Codebook from Creating beauty: creativity compensates for low physical attractiveness when individuals assess the attractiveness of social and romantic partners

Although creativity is attractive in a potential mate, it is unclear (i) whether the effects of creativity on attractiveness generalize to other social contexts and (ii) whether creativity has equivalent effects on men's and women's attractiveness. As social knowledge of creativity may either enhance or ‘offset’ the appeal of social partners who differ in physical attractiveness, three repeated measures experiments were conducted to directly address these issues. Here, participants rated a series of face–text pairs for attractiveness on trials that differed in one of four combinations of facial attractiveness (attractive and less attractive) and creativity (creative and less creative), rating story-tellers in two experiments (short interpretations of an identical painting) and creative ideas in a further experiment (alternate uses for an everyday object). Regardless of the sex of the judge, creativity and facial attractiveness had independent effects on men's overall attractiveness (initial experiment), and, in further experiments, more substantial effects on the attractiveness of men with less attractive faces than men with attractive faces (when using a different measure of creativity) and specific effects on the attractiveness of individuals with less attractive faces (when using different face stimuli). Collectively, across three experiments, these findings suggest that creativity may compensate for putative cues to lower biological ‘quality’ and that the benefits of creativity to social groups more generally enhance attraction to creative men (in two experiments) and creative men and women (one experiment). More broadly, the data suggest that species can integrate knowledge of cognitive intelligence with visual cues to biological ‘quality’ to facilitate mate and/or ally choice.

尽管创造力在潜在伴侣中颇具吸引力，但目前仍存在两个尚未明确的问题：其一，创造力对吸引力的影响是否能推广至其他社会情境；其二，创造力对男性和女性吸引力的影响是否存在等效性。鉴于对创造力的社会认知既可能提升，也可能‘抵消’外貌吸引力各异的社交伴侣的吸引力，本研究开展了三项重复测量实验，以直接解答上述疑问。本实验中，参与者需对一系列面孔-文本配对的吸引力进行评分，实验设置包含四种面孔吸引力（高吸引力与低吸引力）与创造力（高创造力与低创造力）的组合变体。其中两项实验要求参与者对讲故事者（针对同一幅画作的简短解读）的吸引力评分，另一项实验则要求其对日常物品的替代用途相关的创意想法进行评分。无论评判者的性别如何，在初始实验中，创造力与面孔吸引力均对男性整体吸引力产生独立影响；在后续实验中，当采用不同的创造力测评方式时，相较于面孔吸引力较高的男性，创造力对面孔吸引力较低男性的吸引力具有更显著的提升作用；而当使用不同的面孔刺激材料时，创造力仅对面孔吸引力较低个体的吸引力存在特异性影响。综合三项实验的结果来看，上述发现表明，创造力或许能够弥补被认为较低的生物学‘质量’相关线索；且创造力对社会群体的普遍益处，总体上会提升人们对有创造力男性（两项实验结果）以及有创造力男性和女性（一项实验结果）的吸引力。从更广泛的视角而言，本研究数据表明，人类能够将认知智力的相关认知与生物学‘质量’的视觉线索相结合，以此辅助择偶或盟友选择决策。