Department of Anthropology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195-3100, USA.
Hum Nat. 2013 Sep;24(3):268-79. doi: 10.1007/s12110-013-9171-2.
Men may find women with small feet relative to body size more attractive because foot size reliably indexes nubility-i.e., age and parity. I collected judgments of attractiveness in response to drawings of women with varying foot sizes from a sample of 159 Karo Batak respondents from North Sumatra, Indonesia, as part of a collaborative project on foot size and attractiveness. The data revealed a contrarian preference among the Karo Batak for women with big feet. The judgments were compared with the results of an existing cross-cultural study that found a preference for women with small feet in aggregate, but a mix of small- and large-foot preferences in the societies taken individually. Using contingency table analysis, I found that ecology and less exposure to Western media were associated with a preference for women with big feet; patriarchal values were not. The findings suggest that human mating preferences may arise in response to local ecological conditions, and may persist and spread via cultural transmission. This has implications for the concept of universality espoused in some versions of evolutionary psychology.
男性可能会觉得相对于身体大小，脚小的女性更有吸引力，因为脚的大小可靠地反映了女性的生育能力，即年龄和生育次数。我从印度尼西亚北苏门答腊的 159 名卡洛巴塔克人样本中收集了对不同脚大小的女性的吸引力判断，这是一项关于脚大小和吸引力的合作研究的一部分。数据显示，卡洛巴塔克人偏爱大脚女性，这与传统观点相反。这些判断结果与一项现有的跨文化研究结果进行了比较，该研究发现，总体上人们更喜欢小脚女性，但从单个社会来看，既有喜欢小脚女性的，也有喜欢大脚女性的。使用列联表分析，我发现生态和较少接触西方媒体与偏爱大脚女性有关，而父权价值观则无关。研究结果表明，人类的交配偏好可能是对当地生态条件的反应，并可能通过文化传播而持续存在和传播。这对一些进化心理学版本所主张的普遍性概念提出了挑战。
