Is She Just HOT? How Many Kids Does She Have?
Physical attractiveness is always associated with mating success; however research has already shown that it also correlates to women’s capability of having kids and men’s semen quality. A recent research has focused on analyzing the number of kids born based on the physical attractiveness of the participants and has interesting results.
Many studies have shown increased mating success with increased physical attractiveness, however this cannot lead to a conclusion that higher physical attractiveness would result in more number of kids. For example, several researchers have shown that when people seek partners to have kids, they do not prefer extremely attractive partners; as such partners are more likely to leave them or have extra marital affairs. This factor shows that, it is not necessary that increased attractiveness leads to more number of kids.
Yearbook photos, fertility and marital history data of 2241 (1244 women and 997 men) people aged 53 to 56 years were collected. Thirty three judges from ages 63 to 97 rated all of the yearbook photos (each picture gets rated 6 times) for their attractiveness, based on face. Upon this ranking, the participants were grouped as not attractive, moderately attractive, attractive and very attractive. The association between attractiveness and years of marriage, parental socioeconomic status & education level was estimated using regression analysis to provide for the necessary adjustment, these factors would contribute to the number of kids. Following which, detailed statistical analysis was performed to study the relationship between the age at which the participants had their first kid, interbirth interval etc and the physical attractiveness.
The regression analysis showed that, as the attractiveness increased – women had better socioeconomic status but not with men, also women’s education increased with increased attractiveness. Attractiveness increased the years of marriage in both men and women. Attractiveness also resulted in increased marriage probability at early adulthood.
Results about fertility were very interesting. Compared to the combined group of not attractive and moderately attractive women (average of 2.63 kids) the attractive (16%) and very attractive (6%) had more number of kids. Adjusting for education increased these differences to 17% and 8%. In men, the non attractive group had 13% fewer kids than the others. In all cases, adjusting for years of marriage, got the differences down, which indicated that decreased attractiveness decreased the marriage probability.
When it came to having more than two kids, the attractive group was most likely to have a third or fourth kid, while all the other groups, including the very attractive group had less probability. The researchers suggested that this could be possible due to the reason that very attractive women may not want as many kids as their less attractive counterparts, for that they do not want to loose their higher attractiveness. For men, only the non attractive group was less likely to have kids as compared to the other groups, however when it came to having a fourth kid, it all leveled out among all the groups of men. Very attractive women had an increased interval (3.4 months increase) between two kids, while all other groups of women were equal.
All of the above results suggest that the physical attractiveness is not linearly related to the number of kids women have. While attractiveness does increase the chances of having kids, very high attractiveness decreases the number of kids women would have.
Journal Reference: doi:10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2009.03.006
Image Credit: Flickr
