One woman's behavior affects the attractiveness of others

Previous research has shown that viewing photos of highly attractive women adversely affects men's evaluations of more typical women and of their own romantic partners. We could not replicate these results, but induced similar effects by showing participants an innocuous mock video interview of an opposite-sex stranger. Mated men's ratings of their partners and unattached men's ratings of other women were both lower if the interviewee had smiled and acted warmly than if she seemed uninterested, whereas women exhibited no such effects of watching a male interviewee. The results support the hypothesis that perceptions of attractiveness function to assist effective allocation of mating effort, not only in response to the relative quality of potential courtship targets but also in response to behavioral predictors of positive outcome.