Whether we’re looking for someone to date or sizing up a potential rival, our eyes irresistibly lock on to good-looking people, a new study triumphantly announced. Um, duh.The participants, heterosexual men and women, fixated on highly attractive people within the first half-second of seeing them. Single folks ogled the opposite sex, but those in committed relationships more often eyed beautiful people of the same sex. Um, double duh.
“If we’re interested in finding a mate, our attention gets quickly and automatically stuck on attractive members of the opposite sex,” explained study leader Jon Maner of Florida State University. “If we’re jealous and worried about our partner cheating on us, attention gets quickly and automatically stuck on attractive people of our own sex because they are our competitors.” And they had to do a study to figure this out?
Maner's research is based on the idea that we already know -- that evolution has primed our brains to subconsciously latch on to signs of physical attractiveness in others, both to find a mate and to guard him or her from potential competitors.
Maner's "experiments", which flashed pictures of attractive men and women and average-looking men and women in front of participants and measured the time it took to shift their attention away from the image, surprisingly showed little difference between the sexes. Wow, that's scientific.
The study is detailed in the September issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, which if anybody knows where they print it, should torch the building.
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