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Facial width-to-height ratio: Difference between revisions
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There is a negative association between fWHR and risk of dying from contact-violence is<ref>https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233757330_Male_facial_width_is_associated_with_death_by_contact_violence_Narrow-faced_males_are_more_likely_to_die_from_contact_violence</ref> and perceptions of individuals with higher fWHRs as more socially dominant are also sexually dimorphic,<ref>https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886914003031</ref> suggesting that fWHR does play a role in [[intrasexual competition]] among [[men]] in contemporary contexts, and thus a higher fWHR may be associated with traits that have been under sexual or natural selective pressures in human evolutionary history. <ref>https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Barnaby_Dixson/publication/313797888_Facial_Width_to_Height_Ratio_and_Dominance/links/5a395640aca272eb167466a9/Facial-Width-to-Height-Ratio-and-Dominance.pdf</ref> | There is a negative association between fWHR and risk of dying from contact-violence is<ref>https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233757330_Male_facial_width_is_associated_with_death_by_contact_violence_Narrow-faced_males_are_more_likely_to_die_from_contact_violence</ref> and perceptions of individuals with higher fWHRs as more socially dominant are also sexually dimorphic,<ref>https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886914003031</ref> suggesting that fWHR does play a role in [[intrasexual competition]] among [[men]] in contemporary contexts, and thus a higher fWHR may be associated with traits that have been under sexual or natural selective pressures in human evolutionary history. <ref>https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Barnaby_Dixson/publication/313797888_Facial_Width_to_Height_Ratio_and_Dominance/links/5a395640aca272eb167466a9/Facial-Width-to-Height-Ratio-and-Dominance.pdf</ref> | ||
==Brief overview of fWHR research and meta commentary== | |||
Among the users of the [[PSL|PSL forums]] fWHR research was seized upon by certain users who sought to use this research as evidence that dominant, masculine-looking men generally have greater sexual and reproductive success than more effeminate [[prettyboys]]. This line of argumentation was later weakened by the evidence that found null effects for fWHR and male reproductive and sexual outcomes, making fWHR research [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis another noteable victim of the replicability crisis in science in general].<ref>https://europepmc.org/article/ppr/ppr539889</ref><ref>https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1090513811000821</ref><ref>https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0092656612000062</ref> | |||
fWHR was originally proposed by Weston et al. (2007) as a potential marker of aggression in dominance in men as it was assumed to measure the width of a man's face, controlling for overall allometry (i.e., body and face size). It was also initially believed that fWHR was strongly sexually dimorphic. As such, fWHR was viewed as an easily measureable metric of facial masculinity, which was thought to give it potential predictive validity in terms of inferring social perceptions of dominance and aggression and actual tendencies towards this sort of behavior among men with higher fWHRs. After this, a plethora of studies were published, seemingly corroborating these predictions, though many of them later failed to replicate, as mentioned before.<ref>https://psyarxiv.com/tpngz/</ref> | |||
Later research also challenged this initial assumption of a link between fWHR and masculine dimorphism by disentangling the vertical and horizontal components of fWHR, with the finding that facial height rather than width was more associated with judgments of aggression and dominance in male faces.<ref>https://www.researchgate.net/publication/314023775_How_components_of_facial_width_to_height_ratio_differently_contribute_to_the_perception_of_social_traits</ref> The researchers in question hypothesized that this result was due to the fact that facial width was a poorer measure of masculine sexual dimorphism compared to skull height because facial width is affected by factors such as facial fat and soft tissue variation. | |||
fWHR is also potentially confounded by body size, which is a strong potential confound as body size and muscularity also predict and are associated with aggression, particularly in men. This assertion was contested by research showing an association between fWHR and fighting success, even independent of body size<ref>https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ab.21559</ref> | |||
Further research using more granular measures of "fighting success" among professional fighters (individual fighter aggression and grappling ability) discovered that fWHR only weakly predicted these aggressive traits and fight success when body size was controlled for.<ref>https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ab.22027</ref> This study also used manual measurement of fWHR and measured it using the two widely accepted methods, i.e., from the brow to the upper lip and from the upper eyelid to the upper lip. They also noticed that measuring fWHR automatically with computer software compared to measuring it manually created a level of measurement error that could've spoiled earlier results. | |||
In addition, a sophisticated analysis of facial sexual dimorphism conducted by Caton & Dixson (2022) found that facial width itself was highly sexually dimorphic (adjusted d = 1.07, favoring men) when controlling for allometric confounds (multiple facial height and craniofacial measurements). They asserted that fWHR was not a robust or reliable measure and, along with most body ratio metrics, is not an appropriate method of allometric scaling. They argued that the use of such metrics frequently results in spurious correlations and non-robust effect size measurements, two things that indeed have been frequently associated with fWHR research in general. They concluded that facial width was positively associated with general markers of robustness such as shoulder breadth, bicep circumference, forearm circumference, chest circumference, neck circumference, and body size. These associations may drive the effects that have been discovered for the facial width to height ratio per se and mating success and perceived dominance, which align with research that points toward a stronger role for physical dominance in driving men's short-term mating success and reproductive success.<ref>https://incels.wiki/w/Scientific_Blackpill#Body</ref> | |||
To briefly summarize, it seems fWHR was seized upon as a measure of facial dominance mainly because it was easy to measure automatically via photos and because it was initially thought to be an appropriate allometric control for facial width. Recent research has challenged this assumption, which likely explains why fWHR findings often lack robustness despite the associations between fWHR and the traits it was originally thought to measure (dominance, fighting success, short-term mating drive, and success) generally being weakly positive. Another key issue with the facial width to height ratio is that it conflates a masculine sexually dimorphic trait (a wide face) with a trait that is less consistently sexually dimorphic, namely midface height. Evidence suggests that, overall, a compact midface is actually a neotenous trait, which explains why "babyfaced" men have higher fWHRs and are seen as more childlike, despite the general link between fWHR and aggression, and also explains why a compact midface is generally seen as a desirable aesthetic trait among women. Two facial metrics that contribute to a short midface in the fWHR, that is, a shorter philtrum and maxilla, are neotenous, feminine traits,<ref>https://incels.wiki/w/Compact_midface</ref> with a long maxilla being gerontomorphic and atavistic. Thus, having a compact midface would be expected to be, if anything, negatively associated with the traits fWHR purports to measure, while facial width would be positively associated with such traits, and the conflation of a neotenous and a masculine dimorphic trait would be expected to be inferior to simple facial width (transformed allometrically and controlled for adiposity) as a measure of such tendencies. | |||
==fWHR and aesthetics== | ==fWHR and aesthetics== | ||