ABSTRACT
The two opposing views depicted above illustrate both our absorption with beauty and our simultaneous misgivings with this predilection. Is it any surprise then, that much of the early literature on intimate relationships was devoted to exploring the physical basis of attraction? That such issues can be investigated with relative ease did not hurt either. They are highly conducive to being studied in the context of tightly controlled laboratory experiments in which the physical attractiveness of another can be varied while everything else
can be held constant. Any differences that are obtained on a dependent measure can therefore be attributed to the variations in attractiveness employed in the experiment. And even though there were reports as far back as the early 1970s indicating that understanding (initial) attraction between two people may tell us little about what happens in their (ongoing) relationships (Levinger, Senn, & Jorgensen, 1970; Levinger & Snoek, 1972), the field was relatively slow to shift its attention to issues going beyond attraction. Despite the fact that many of the towering figures in research on physical attraction were women (i.e., Karen Dion, Ellen Berscheid, Elaine Hatfield), much of the early attraction research focused almost exclusively on heterosexual men’s perceptions of women’s attractiveness. And although more recent research has freed itself from its early androcentric bias, most of the current work is limited to cross-gender perceptions of attractiveness by heterosexual men and women.
