People tend to assign higher attractiveness to an individual viewed from the back than head on; this tendency is pronounced when males rate the attractiveness of women

Romantic Bias in Judging the Attractiveness of Faces from the Back. Fuka Ichimura, Miho Moriwaki & Atsunori Ariga. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, Apr 8 2021. https://rd.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10919-021-00361-7

Abstract: People tend to assign higher attractiveness to an individual viewed from the back than head on. This tendency is pronounced when males rate the attractiveness of women. This study investigated reasons for the previously observed gender difference in this bias, focusing on the social relationship between raters (participants) and rated models (stimuli). To manipulate the assumed social relationship, we explicitly instructed participants in advance to rate the front/back view of an opposite-gender individual as a romantic partner (romance-based condition) or as a friend (friend-based condition). The back-view bias was robustly observed in both male and female raters under every condition. More importantly, male raters showed an enhanced back-view bias under the romance-based condition compared to the friend-based condition, whereas female raters showed less bias, irrespective of the assumed social relationship. We discuss these results in terms of gender differences in criteria used to form judgments of attractiveness.