An Exploration of Attraction Stereotypes and Self-Reported Attraction Priorities across Diverse Groups

Abstract

Psychologists have identified several characteristics that impact judgments of attraction, including physical appearance, personality, earning potential, and social status. Prior research has focused on evaluating self-report judgments of which factors people prioritize when selecting partners, but less work has investigated the attraction stereotypes that people hold, which we define as beliefs about specific groups’ priorities when evaluating a partner. Furthermore, past literature has focused on gender differences, yet lacks diversity and is influenced by a cisnormative, heteronormative bias. The present work ventures to examine how people’s perceptions of others’ partner priorities are affected by targets’ unique intersectional identities. University (N=214) and online (N=436) samples — featuring straight, bisexual, and gay men and women — provided stereotype ratings of ten traits for judging attractiveness for six gender-by-sexuality groups, as well as self-report ratings of these traits’ importance when choosing their own partners. We describe attraction stereotypes across gender-by-sexuality groups, examine how these patterns are moderated by type of rating (stereotype vs. self-report), and evaluate how discrepancies between these types of ratings differ according to perceiver identity.