Mind: Blind Men Prefer the Hourglass Figure

In a recent paper published in Evolution and Human Behavior, Johan C. Karremans, Willem, E. Frankenhuis, and Sander Arons explored men's WHR [women's waist-hip ratio] preferences with one twist: the men in question were congenitally blind! Needless to say, this largely removes the possibility that these men were taught via media images to prefer a particular female body type. You might wonder how one would go about eliciting such preferences from blind men...via touch of course! The researchers had two mannequins dressed in exactly the same way but who varied in terms of their WHR (0.70 or 0.84). The blind men touched both mannequins subsequent to which they provided attractiveness scores on a 1-10 attractiveness scale (higher meant more attractive). This task is quite reasonable in terms of its mundane realism, as we know that blind people use their haptic sense to evaluate numerous stimuli (e.g., facial features).

I should add that the researchers also conducted the study with sighted men, as well as blindfolded men (who otherwise had vision). The goal here was to gauge the strength of the preference across the three groups, namely blind, sighted, and blindfolded men. For all three groups, the mannequin with the 0.70 WHR was preferred to the one with a WHR of 0.84 (p < .02, p < .001, and p < .05 for the blind, sighted, and blindfolded groups respectively). That said, the strength of the effect, which is captured by a metric known as Cohen's d, was strongest for the sighted group (d = 1.33) followed by the blind group (d = 0.68), and finally the blindfolded group (d = 0.54). In other words, whereas all three groups displayed the preference for the hourglass figure, sighted individuals exhibited the preference most staunchly. In this sense, it is conceivable that media images could serve to accentuate an otherwise innate preference (I am being charitable to the social constructivist position here!).

For more, see Congenitally Blind Men Prefer the Female Hourglass Figure (Literally) by Gad Saad, Ph.D., June 20, 2010, at Psychology Today.