Looking through artworks from previous centuries, it would seem the beauty ideals we hold have
remained unchanged for generations. Are there just some things that everyone finds attractive?
Well, if that was the case, why don't we all look the same? Surely natural selection would
favour the most beautiful among us until we all had perfect attributes?
Sometimes a bit of uniqueness is what catches the eye. Humans like novelty, particularly,
it seems, when it comes to attraction.
Take beards, for example. The recent fashion for facial hair would imply that whiskered
men do better in the dating market. However, a few years ago it was claimed we had reached
peak beard. Beards would soon lose their appeal.
So what happened?
There was some evidence for peak beard. Barnaby Dixson, a psychologist, showed that women
prefer men who stand out from the crowd.
He showed some women mostly bearded faces, and asked them to rate how attractive they
found them. Other women were shown mostly clean-shaven faces and asked to do the same.
Both groups were then shown the same mixture of stubbly, bearded and smooth faces.
What happens is something quite interesting. If you were assigned to the group when you
ranked only clean-shaven faces, to begin with, then you get significantly higher ratings
for attractiveness to the bearded faces
Whereas, if you are assigned to rate all bearded faces and you, you are then rank the clean-shaven
face it most attractive, so you get these novelty effects it's like something different,
is being shown to me and it's appealing.
Seeking novelty, Barnaby says, is what has made us such a successful species. Natural
selection favours a taste for the unique.
Natural selection at its core requires the ability to to adjust and adapt to new environments
as they're presented to you.
If anything that variation is critical for the species survival and reproduction and
movement and settling capabilities human beings might be an extreme example of that.
Our species taste for the unusual extends not only to natural selection but also our
cultural choices it's why we have fashions but, like with beards, some things become
less attractive the more popular they are.
Take baby names. While some names are always relatively popular (names like Charlotte,
Rebecca, James or Daniel), the popularity of a baby name can make it quickly become
unpopular.
Of the top 5 boys and girls names in the US in 2020 only Olivia and Emma for girls and
Noah for boys feature in the top 40 baby names in the year 2000.
None of those names appeared in the top 40 baby names in 1920.
Names do come back in and out of fashion: Charlotte and Isabella were more popular in
2020 than in 1920, and Evelyn was almost as popular last year as it was 100 years ago.
But none of those three names featured in the top 40 in 2000.
This rotation between old and new names is an example of an anti-conformity bias cycle
according to evolutionary biologist Kaleda Krebs Denton
So an example could be 70% of individuals in one generation have an iPhone and 30% have
an Android, but in the next generation 70% have an Android and 30% have an iPhone. In
the third generation you are back to what you saw in the first generation, and so on
and so forth. So every other generation you reach the same frequency.
Anti-conformity biases might be another way of looking at our preference for the outlier,
like the clean-shaven man in a room of bearded men, for example. Do we just like the fact
they stand out?
If we are referring to biological fitness benefits then anti-conformity might be beneficial
when the more selectively advantageous variant is rare, which is not a great answer as it
just raises the question: When is the more selectively advantageous variant rare?
My speculation, although I have not modelled this, is that a situation like this might
arise when the environment is constantly fluctuating, and new beneficial variants are consistently
arising due to innovation.
On the other hand, benefits might not be biological. In that case, anti-conformity might be very
useful in fields such as fashion, music, painting, dance, literature, where the intrinsic uniqueness
is appreciated.
Maybe those anti-conformists among us are what made us the successful species we are
today.