Strengths and weaknesses of a research study

Male attraction to various female forms has varied through the ages due to certain features that were valued in a particular location or era. Evolution depends on the survival of the fittest, at least in Darwin's eyes and many evolutionists that have come after, but that can mean very different things to different people. Of course, there is the case of the butterfly group which survived for many years with white and black-winged varietals, but then became all black-winged when the forest they nested in was burned. Many similar examples can be found in studies that suggest that survival is related to attractiveness also. The ability of a man or woman to survive is subconsciously determined in the brain, and then translated to a hierarchical system of attractiveness. Thus, the reason that attractiveness elements have changed over time for men with regard to women, is because society has changed. If men in poor areas of the world were surveyed, they would probably have a very different idea about what made a woman attractive than those men in relatively financially secure and safe regions. Along these lines, a study was conducted with the goal of trying to determine if men under stress would consider a different female body size attractive. This paper summarizes the study's goals, methods, results and discussion to determine if the authors reached any statistically significant conclusions with regard to the research question.

Goal

The researchers were interested in how men saw women when they were under stress and whether any difference would show itself even if the subject knew that an experiment was being conducted and that the stressor would be short lived. They assumed that men under stress would choose a woman with a fuller body shape, and they gave two primary reasons or their assumption. First, other research had shown that "heavier body sizes are perceived as more physically mature" (2). The reason for this is that generally, an individual's mother and women who are approximately her same age have had a larger body size than the typical model or other female body-type role model presented to the public. Thus, when a man is under stress, he will seek out a person who, being perceived as a more mature woman like his mother, will act in the same nurturing way his mother did. Because of the stress, the male prefers someone who will be nurturing at that moment rather than a perfect sexual partner.

The other reason they believed that men would prefer a larger female body type when they were under stress is due to evolution. For many years, people who were larger were better able to survive than people who were more prone to being thin. When food is in short supply, the person with the larger average body size will have a better survival rate. Also, women who were larger tended to have more material wealth than ones who exhibited a smaller body type. Thus, larger women were preferred because of their ability to survive (1).

The study had the stated goal of providing some solid, empirical data to the archival information that had existed previously (1), and to determine what could be done for further study.

Methods

The participants were randomly selected from a university campus and asked if they wished to participate in a psychologically-derived study (2). The participants, 81 heterosexual males, were also confined to British White subset because ethnicity and race have been shown to skew preference. The men were taken to a research hall where they were then randomly assigned to a group. The control group had to do nothing other than look at a series of pictures of females and check whether they thought the pictured female was attractive or not. The study group was taken to a room where they had to complete a job interview of two parts. First they were asked to present their qualifications for a given job title to a group of four people (male and female) while standing at a microphone and asked to give the application data extemporaneously (2). After five minutes, they were asked to "serially subtract 13 from 1,022," and that they would fail if they were not finished within a further five-minute limit (2). This test had previously been shown to induce a great deal of psychological stress. The men in the study group were then taken to a separate room and asked to complete the same attractiveness exercise that the control group had done. Both groups were also asked to rate their degree of "satiety" (2) by marking a single question on an appetite sensation scale. This data had been shown to affect a person's views on opposite sex attractiveness in the past.

Results

The authors conducted statistical analysis of the raw numbers they received from the experiment and determined that there was some statistically significant difference in their ratings of the women. The researchers first wanted to make sure that the two samples were effectively balanced, and they were, then they wanted to determine what the differences were with regard to the attractiveness selections. To accomplish this, they "examined ratings of the figure perceived as the most physically attractive (ideal), the largest and thinnest figures rated as attractive, and the attractiveness range" (3). They found that the stress group had a larger attractiveness ideal, a wider range of women that they found attractive, but did not differ from the control group when choosing the thinner end of the scale was analyzed (meaning that both groups rated the thinner women in the scale the same for attractiveness). The researchers also found that there variable controls ("covariate age, BMI and appetite sensation) were not significant with regard to the between group differences in level of attractiveness ratings (3).

Discussion