angela Bryan and Amanda Mahaffey, Webster looked at socially, physically and financially dominant people and the effect agreeableness had on their appeal.

All three of these types of dominance are attractive, the researchers say, as each offers a kind of protection or access to basic needs, like food and shelter, through to more desirable needs, like lavish lifestyles. But, dominance can be used for good and bad.

"We can think about dominance as being turned inward towards a relationship or dominance being focused outward away from the relationship," says Webster. "What people want are partners who are socially, physically or financially dominant, but not necessarily towards their partner."

Dominance mediated by agreeableness is an appealing combination, he adds. "It's one thing if you're able to dominate other people, but are you willing to share those resources with your romantic partner?"

When it comes to finding the right match, says Webster, agreeableness accentuates the benefits of other parts of our personalities. It really could pay to be kind after all.

posted by Davidblogger50 at 11:08 0 comments

Sunday 31 December 2023

Why are women less likely to ask questions in public?

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Over the years I've presented dozens of radio shows and chaired hundreds of public events in front of live audiences. The Q&A at the end is an important part of the session and so I want everyone to feel comfortable enough to ask their burning question. But however much I try to make people feel relaxed, as the hands go up, there are always more men than women ready to ask a question and often those first hands all belong to men.

It's possible of course that women have fewer questions they want to ask, which is fair enough. But countless times, in the queue for the ladies loos afterwards, women from the audience have told me the question they had wanted to ask, but didn't. Invariably it's an excellent question.

Data is not the plural of anecdote, but years of these experiences have prompted me to look at the statistics. Most of the research on this topic has been done by observing audiences at academic conferences rather than events open to the general public, but it's still instructive. The evidence suggests that my experience is not some outlier. It's the norm.

For example, a study by Shoshana Jarvis from University of California, Berkeley, published in 2022, observed who asked questions at a conference that included everyone from biologists to astrophysicists and economists. This was one of those conferences where if you want to ask a question you have to leave your seat and stand in a queue in front of a microphone while everyone else watches you. Of the delegates, 63% were men, so you might expect 63% of the questions to come from men, but in fact men asked 78% of the questions.

The same happened when 250 academic departmental seminars in 10 countries were observed in a study led by Alecia Carter who's now at University College London. She found that women were two-and-a-half times less likely than men to ask a question despite the fact that the ratios of men to women present were, on average, equal. 

It's true that in these studies the observers only looked at the actual questions asked, not who had their hands up in the hope of asking the question, so there is also the possibility that the moderators chose to the take the questions from men. But the repeated experience of men asking more questions has led some in academia to dub them "question-and-manswer" sessions.

If men are the first to ask a question at an event, it may mean women are less likely to ask subsequent ones (Credit: Getty Images)

If men are the first to ask a question at an event, it may mean women are less likely to ask subsequent ones (Credit: Getty Images)

So what's putting some women off?

It seems it's not for the lack of a question to ask. Alecia Carter analysed survey responses from 600 academics from 20 countries. It was interesting to see that both men and women said they sometimes didn't volunteer a question, even though they had one in mind. But women were more likely to say that the reason they held back was that they couldn't work up the nerve to ask it, were worried they had misunderstood the context, that the speaker was too eminent or intimidating, or that they felt they themselves weren't clever enough to ask a good question.

No one wants be the person who asks a question, only to be told in front of three hundred people, that they have missed the point. But this study would suggest this possibility is more likely to deter women.

Twice as many men as women said they were motivated to ask a question because they felt they had spotted a mistake

In the US, Jarvis found that women tended to say that they felt too anxious to ask a question, while men said that if they didn't ask a question they were holding back in order to give others space, suggesting that some men are taking active steps not to dominate the Q&A.  

Twice as many men as women said they were motivated to ask a question because they felt they had spotted a mistake. This may sound mean, but these are academic events where speakers responding to criticism is all part of the process.  

Research has also looked at the nature of the questions men and women ask. It's sometimes claimed that men are more likely to ask longer questions or attempt to ask more than one question at a time (I can't believe how often when I say we have time for one last quick question, the person I choose starts by saying they have three questions to ask).

But men are not the only offenders. When Gillian Sandstrom from the University of Sussex analysed more than 900 questions asked at 160 live conferences or public festivals, in a paper awaiting publication, she found no difference based on gender. When women did ask a question it was just as likely as a man's to be long or to have multiple parts.

When other characteristics of questions were compared, such as beginning by saying hello to the speaker, complimenting them, or introducing themselves, the only variation between men and women was that women were more likely to greet the speaker.

Research suggests moderators play an important part in making women more likely to want to ask questions (Credit: Getty Images)

Research suggests moderators play an important part in making women more likely to want to ask questions (Credit: Getty Images)

So, the only real difference concerns who volunteers to ask a question in the first place.

You could argue that since there isn't time for everyone to ask a question anyway, then if some people don't volunteer, it doesn't really matter. The problem is that if half the audience is more reluctant to join in, then you might not be getting as diverse and interesting range of questions as you might otherwise. So far research has tended to focus on men and women, but it would be interesting to look at whether other under-represented or marginalised groups also hold back from the asking the questions they'd like answered.  

In a work setting, asking questions can get you noticed and if you want to get the best jobs, then visibility matters. In a study conducted at a conference in France, researcher Junhanlu Zhang at the Insitut Pasteur found that people were more likely to remember the names of serial questioners. Of course, that doesn't mean their names were necessarily remembered positively. Maybe they were remembered for being the annoying one constantly asking questions!

The other problem with fewer women asking questions overall is that women at the start of their academic careers have fewer visible role models of other women showing them that you needn't be afraid to ask questions

posted by Davidblogger50 at 09:41 0 comments