A new eye-tracking study published in Evolution and Human Behavior has found striking differences in how men and women allocate their attention to attractive faces. The research suggests men linger longer on faces that match their sexual orientation, while women spend more time viewing attractive faces regardless of the other person’s sex. The pattern emerges during deliberate, sustained looking rather than the first instant of automatic attention, and being in a committed relationship does not reliably curb such eyeing.
Attentional bias describes the tendency for our eyes to prioritise certain stimuli over others. Facial attractiveness acts as a powerful lure for gaze, a signal often linked to health and fertility from an evolutionary standpoint. How this pull operates, the researchers note, depends on who is looking and who is being looked at.
Earlier work in the field proposed several possibilities for how gender and mating motives shape gaze, ranging from a focus on attractive members of the preferred sex to longer viewing times for attractive faces of the opposite sex as potential rivals. More recent studies have added nuance by considering relationship status and different processing stages of attention.
Researchers recruited 105 adults at the Betweter Festival, a public science festival in Utrecht, the Netherlands. After excluding three non-binary participants, the final sample comprised 102 individuals: 65 women and 37 men. The average age was 38, and most (87 of 102) were heterosexual, while 63 participants were in exclusive relationships with an average length of about 12.6 years.
Each participant sat about 60 centimetres from a monitor fitted with an infrared eye-tracker recording at 300 times per second. Across 36 trials, they viewed pairs of same-sex portrait photos with neutral expressions, each pair contrasting a conventionally attractive face with a less attractive one from established databases. All faces were white adults, mostly in their twenties and thirties, shown for three seconds before the participant answered a short questionnaire about age, sex, sexual orientation, relationship status, relationship length, and alcohol consumption that evening.
The researchers matched each participant’s stated sexual orientation with the sex of the faces shown to categorise every trial as either “preferred” or “non-preferred.” They also controlled for alcohol consumption, the photo database used, and whether the attractive face appeared on the left or right side of the screen.
In terms of immediate attention—the first face the participant’s gaze landed on within half a second—the study found no clear effect of facial attractiveness. Women looked at the attractive face first about 50.0% of the time for both preferred-sex and non-preferred-sex trials, effectively a coin toss. Men looked at the attractive face first in 53.9% of preferred-sex trials and 49.9% of non-preferred trials, a difference that was not statistically robust.
Instead, a distinctly different pattern emerged when examining volitional attention, or the slower, deliberate process of sustaining gaze. Women showed a general propensity to look longer at attractive faces, spending 55.4% of their viewing time on the attractive face when looking at their preferred sex and 54.7% when looking at their non-preferred sex, with both figures above the 50% mark.
Men, by contrast, were more selective in their deliberate gaze. They spent 54.9% of their viewing time on the attractive face when the pair matched their sexual preference, but only 52.0% when viewing the non-preferred sex. That latter figure did not reliably differ from chance, and the direct comparison between the sexes’ patterns hovered just short of statistical significance, partly because women looked slightly longer at attractive faces of their preferred sex.
The authors note that the pattern aligns with prior research suggesting men’s visual and physical sexual responses are more tightly tethered to their preferred sex, while women’s responses may be less restricted. “We find that men and women differ in their attractiveness bias,” Roth explained. “Men are specifically interested in attractive faces that align with their sexual orientation, while women have a general bias toward attractive faces of both sexes. This is in line with previous research. We don’t find that men have a stronger bias toward attractiveness in their preferred sex, as has been suggested by some evolutionary hypotheses.”
The study’s findings echo earlier PsyPost reporting on neural responses to faces, which suggested that more attractive faces drive direct eye movements but do not necessarily speed attention shifts measured in certain tasks. The present study, however, emphasises a behavioural pattern—where people choose to look over how quickly they react.
To probe how consistent these patterns are across individuals, the team ran simulations predicting how a newly recruited participant would perform. They found that a new female participant would have about an 80% probability of looking longer at attractive faces of either sex, while a new male participant would have about a 76% probability for attractive faces of his preferred sex, but only about 62% for faces of his non-preferred sex. This wider uncertainty at the individual level suggests that, although the group trend is reliable, personal viewing habits vary considerably.
The researchers stress that relationship status did not meaningfully alter how long people looked at attractive faces of their preferred sex. The article notes that the festival sample largely comprised individuals in established relationships and that findings may differ for newer relationships. “We had expected that people might look less at attractive faces that aligned with their preference when they were in a relationship, as they want to ‘protect’ their relationship. However, our sample mostly contained data from participants who were already in very established relationships with a long duration. Maybe our expected effect would apply more to new relationships specifically.”
There are important caveats. “One important caveat is that we measured where people looked, not whom they wanted to date or felt sexually attracted to,” Roth added. “Women looking longer at attractive faces of both sexes should therefore not be interpreted as evidence of sexual interest in both sexes.”
The festival setting and reliance on pre-existing average attractiveness ratings means participants may not have personally found the designated “attractive” faces appealing, potentially diluting the measured gaze patterns. The researchers also note the sample’s composition—more women and more coupled participants than men and singles—and the faces being uniformly white and relatively young. They call for larger, more balanced studies featuring faces of diverse ages and asking participants to rate faces themselves, while collecting detailed data on relationship satisfaction and jealousy.
Lead author Johanna M. Bellue, along with colleagues from Utrecht University, emphasised the need to broaden samples beyond university settings to understand how broadly these patterns apply. “Although our science-festival sample covered a broader age range than a typical student sample, it still overrepresents highly educated people from urban settings, and most participants were heterosexual,” Roth said. “Recruiting people from a wider range of backgrounds and sexual orientations would help us establish how broadly these patterns apply. We would also like to account more directly for individual preferences: the faces that are attractive on average are not necessarily the ones that every individual finds attractive.”
The study, “Sexual preference modulates attentional bias towards attractive faces in men, but not women,” was authored by Johanna M. Bellue, David Terburg, Mirre E. Balke, Tessa W. Coster, Jorg J.M. Massen, and Tom S. Roth.
