Table 1.
Sex preference differences in characteristics.
Fig 1.
Relative importance of aesthetics, resources, and personality factors for sexual attraction, by sex.
Distribution density for each factor is estimated within sex.
Fig 2.
Level of sexual attraction for aesthetic, resource, and personality characteristics over age, by sex.
Markers represent the average relative importance for each characteristic within sex (males = blue, females = red), calculated at each year of age. Smoothed lines represent the local cubic polynomial with Gaussian kernel function and bandwidth of 5, with shaded areas representing the 95% confidence intervals. We also show the linear fit of the observations across age, represented in grey dashed lines. The green reference line (relative importance = 0) indicates a factor is of the same importance to the average of all nine characteristics. Each characteristic is graphed for participants aged 18–64 years.
Fig 3.
Sex differences in importance of aesthetic, resource, and personality factors for sexual attraction, across lifespan.
Positive (negative) sex difference shows males (females) place higher relative importance in terms of sexual attraction to a characteristic; sex difference not significantly differ from 0 means the characteristics have equal importance to both males and females, relative to other factors. Estimates are obtained from Eq (1) using OLS. Shaded areas represent 95% confidence intervals.
Fig 4.
Sex differences in importance of attractiveness for sexual attraction across participants’ age, mediated by relative importance of age for sexual attraction (panel a and b) and sex differences in importance of intelligence across age, mediated by relative importance of attractiveness (panel c) and age (panel d). Estimates of sex differences (represented by color) were obtained from OLS regressions. In each regression, we include the interaction term between sex, importance of age or attractiveness (y-axis) and age and age square (x-axis). Positive sex differences (blue) indicate males place relatively higher importance on the explained trait (z-axis) compared to females, relative to other factors. In panel a, no control variables were added to the regression, in panel b, c, and d, control variables were included in the regression model.
Fig 5.
Sex-specific factors on sexual attraction importance of aesthetic, resource, and personality factors.
We show the effect of each independent variable on the relative importance of characteristics of interest for both sexes (effects on male and female sexual preferences are indicated by blue and red markers, respectively). P-values of the sex-specific effects are shown above the corresponding markers, with error bars indicating 90%, 95%, 99%, and 99.5% confidence intervals. The statistical significance of the sex difference of each independent variable (i.e., interaction terms with sex) is shown to the right of the coefficient estimates. † p < .10; * p < .05; ** p < .01; *** p < .001.