Several lines of evidence suggest that masculinity signals genetic (i.e., heritable) good health. For example, facial masculinity in human males is associated with a lower incidence of disease (Rhodes et al., 2003 and Thornhill and Gangestad, 2006). Male facial masculinity is also positively correlated with symmetry, a potential signal of developmental stability (Gangestad and Thornhill, 2003 and Little et al., 2008). Additionally, women's preferences for masculinity and symmetry are positively correlated, suggesting both traits signal a common underlying quality (Little, Jones, DeBruine & Feinberg, 2008). Although male masculinity is associated with health benefits, it is also associated with negative personality traits and behaviors. For example, high-testosterone men are less likely to marry, more likely to divorce and have more marital problems than lower-testosterone men (Booth & Dabbs, 1993). Men with higher testosterone are also less likely to feel a need to respond to infant cries than men with lower testosterone (Fleming, Corter, Stallings & Steiner, 2002). Masculine male faces are also ascribed antisocial traits, such as low warmth, low emotionality, dishonesty, low cooperativeness and poor quality as a parent (Boothroyd et al., 2007 and Perrett et al., 1998). Masculine men are also perceived to have more interest in short-term than in long-term relationships (Kruger, 2006), and masculine men have more short-term, but not long-term, partners than feminine men do (Rhodes, Simmons & Peters, 2005).
Attraction to masculinity is a function of the tradeoffs between the benefits of greater genetic health and the costs of lower investment in relationships and children (Fink and Penton-Voak, 2002, Gangestad and Simpson, 2000 and Little et al., 2002). Factors that affect the relative importance of these costs and benefits affect this tradeoff. For example, the benefits of genetic health for offspring can only be attained when women are able to conceive and preferences for masculine traits are accordingly greater when conception risk is high (for reviews, see Fink and Penton-Voak, 2002, Gangestad and Simpson, 2000, Gangestad and Thornhill, 2008 and Jones et al., 2008). Additionally, the paternal investment costs associated with partnering with a masculine man are less important in short-term relationships than in long-term relationships. Accordingly, women prefer more masculine men for short-term than for long-term relationships (Burt et al., 2007 and Little et al., 2002; Little, Cohen, Jones & Belsky, 2007). Because a partner's heritable health is of greater value when pathogens are a greater concern, concern about pathogens is likely to also be a factor that contributes to the resolution of this tradeoff.
Cross-cultural differences in mate preferences and mating systems vary consistently with differences in pathogen prevalence (Gangestad and Buss, 1993, Low, 1990 and Penton-Voak et al., 2004). When people from 29 different cultures were asked to rank a series of attributes based on how important they would be in a mate, people in areas with a high prevalence of pathogens ranked physical attractiveness higher than people in areas with a relatively low prevalence of pathogens did (Gangestad & Buss, 1993). Areas with higher pathogen prevalence also have a higher proportion of polygynous marriages, possibly reflecting that women are trading paternal investment for genetic quality when disease is a greater concern (Low, 1990). Also consistent with these findings, rural Jamaican women prefer masculinity more than British women do, although this may alternatively or additionally be explained by differences in the mating and parenting systems (Penton-Voak et al., 2004). While these studies have emphasized how cross-cultural differences in pathogen levels may affect mate preferences, individual differences in concern about disease and pathogens may also affect mate preferences. Specifically, differences among women in concerns about disease and pathogens may be positively related to preferences for cues of genetic health in potential mates, such as male facial masculinity.
Concern about pathogens can be assessed by measuring disgust sensitivity. Disgust towards potential sources of pathogens has been shown to be a separate domain of the emotion disgust that is relatively independent of the other domains of moral and sexual disgust (Tybur, Lieberman & Griskevicius, 2009). Therefore, we predict that women's preferences for male facial masculinity will be positively associated with their disgust sensitivity in the pathogen domain, but will not necessarily be consistently positively associated with disgust sensitivity in the moral and sexual domains. Such a pattern of results would reveal domain specificity in the relationship between disgust and masculinity preferences and present novel converging evidence that variation in concerns about pathogens and disease influences facultative human mate preferences. We investigated this prediction using two different methods for assessing masculinity preferences: preference for computer graphic-manipulated masculinity (Study 1) and preference for rated masculinity in unmanipulated faces (Study 2).
