David M. G. Lewis

From cockroaches and cuttlefish to crocodiles and chimpanzees, organisms across diverse taxa are equipped with physical and psychological systems for courting opposite-sex conspecifics. In this chapter, we focus on the colorful—literally and figuratively—collection of courtship ornaments, tactics, and strategies of one primate species: Homo sapiens. Humans use their vocal qualities—deep voices, soft voices, expressive voices—to show their dominance, kindness, and intelligence. They dance dynamically, kiss passionately, and offer caring (as well as deceptive) compliments. Humans’ courtship signals and the psychophysical systems that detect them span the senses: visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, and gustatory. We review research across these perceptual modalities and offer suggestions for future work into the many uncharted areas of this fascinating domain.

Attractiveness is a perception produced by psychological mechanisms in the mind of the perceiver. Understanding attractiveness therefore requires an understanding of these mechanisms. This includes the selection pressures that shaped them and their resulting information-processing architecture, including the cues they attend to and the context-dependent manner in which they respond to those cues. We review a diverse array of fitness-relevant cues along with evidence that the human mind processes these cues when making attractiveness judgments. For some of these cues, there is unequivocal evidence that the cue influences attractiveness judgments, but exactly why attractiveness-assessment mechanisms track that cue is an area of current debate. Another area of active inquiry is when these cues influence attractiveness judgments: because the fitness costs and benefits associated with these cues would have varied across contexts, selection should have shaped attractiveness-assessment mechanisms to be sensitive to contextual variables. As a consequence of this context-sensitive design, these mechanisms, despite being universal, should produce attractiveness assessments that vary systematically and predictably across contexts. We review evidence indicating that this is how human perception of attractiveness works, and highlight the need for more comprehensive and systematic investigations into contextual variation in human standards of attractiveness. We conclude by identifying limitations on existing evolutionary research on attractiveness, and provide concrete suggestions for how future work can address these issues.