Disease threat does not predict attractiveness preference in a United Kingdom dataset: a replication attempt and commentary on White et al., Psych Sci 2013
1
Stress Research Institute, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
2
Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden
3
Valtech AB, Stockholm, Sweden
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Evolutionary Studies, Psychiatry and Psychology, Public Health
- Keywords
- Disease avoidance, Attractiveness, Replication
- Copyright
- © 2015 Nilsonne et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2015. Disease threat does not predict attractiveness preference in a United Kingdom dataset: a replication attempt and commentary on White et al., Psych Sci 2013. PeerJ PrePrints 3:e804v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.804v1
Abstract
Background: A study by White et al. found that population disease burden predicted preference for attractive politicians in U.S. congressional elections. Aim: We aimed to replicate this finding using data from the United Kingdom. Method: We regressed rated sexiness of elected members of parliament on health metrics from their constituencies: life expectancy, infant mortality, and self-rated health. Results: None of the health metrics predicted rated sexiness of members of parliament. Conclusion: Further investigation is needed to verify whether the proposed relationship is important and whether it is moderated by other factors such as cross-cultural differences.
Author Comment
This is version 1 of the preprint.