Attractiveness of the female body: Preference for average or supernormal?

Slobodan Markovic, Tara Bulut, "Attractiveness of the female body: Preference for average or supernormal?" in: Paolo Bernardis, Carlo Fantoni, Walter Gerbino (eds.) "TSPC2016: Proceedings of the Trieste Symposium on Perception and Cognition, November 4th 2016", Trieste, EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2016, p. 28. http://hdl.handle.net/10077/14979

The main purpose of the present study was to contrast the two hypotheses of female body attractiveness. The first is the “preference-for-average” hypothesis: the most attractive female body is the one that represents the average body proportions for a given population [1]. The second is the “preference-for-supernormal” hypothesis: according to the so-called “peak shift effect”, the most attractive female body is more feminine than the average [2]. We investigated the preference for three female body parts: waist to hip ratio (WHR), buttocks and breasts. There were 456 participants of both genders. Using a program for computer animation (DAZ 3D) three sets of stimuli were generated (WHR, buttocks and breasts). Each set included six stimuli ranked from the lowest to the highest femininity level. Participants were asked to choose the stimulus within each set which they found most attractive (task 1) and average (task 2). One group of participants judged the body parts that were presented in the global condition (whole body), while the other group judged the stimuli in the local condition (isolated body parts only).

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In short, these findings support the preference-for-supernormal hypothesis: the most attractive WHR, buttocks and breasts are more feminine than average ones, for both genders and in both presentation conditions.