Research Article
If I’m Not Hot, Are You
Hot or Not?
Physical-Attractiveness Evaluations and Dating Preferences
as a Function of One’s Own Attractiveness
Leonard Lee,
1
George Loewenstein,
2
Dan Ariely,
3
James Hong,
4
and Jim Young
4
1
Columbia University,
2
Carnegie Mellon University,
3
Duke University, and
4
HOTorNOT.com, San Francisco, California
ABSTRACT—Prior research has established that people’s
own physical attractiveness affects their selection of
romantic partners. This article provides further support
for this effect and also examines a different, yet related,
question: When less attractive people accept less attractive
dates, do they persuade themselves that the people they
choose to date are more physically attractive than others
perceive them to be? Our analysis of data from the pop-
ular Web site HOTorNOT.com suggests that this is not the
case: Less attractive people do not delude themselves into
thinking that their dates are more physically attractive
than others perceive them to be. Furthermore, the results
also show that males, compared with females, are less
affected by their own attractiveness when choosing whom
to date.
Physical attractiveness is an important dimension of individu-
als’ dating preferences. Not only are physically attractive people
popular romantic targets (Buss & Barnes, 1986; Feingold, 1990;
Regan & Berscheid, 1997; Walster, Aronson, Abrahams, &
Rottmann, 1966), but they are also likely to date other attractive
people (Buston & Emlen, 2003; Kowner, 1995; Little, Burt,
Penton-Voak, & Perrett, 2001; Todd, Penke, Fasolo, & Lenton,
2007). Studies of assortative mating find very strong correlations
between the attractiveness of partners in both dating and marital
relationships (Berscheid & Walster, 1974; Buss & Barnes, 1986;
Epstein & Guttman, 1984; Spurler, 1968). In a meta-analysis on
this topic, Feingold (1988) found that interpartner correlations
for attractiveness averaged .39, and were remarkably consistent
across 27 samples of romantic partners.
Such attractiveness matching can potentially be explained
by various theories, including evolutionary theories, which posit
that assortative mating maximizes gene replication and in-
creases fitness (Thiessen & Gregg, 1980); equity theory, which
proposes that a relationship built on attribute matching could
be perceived to be more equitable and satisfactory than a
relationship that involves a mismatch of personal attributes
(Walster, Walster, & Berscheid, 1978); market theories, which
indicate that attractive people seek one another as mates,
leaving the less attractive people to choose among themselves
(Hitsch, Hortacsu, & Ariely, 2006; Kalick & Hamilton, 1986);
and parental-image theories, which claim that people are at-
tracted to others who resemble their parents and thus indirectly
themselves (Epstein & Guttman, 1984).
The phenomenon of assortative mating raises the question of
whether, beyond affecting the attractiveness of the people whom
one will accept as dating or marital partners, one’s own attrac-
tiveness also affects one’s perceptions of how physically attrac-
tive those potential partners are. Does, for example, a potential
partner appear more attractive to an individual who is likely to
attract only average-looking partners than to one who is likely to
attract much more attractive partners?
1
A rich body of research on dissonance theory, dating back to
the seminal work of Festinger (1957), suggests that, in order
to justify accepting physically less attractive dates, individuals
might engage in postdecisional dissonance reduction and per-
suade themselves that those they have chosen to date are in fact
more physically appealing than other, unmotivated individuals
would perceive them to be (Wicklund & Brehm, 1976). Such
evaluative distortion would serve the important psychological
Address correspondence to Leonard Lee, Columbia Business School,
Columbia University, Uris Hall, 3022 Broadway, Room 508, New
York, NY 10027-6902, e-mail: leonardlee@columbia.edu.
1
See Clark and Reis (1988) and Berscheid and Reis (1998) for compre-
hensive reviews of interpersonal processes in romantic relationships.
PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE
Volume 19—Number 7 669Copyrightr 2008 Association for Psychological Science

function of allowing individuals to reconcile the apparent dis-
crepancy between their overt behavior and their covert desires.
However, prior studies have consistently shown that people
seem to have largely universal, culturally independent stan-
dards of beauty (Berscheid & Reis, 1998; Cunningham, Roberts,
Barbee, Druen, & Wu, 1995; Jones & Hill, 1993; Langlois et al.,
2000; Langlois & Roggman, 1990; McArthur & Berry, 1987;
Singh, 1993)—large eyes, ‘‘baby-face’’ features, symmetric
faces, ‘‘average’’ faces, and specific waist-hip ratios (different
for men vs. women), to name a few. Cross-cultural agreement
on what constitutes physical attractiveness, coupled with the
finding that even infants prefer more attractive faces (Langlois,
Ritter, Roggman, & Vaughn, 1991), suggests that these universal
yardsticks of beauty might have an evolutionary basis. Together,
these findings raise the contrary possibility that, despite their
own level of physical attractiveness and how it might affect
whom they pick as romantic partners, people may have a real-
istic sense of how physically attractive (or unattractive) these
partners are.
In addition to providing further support for the well-estab-
lished finding that more attractive people are more selective
when it comes to mate choice, the study we report here tested
these predictions—that is, we tested whether one’s own attrac-
tiveness affects one’s evaluations of the attractiveness of po-
tential partners.
OVERVIEW OF THE EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION
Propitiously, the unique setup of HOTorNOT.com allowed us not
only to seek further support for the tendency for the physically
attractive to date the physically attractive, but also to examine
the more novel question of how more attractive versus less
attractive people perceive the physical attractiveness of those
whom they choose to date. Founded in 2000, HOTorNOT.com
was originally a Web site where members rated how attractive
(or how ‘‘hot’’) they thought pictures of other members were (on a
10-point scale) and posted their own pictures to receive feed-
back on how hot others perceived them to be. After the Web site
became extremely popular, in part to raise revenue, the founders
added a dating component that included the ability for members
to chat with, and send messages to, other members with whom
they wanted to meet or get acquainted. To date, HOTorNOT.com
has more than 1.6 million registered members and has recorded
more than 12 billion picture ratings.
For our empirical investigation, we employed two data sets
from HOTorNOT.com—one containing members’ dating re-
quests, and the other, their attractiveness ratings of other
members. Both data sets also included ratings of members’ own
attractiveness as rated by other members. Thus, the first data
set allowed us to validate whether individuals perceived as less
attractive by others are indeed more willing to date others
who are, on average, perceived as less attractive. The second
data set allowed us to test whether individuals rated as less
attractive by others rate potential dates as being more attrac-
tive—that is, whether people’s own attractiveness affects their
ratings of others’ attractiveness. Note that the ratings and dating
decisions in these data sets were based on members’ exposure
to the photos of other members, and hence were not colored
by any face-to-face interactions between members and their
potential dates.
‘‘HOTNESS’’ VERSUS PHYSICAL ATTRACTIVENESS:
A PRETEST
To assess the validity of using the hotness ratings in the HOTorNOT.
com data sets as a measure for physical attractiveness, we ran a
separate study in which we asked 46 participants (19 males and
27 females) to rate (on 10-point scales) 100 pictures of members
of the opposite sex in terms of five different attributes—hotness,
physical attractiveness, intelligence, confidence, and sexiness.
These pictures were actual photos posted on HOTorNOT.com by
members.
Factor analysis using principal-components analysis with
varimax rotation revealed that the ratings loaded on two primary
underlying factors (see Table 1): Hotness, physical attractive-
ness, and sexiness loaded on one factor; intelligence and
confidence loaded on the other. Correlation analysis further
revealed that participants’ ratings of the hotness of the targets
in the photos were highly and significantly correlated with their
ratings of the targets’ physical attractiveness (overall: r 5 .92,
p
rep
> .99; for males: r 5 .93, p
rep
> .99; for females: r 5 .90,
p
rep
> .99). These results support the idea that members’ ratings
of the hotness of potential dates in the HOTorNOT.com data sets
are a valid measure for how physically attractive they found
these potential dates to be.
EMPIRICAL ANALYSES OF HOTORNOT.COM DATA
The Data
As noted, the field study was based on two separate data sets
from HOTorNOT.com. The meeting-requests data set contained
members’ binary decisions about whether or not they wished to
meet other members (randomly generated from HOTorNOT.
com’s membership database) after viewing pictures and brief
profiles of those other members. The attractiveness-ratings data
TABLE 1
Factor Loadings of Photo Ratings in the Pretest
Trait judgment Factor 1 Factor 2
Hotness .96 .03
Attractiveness .90 .11
Sexiness .95 .05
Intelligence
.00 .88
Confidence
.05 .91
670 Volume 19—Number 7
Attractiveness Evaluation Versus Dating Preferences