Study: Smiling Girls Make Guys Attractive

If you go out looking for love in bars, you might bring along a wingman. But if you're a guy looking for a girl, a new study suggests a wingwoman (properly trained) might be a better idea:

A new study set to be published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B concludes that women are more likely to find men attractive if they see other women smiling at them.

This is how the research worked:

Researchers from the University of Aberdeen in Scotland showed women pairs of pictures of men and asked them to choose the more attractive guy and rate how much more attractive he was. They then showed the women short videos with the same faces, but in each shot a woman was looking at the man with either a smile or a neutral expression. After watching the video, the women rated the men who got a smile higher than those who got the blank stare.

So guys, get a gaggle of women to stand and gaze at you adoringly while you're out looking for action.

And what should women do? Oddly enough, the study apparently didn't ask whether the smiles of the opposite sex make them more attractive to menfolk. Although the researchers did ask what men thought of other men who were getting smiles from women.

Guess what: the men thought they were less attractive:

"This latter finding suggests that within-sex competition promotes negative attitudes among men towards other men who are the target of positive social interest from women."

In other words: Guys don't like guys who look like they might get some.

I'll have what she's having [Seed] and study abstract [Facelab]