The mistaken attribution of attraction to visual stimulus

Pheromone Science Pheromone Theory & Molecules
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James V. Kohl makes an interesting and provocative statement on the first page of his website.

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It is conceivable that we learn what is considered to be visually attractive. For instance, one might imagine that morbidly obese people could have a distinctive component of their pheromone signature that people of a more standard weight do not have. Such a component might signal ill health or an upset hormonal balance, and repeated exposure to such a signature after seeing the obese person might lead to a conditioned response where a person associates the sight of an obese person with the unhealthy signature.

However, I think there is much more beyond conditioned responses going on with the brain and visual stimulus.

On several occasions when I was wearing artificial pheromones I have been complemented on my attire, although I was not dressed well. This is unlikely to have been a conditioned response, as some of these people had never seen me before. I think artificial pheromone usage is rare enough that it is unlikely strangers have formed conditioned responses to artificial pheromone signatures. Even if a conditioned response to natural pheromones exist, and my artificial signature duplicated those natural stimuli, it is unlikely that that the conditioned response would involve complementing people on attire.

I believe that our visual orientation leads us to falsely attribute attractions that may be caused by pheromonal or other non-visual stimulus to a visual stimulus. This would help to explain why pheromone users are sometimes described as having a “glow” about them, and why a pheromone user dressed in shabby clothing might be perceived as “chic” and fashionable.

I hypothesise that something is happening similar to when a hypnotic subject is given a post hypnotic suggestion to do something, and told not to remember the suggestion. If they are later asked why they performed the action they will come up with a more-or-less rational reason why they did what they did. Apparently the rational part of the brain assembles a plausable reason for the action that was caused by the post-hypnotic suggestion. It may be that pheromonal influences are far enough below conscious thought for most of us that a similar rationalization occurs when either attraction or more overt behaviors are motivated by a pheromonal stimulus.

I find this to be an extremely interesting possibility. If it exists it is an mechanism by which an exposed individual recognizes an effect, and deludes himself as to the cause of the effect.

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If I understand correctly, hormone/pheromone levels affect the way we visually perceive someone as “attractive?”

I would wonder about this in that there are quite a few times we can see someone from afar, or on TV or movie screen, that we might find “attractive” (or unattractive) where olfactory stimulation is impossible or nearly so. Would we then be going on memories/associations of past experiences? Or would such occurences be evidence that said connection isn’t so?

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I’m just worried that if enough people find out about artificial pheromones and start wearing them.. what a mess that would make this world

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James Kohl might be on to something with the pheromone conditioned stimulus, but I’m betting it’s a minor component of visual attraction, at best. Witness how visual standards of beauty have changed through recorded history while our physiology has remained fairly constant.

My major point was not that visual attraction is learned. There are many reasons why someone on a movie screen or in a magazine photo looks attractive. Most of them have little to do with pheromones or odors.

My point is that people seem to be attributing attraction to a visual stimulus that is not there. OK, they think James Bond looks cool in his tux. Why do they think I’m dressed like James Bond on the big screen when I am dressed in frayed blue jeans and a dirty t-shirt?

If they only saw pictures they would not make a false attribution of that nature. It seems to hapen in person when the olfactory pathways are in play.

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Everyone being attractive and horny, how could that be a bad thing? :smiley:

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I always thought that reasoning to be evolution based rather than the specific individual’s personal experience based.

Human male with square jaw, big muscles etc had an attractive pheromone signature to our ancestor females. Thus whenever they saw someone with square jaw and big muscles it was attractive to them.

This has been imprinted in the genes that were passed and the females in our current world have that conditioned response (not a learned response) whenever they see a male with similar features.

A guy in tuxedo or any dress that enhances the male qualitites which our ancestor females were conditioned to respond to (even though our ancestor male pretty much roamed naked, still the same visual qualities are being conveyed) women find the guy attractive.

So some guys can convey those attractive qualitites in a tuxedo, and others in shorts and t-shirt. Women are still responding to the conditioned response imprinted in their genes. Anyway that’s my understanding.

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Everyone being perceived as alpha male… that could create some problems…

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Interesting ideas, Nbully. Also quite plausible.

Are you suggesting that because certain clothes styles emulate physiological features that have come to be associated (through evolution) with certain pheromone signatures, people exposed to those signatures might complement an artificial pheromone user on grubby clothes that do not emulate those physiological features?

You mention that

My experience is that the unusual complements on grubby clothes only come when I’m wearing artificial pheromones. Some of these complements have come from other men.

I believe that people can, and often do, find a poorly dressed guy attractive for many of the reasons you mentioned. What is interesting and puzzling to me is when the poorly dressed individual starts getting complements on his clothing.

One little terminology point.

The words “conditioned response” have come to mean a very specialized type of individual learning. See Classical conditioning - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Thanks for pointing that out GWTW! I have been throwing around that word at the wrong places but what I mean is evolutionarily conditioned response.

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I think it goes both ways.
Attractive pheromone signature which was attractive to our ancestors is still attractive to the current counterparts (male or female aside).

Attractive physical features associated with attractive pheromone signatures which was attractive to our ancestors are also still attractive to the current counterparts.

I think the reactions we obtain from other people males/females in the current time are a combination of the evolutionary visual conditioned response as well as the evolutionary pheromone conditioned response.

Hence even if sometimes our garb don’t match the ideal visual aspects sometimes the pheromone conditioning overrides and we are still attractive to the observer. The best responses are when visual and pheromonal aspects match. This is how I have tried to explain to myself, but there might be a better explanation.

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superb posts gwtw and nbully…

on a little bit (but hopefully not too much) of a tangent, I wonder if visual filters can be tuned by a broader set of factors than just pheromone signature and signals of status etc…

as I get older I seem to find women physically attractive or otherwise based on factors beyond just their objective looks - intelligence, cultural and social savvy etc. ie it’s not ‘Anna is okay-looking but she’s really cool so overall she is pretty attractive’ - more like ‘As I’ve gotten to know Anna and discovered how cool she is I realised she is actually pretty good-looking’. you discover the beauty within someone as you start to appreciate their attractive attributes beyond the purely aesthetic ones.

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Interesting. That happens to me too and it may be part of this same phenomena. Another exapmle of forming a conception of beauty through a variety of modalities, and then attributing it to visual stimulation. In this case we’ve got intellectual perceptions of behavior, intelligence, perhaps developing emotional attachment, and they make the person “look” more beautiful. This one could easily be a conditioned response because as we form the perception of the person’s beauty it is almost always accompanied by the same visual stimulus.

Or it may be that we are so visually oriented that vision is just the way we are built to conceptualise things.

Vision works at greater distances than most of the other senses, most of the time. (pheromone perception may work at pretty long distances too if the wind is right) Maybe we’ve evolved to make this false attribution to vision so if we see someone we know is cool from far away we’re still attracted.

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Why wouldnt pheromonal traits be more important than visual cues (big jaw, prominent brow, muscles) ?

Think about it, have you ever asked a woman whether she likes a guy with big muscles and heard her response? In alot of woman, probably the majority, the answer is no. As for the preferences for faces, this varies hugely.

The place in the brain where pheromones and odours are detected is near the inner brain centre where emotions and sexual arousal is handled, whereas in order to perceive a visual image, then decode it, it has to do through the visual centres of the brain which are quite large and complex, and then filter down, and go through alot of processing before its can affect her subconscously. My argument is that its simpler, and more accurate in evolutionary terms to use the simplest sense to detect a mates value. What if a female is blind, what if the complex pathways that take thousands of genes to encode undergoes a mutation. Evolution wants two ways to do it (redudancy) but it also will very likely use the simplest method prefably.

My argument is, if you have an alpha-male pherosignature, and you act like one, you might as well look like one in her brain. It will probably ignore what her eyes see. Perhaps the difference in human females, is that the social filters are so complex that just by spraying a bum with a pheromone wont make him attractive. She needs to consider how her family, social group and peers will perceive her choice. In the evolutionary past, alienating these people could make your life very difficult in the short term even if you get the very best genes. Thats why, when a female sees a really attractive alpha male with highly desirable genes, she will very likely not be very overt about it. She may want him to have sex with her, but she doesnt want to mess things up in her life, be seen as a slut, lose friends, or whatever negative social conditions may apply.

Also, my theory is that if a female has a difficult upbringing, perhaps suffers abuse, loses her family, support network, etc, she will not perceive as much importance in following societal rules, and is more likely to want an overt bad boy with a powerful pheromone signiture.

In conclusion, my theory is that the two most important traits in a male is social status (not money, fame or popularity, but rather power or leverage which can sometimes be seen as money on the low end of wealth - that power can be gained by joining a gang, or being high up in an organisation) and your pheromone output/dominance. That is my guess anyway, looks, musculature, even niceness or faithfulness, etc, rank quite low in a females choice. And ive seen how females can often go for guys I would consider to be bad choices visually, but they still end up marrying them, screwing them, or whatnot. Btw, for the women here, I dont mean to offend, im just noting my observations and analysing them. I dont stereotype women at all, and recognisse theres alot of variation in preferences and behaviour.

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I know you are talking about visual response in women but this is just an observation that me and some of my girlfriends once talked about long before I discovered mones and I would like to get the mens take on it.

About half of us are married the other quarter are involved with someone and the rest of the group are still looking.
We noticed and talked about how women tend to gravitate towards men who are much like there own fathers in Personality, Morals, Build, and Authority or Power. We wondered if this is why you often find that women who come from abusive households as children often (not always) end up with a abusive husbands.

My friend who inspired this discussion was in a abusive marriage at the time and also had a abusive childhood due to her father. She often said that when she met her husband he was so different in personality from her own dad that she didnt understand how she ended up with someone just like her father. Those of us involved or married noticed the same thing after talking about it. Each of us has a SO that is in alot of ways similar to are own fathers in personality morals ect… Some of us that are married mentioned that we didnt perceive our SO to be anything like our dads when we first met them but after being together for a long time we discover that they are very similar. I know in my own marriage my husband is very much like my dad. I am lucky enough to have a great dad.

Another friend had a abusive father as a child but he passed away when she was pretty young and her mother found another husband and he was much nicer. Her husband is much like her step father and not her abusive dad.

Do men notice they look for women with quailtys like there mothers. I dont mean looks but values, morals, habits ?

Do you think this is just conditioned or learned response ?

Do you think that Pheromone signature could play a part in why these men dont appear to be like our dads at first but ultimately end up being very similar ?

Do you think this could be why visual cues vary so much ? Why I girl could go for a Bad boy or someone who dresses like a bum or the unlikely guy others cant figure out why your attracted to?

I dont know the anwsers and I am not saying that all women who have been abused gravitate towards it. I know that for women who have had abusive dads some of them do find better husbands but the ones I know usually had a strong male presense as a child other then there fathers.

Women are all different so I dont mean to offend anyone who reads this and is going through a Bad situation. I am just curious as to everyones opinions.

Tisha

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If I feel attracted to a guy, I will look for reasons why–and happily sit there seducing myself into being even more attracted to him.

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haha… seduce urself lol..

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Why Is Muscularity Sexy? Tests of the Fitness Indicator Hypothesis – Frederick and Haselton 33 (8): 1167 – Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin

I don’t think that the authors answer the question of why, so much as attest to the fact that muscularity is sexy–when not overdone. A few other studies have indicated this (especially Victor Johnston’s facial morphing studies). Johnston, V. S., Hagel, R., Franklin, M., Fink, B., & Grammer, K. (2001). Male facial attractiveness. Evidence for hormone-mediated adaptive design. Evolution and Human Behavior, 22, 251-
267. I co-authored with two of the authors of this paper, also in 2001 for Neuroendocrinology Letters.

Muscularity – as a fitness indicator – and many other physical characteristics that are different in males and females (e.g., males are taller with darker skin tone/complexion, with longer ring finger compared to index finger length 2D:4D ,and waist to hip ratios closer to 1.0 than the female characteristic 0.7) are due to different hormone levels. All of the aforementioned are linked to higher testosterone levels either before birth, after a male is born, or both. So is higher production of testosterone (i.e., androgen) -related pheromones.

The difference between how visual input influences our behavior and how olfactory/pheromonal input influences our behavior is: olfactory/pheromonal input directly influences hormone levels linked to behavior from the day we are born–and the affect is different in males than in females who are exposed to olfactory/pheromonal input from either males or females.

What we process visually is the same, and there are no sex differences in the visual system that allow for a direct influence of visual input on sex differences in sexual behavior.

More on this when I have some free time. Nice to see the topic come up on this forum.

James V. Kohl
http://www.pheromones.com

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I thought I read somewhere that women don’t really like really muscular guys all that much

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That’s why I included the caveat: when not overdone. There are also some correlates with menstrual cycle phase that indicate women who are in the most fertile phase prefer the more muscular types, compared to less muscular/dominant when they are less likely to get pregnant. You would need to read the article I cited to get the full perspective on what their results indicate–they are far from clear-cut. The same thing can be said for the olfactory/pheromonal preferences of women, which vary with menstrual cycle phase–and, as always, too much of anything: muscles or pheromones is simply too much.

James V. Kohl