Bovet Jeanne
Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, United States.
Front Psychol. 2019 Jun 4;10:1221. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01221. eCollection 2019.
Over the last 25 years, a large amount of research has been dedicated to identifying men's preferences for women's physical features, and the evolutionary benefits associated with such preferences. Today, this area of research generates substantial controversy and criticism. I argue that part of the crisis is due to inaccuracies in the evolutionary hypotheses used in the field. For this review, I focus on the extensive literature regarding men's adaptive preferences for women's waist-to-hip ratio (WHR), which has become a classic example of the just-so storytelling contributing to the general mistrust toward evolutionary explanations of human behavior. The issues in this literature originate in the vagueness and incompleteness of the theorizing of the evolutionary mechanisms leading to mate preferences. Authors seem to have rushed into testing and debating the effects of WHR on women's attractiveness under various conditions and using different stimuli, without first establishing (a) clear definitions of the central evolution concepts (e.g., female mate value is often reduced to an imprecise concept of "health-and-fertility"), and (b) a complete overview of the distinct evolutionary paths potentially at work (e.g., focusing on fecundability while omitting descendants' quality). Unsound theoretical foundations will lead to imprecise predictions which cannot properly be tested, thus ultimately resulting in the premature rejection of an evolutionary explanation to human mate preferences. This paper provides the first comprehensive review of the existing hypotheses on why men's preferences for a certain WHR in women might be adaptive, as well as an analysis of the theoretical credibility of these hypotheses. By dissecting the evolutionary reasoning behind each hypothesis, I show which hypotheses are plausible and which are unfit to account for men's preferences for female WHR. Moreover, the most cited hypotheses (e.g., WHR as a cue of health or fecundity) are found to not necessarily be the ones with the strongest theoretical support, and some promising hypotheses (e.g., WHR as a cue of parity or current pregnancy) have seemingly been mostly overlooked. Finally, I suggest some directions for future studies on human mate choice, to move this evolutionary psychology literature toward a stronger theoretical foundation.
在过去25年里，大量研究致力于确定男性对女性身体特征的偏好，以及与此类偏好相关的进化益处。如今，这一研究领域引发了大量争议和批评。我认为部分危机源于该领域所使用的进化假说存在不准确之处。在本次综述中，我聚焦于大量有关男性对女性腰臀比（WHR）的适应性偏好的文献，这已成为“虚构故事”的经典例子，导致人们对人类行为的进化解释普遍不信任。该文献中的问题源于导致配偶偏好的进化机制理论化的模糊性和不完整性。作者们似乎急于在各种条件下并使用不同刺激来测试和辩论腰臀比对女性吸引力的影响，却没有首先确立：（a）核心进化概念的明确定义（例如，女性配偶价值常常被简化为“健康与生育能力”这一不精确概念），以及（b）可能起作用的不同进化路径的完整概述（例如，关注受孕能力而忽略后代质量）。不稳固的理论基础会导致不精确的预测，而这些预测无法得到恰当检验，最终导致对人类配偶偏好的进化解释被过早摒弃。本文首次全面综述了关于男性对女性特定腰臀比的偏好可能具有适应性的现有假说，并分析了这些假说的理论可信度。通过剖析每个假说背后的进化推理，我指出哪些假说是合理的，哪些不适合解释男性对女性腰臀比的偏好。此外，被引用最多的假说（例如，腰臀比作为健康或生育能力的线索）并不一定是理论支持最强的，一些有前景的假说（例如，腰臀比作为 parity 或当前怀孕的线索）似乎大多被忽视了。最后，我为未来关于人类配偶选择的研究提出了一些方向，以使这一进化心理学文献朝着更坚实的理论基础发展。
