What it means if you like older men

This is the conclusion reached by a team led by Jinheng Li from the University of Strathclyde (Glasgow, UK). The work was published in the journal PLOS One.

In this case, the preference for "older" appearance is not explained by either perceived wealth or apparent "goodness" as parents - these factors, as it turned out, did not play a role.

How the attractiveness of "older" people was tested

Researchers have long studied what exactly makes people attractive: both external traits and the elusive "charisma effect" help win elections, get jobs and attract partners. It's a common belief in evolutionary psychology that men particularly value youthful appearance, supposedly primarily for reproductive reasons.

Lee's team decided to test how true this is, and whether it works in both sexes.

The first study involved:

• 149 men and 151 women,

• average age around 30 to 31 years old,

• all heterosexual UK residents,

• without children and with English as their first language.

Participants were shown 50 full-face photographs of persons of the opposite sex, and the models' ages ranged from 19 to 55. Everyone rated attractiveness on a scale from "not at all attractive(s)" to "very attractive(s)".

Everyone then filled out the Desire to Have Children Questionnaire, a scale measuring the strength of the desire to have children.

What was found out

Overall, the results confirmed what was expected:

• younger adults were, on average, considered more attractive than olderadults;

• men and older participants were more likely to give higher attractiveness ratings than women and younger participants.

But the key result was unexpected by classical evolutionary logic:

both men and women who had a stronger desire to have children showed weaker "liking" for younger individuals.

That is, the higher the request for parenthood, the less participants were "hooked" on youthful looks.

Hypothesis testing: it's not about money or "parenting" qualities

To see if this was due to older faces being perceived as:

• more affluent,

• more reliable or competent parents,

the researchers conducted two additional studies with new groups of participants.

In them, people rated how they perceived the wealth status and potential parenting qualities of the owners of younger and older individuals.

The result:

• older looking individuals were not perceived to be either richer or "better as parents" than younger individuals,

• hence the preference for "less young" with a high desire for children cannot be explained by expectations about money or parenting skills.

The authors emphasise that studies 2 and 3 were conducted on other samples, not on the same people who participated in the first experiment, so these data add to the picture but do not describe the perceptions of the first group directly.

What this might mean

Why people who want children more are less drawn to the image of the "forever-young" partner is still unclear.

Researchers plan to study additional factors, including:

• whether or not people have children,

• how they feel about contraception and whether they use it,

• cultural and social differences between countries and groups.

The authors summarise:

"Our study challenges a widely held assumption in evolutionary psychology. We found that men and women with a stronger desire for children are just as likely to prefer younger individuals. We found no evidence that reproductive motivation enhances the desire for youth."