Picture ©Lightworks-Gallery, V. Schrader
A small series of articles by Dr. med. Margrit Lettko (Medical Director of the Network Aesthetics) and Dirk Brandl (Speaker Network Aesthetics)
Have you already read the first part of this series of articles? If not, then follow this link to get to the very beginning.
Why does attractiveness influence our social environment and ourselves?
We only want to give some brief indications of the “why”, but these are necessary to better understand the mechanisms involved in meeting an attractive person. Most of the article deals with how strongly attractiveness influences our social environment.
We should differentiate between the initial perception, which gives us an answer within the first 150 milliseconds as to whether we perceive someone as attractive, and other signals which we process in the process of getting to know them better. Although human societies have developed enormously in terms of civilisation over the last 10,000 years, the first impression consists mainly of very instinctive feedback, which refers to a much longer period of human development and is actually part of our animal nature. All attributes of attractiveness allow us to make a selection that is based on the mechanisms of reproduction, i.e. the procreation. The unconscious and instinctive question that plays a role in this is that of how our own gene pool develops in a beneficial direction.
The perception of attractiveness seems to have a common basis across all cultures, which for the majority of attractiveness researchers was the reason for assuming a kind of innate tendency. Social factors or social socialisation should not play a role according to this.
In the next part III we want to introduce you to the theories of attractiveness and explain why they are quite nonsense. You will find an overview of all discussed or quoted works at the end of part 6.