New research suggests a woman’s waist-to-hip ratio influences the number of details men remember about her.
Previous studies have found that women with a waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) of .60 to .70 are more consistently rated as highly attractive by men.
The new study, published in Evolution and Human Behavior, found that male undergraduates who viewed a photograph of a woman with a .60, .70, or .80 WHR recalled and recognized more about her physical and biographical details than those who had seen the same woman with either a .50 or .90 WHR.
PsyPost interviewed the study’s corresponding author, Carey J. Fitzgerald of University of South Carolina, Beaufort. Read her explanation of the research below:
PsyPost: Why were you interested in this topic?
Fitzgerald: There has been a lot of research on how men tend to view a .70 wait-to-hip ratio as the most attractive waist-to-hip ratio (Singh, 1993). And back when I was in graduate school, I read an article about an fMRI experiment in which the researchers found that men’s anterior cingulate cortex – a part of the brain associated with reward processing – was activated when they looked at pictures of women whose waist-to-hip ratio approached .70 (Platek & Singh, 2010). That made me wonder if the female waist-to-hip ratio had other effects on the male brain and male behavior.
What should the average person take away from your study?
One could argue that our data shows that men might pay more attention to a women he thinks is attractive. But to my knowledge, our study was the first to examine the potential relationship between female waist-to-hip ratio and men’s memory, so I wouldn’t recommend taking much away from it until more studies have been conducted.
Are there any major caveats? What questions still need to be addressed?
Yes. All of our participants came from the southeastern region of the United States, which limits the generalizability of our findings. Some research has found that men in certain cultures around the world do not view the .70 waist-to-hip ratio as the most attractive waist-to-hip ratio, so that could lead to cultural differences in our results (Furnham et al., 2002; Wetsman & Marlowe, 1999).
Having a more diverse sample – our sample was predominantly Caucasian – could help show if this effect generalizes across races and cultures. Our results were also limited because we only used photographs of one Caucasian female target who was approximately 120lbs. We manipulated her waist-to-hip ratio using Photoshop.
Future research could utilize photographs of women of various races and weight ranges, which could show if the waist-to-hip ratio has a consistent effect on men’s memory. Manipulating some biographical information of the female targets, such as relationship status and socioeconomic status, may also yield an effect on men’s memory.
Is there anything else you would like to add?
My co-author, Susan Himes, is currently designing a similar experiment to see if male physique influences memory of female participants.
The study, “Shaping men’s memory: the effects of a female’s waist-to-hip ratio on men’s memory for her appearance and biographical information“, was also co-authored by Terrence G. Horgan and Susan M. Himes.