Women's Life History Strategies And Environmental Threats Affect Their Gender Dimorphism Preferences

Purpose Previous studies on the preference of gender dimorphic faces often settled on the trade-off between "good genes" and "good parents" under different contexts,mostly investigating the impact of social ecological environmental cues,ignoring the role of individual personality traits.How individuals weigh their own resources and time is called life history strategy.At both ends of the life history strategy continuum are the fast strategy and the slow strategy.Different life history strategies have different orientations in the reproduction of future generations.Fast strategy individuals have more reproductive efforts,pursue current fertility,and pay attention to the number of offspring;slow strategy individuals have more physical effort,delay fertility,and focus on the cultivation of offspring quality.The characteristics of masculine and feminine faces in men represent different evolutionary meanings.The masculine face in men means the "good gene" feature,which can provide high-quality genes for future generations and ensure the survival rate of the offspring;the feminine face often has more pro-social behavior and more "parent investment" for the offspring.Previous studies have rarely discussed gender dimorphism preferences based on life history theory.This study aims to explore the impact of life history strategies on gender dimorphism preference through experiment one,and further explores whether environmental threat cues will affect the gender dimorphism preference of life history strategy individuals through experiment two.Method The study used forced selection to explore the explicit attitudes of individuals with fast and slow strategies by selecting the proportion of masculine-faced men,while using implicit association tests to explore implicit attitudes,combined with eye movement technology based on the indicators of first fixation duration,dwell time,and fixation counts to explore the gender dimorphism preference of individuals with fast and slow strategies,and whether the gender dimorphism preference will change when exposed to environmental threat cues.Result Fast strategies individuals prefer masculine-faced men in implicit association tests and forced selection tasks,which are also reflected in three eye movement indicators: first fixation duration,dwell time,and fixation counts.However,individuals with slow strategies did not show significant gender dimorphism preference in implicit association tests,and masculine men were significantly preferred in forced selection tasks.The eye movement results were consistent with the implicit association tests.When exposed to environmental threat stimuli,there was no significant change in fast strategy individuals.Both the stimulus group and the neutral group preferred masculine men,reflected in implicit association tests,forced selection tasks,dwell time,and fixation counts.Slow strategy individuals showed significant masculine preference,reflected in implicit association test,forced selection tasks and first fixation duration.Conclusion The research was in line with the life history theory,proving that the fast and slow life history strategy individuals have different trade-off points in their reproduction task,thus forming different gender dimorphism preferences;it also proves that their preferences are not static,but change flexibly according to situational cues.