Why Do Athletes Have More Attractive Faces

here is a concept to consider our athletic people really more beautiful because the evolutionary biomarkers actually all add up to them being more beautiful in theory I mean think about it they're genetically advantaged because that's why they're athlete which means more symmetry less diseases all those benefits they are physically fit lower levels of body fat better for ensure robusticity sharper facial features and so while Attractive people can be found in any environment they seem to be more common amongst the athletes and so is there some truth to the idea that attractive people generally are typically

more athletic or more correctly are athletic people more attractive the current literature regarding facial attractiveness and athletes does actually have a research study into this let's break down the study and some reasons why athletes May in fact be better looking there is also an observable Phenomenon with more skilled athletes tend to be more attractive than less skilled ones and that's a weird question we have to answer lastly we're going to examine something called the positive social knowledge Theory outlined by leital in their study a paper by back in Bull 2017 May lend us some perspectives

into the beauty athlete relationship while research that directly states that athletes are more attractive appears to be lacking the paper does have some implications according to backing bull more skilled athletes are also more attractive and in that study she notes that there is a significant correlation between physical attractiveness and athletic performance amongst tennis players though it may not be the sport itself which results in a more attractive phase and so we're going to examine the reasons why that is in just a second but the study actually concludes that coaches or managers would benefit from hiring

more attractive tennis players and this is because the more attractive players tend to be more successful which results in higher prize earnings and greater sponsorships all of these findings applied to both men and women and clearly facial attractiveness is an important factor even for athletes usage by mutz and Maya confirmed this where noting that soccer players public attention is contingent on their athletic performance and their physical attractiveness I mean just look at Ronaldo the men and women who are both skilled and attractive are the most popular and back in Bull would indicate that the two

go hand in hand these findings raise some questions as to why the more skilled athletes are more physically attractive the answer to that question could perhaps be extended to answer why athletes are more attractive than non-athletes we're going to touch on some of the social reasons for why that is but there may also be a physical one from an evolutionary perspective for one the more skilled athletes may just be in better shape resulting in the increased performance it is also the case that a more attractive base views into underlying health where an athlete who has

developed healthier may be more efficient at their respective sport for example a strong jaw indicates healthy Dental facial development the growth of the jaw is often associated with airwave function you can imagine where we're going with this where an athlete with proper Airway function would have an advantage in having a strong defined jaw and thus making them conventionally attractive in the book sleep a comprehensive handbook Dr Lee Chong notes that maxillary or mandibular hyperplasia the growth or not lack of growth from the upper and lower jaw is a representation of the most common contributing skeletal

causes of obstructive sleep apnea basically having an underdeveloped jaw can obstruct your Airway and that is not to say that you shouldn't have a chisel Jaw from Granite To Be An Athlete but a well-developed jaw is a pretty big indicator that you have a good chance of being a pretty successful athlete there may also be an alternative explanation for why athletes are judged as more attractive at least according to a paper by leital where this paper investigated the relationship between video game skills sexual dimorphism and facial attractiveness all of the concepts they discuss can be

applied to basically any social environment but other research by wangital and Quinn and Mark Ray also emphasize that social information does play a role in judgment's official attractiveness this is common sense but how does it really apply to athletes and especially the famous ones well people tend to attribute positive social judgments to famous athletes because they are highly skilled at their Sport and this is especially true if the person judging also plays a sport or watched it enough the aforementioned papers the two papers we just spoke about all discuss a bottom-up visual component to attractiveness

as well as a top-down social knowledge component so we're looking at why these people are attractive from two different Frameworks of beauty where they're physically attractive but also they're socially attractive and the visual approach covers things like averageness and sexual dimor orphism we follow the channel you know those are things that make a face attractive but also social knowledge can impact perceptions of attractiveness with no other social information one's facial cues you know the dimorphisms the averageness how symmetrical your face is are the only way to assess your attractiveness an example would be using a

dating app but you'll provide no other information about yourself in the bio on the other hand most normal people know a few things about famous athletes you know we know Ronaldo has a lot of money Messi has a lot of money Gerard Pique a lot of money and something about Shakira that positive social information is available primarily through social media people associate Cristiano Ronaldo's success with positive characteristics like competence because he's a successful athlete he can probably be a successful programmer if you really wanted to and so he has conventionally attractive visual cues but that's

only one side of the coin in fact athletes seem to maximize both the visual side of facial attractiveness and the social side most sports such as track and field tennis football basketball all require you to be in shape and this means being at a relatively low body fat percentage and carrying a healthy amount of muscular development and so not all athletes fit conventional standards of facial attractiveness through the averageness the dimorphism disproportion symmetry or even having defined bone structure but athletes have maximized their potential and this is key to why most athletes tend to be

more attractive than the average person even if sport itself may not make a attractive face that sub-population of athletes pre-selects for being in shape which often is tied to facial attractiveness meaning they're typically worn attractive more or less and they become athletes second not the other way around this concept can also be applied to lesser known athletes or even young athletes in school men typically find athletic women attractive and vice versa and there are visual and health cues that explain some of that however there also seems to be a social Aura around athletes in high

school and University where in the US for example collegia Sports command a lot of attention money and buyers and if you intend one of those Sports schools then it's almost impossible to not have some kind of social bias towards athletes as being Superstars the same can be said for high school and universities in other parts of the world or maybe less so like in countries like Australia we don't really care about athletes that much but there is still a social element to being an athlete no doubt about that it also seems to be the case

that the sport itself is largely irrelevant the paper by Lai atal demonstrates that this applies even to people that play video games esport athletes the only caveat is that if the sport is more obscure like table tennis ping pong juggling then most people don't have enough information to provide positive social knowledge I mean if you're the best jungler in League of Legends other than other League of Legends players people don't really care and they don't know what that means but you could be making millions of dollars a year this is why less of attractive athletes

Encompass mainly the most popular sports and this includes Olympic sports football basketball tennis to name a few lyotal noted that for non-gamers the gaming skill did not influence their perception of facial attractiveness in other words a girl who knows nothing about gymnastics wouldn't appreciate the level of skill and difficulty that entails and she would rely on visual cues to determine somebody's facial attractiveness like a male gymnast although most people do have at least some basic recognition that being top one percent in any sport is a difficult idea even at a physical aspect but on the

other hand lots of people simply don't play video games for example so this doesn't apply strictly to video games but it does to a lot of physical Sports this is why the athlete Beauty bias applies to most sports except for the really obscure ones video games are a unique example even though they are still quite popular but still most people don't really have a positive social perception regarding video games usually they think their basement dwelling neckbeards but even if they do there are many different kinds of video games out there is a world-class Tetris player

the same as a world-class social Esports player like maybe again League of Legends lyotol does give some evidence that the athlete Beauty buyer still extends to Gamers but it requires positive social knowledge meaning that you have to be a gamer of that game itself to understand that this person is a top one percent player and get that beauty bias so with all this being said there is enough evidence to conclude that the truth to athletes being more beautiful is in fact a real bias we've touched on a few of these in this video but this

is generally the theme of what we've covered in most of the videos on the channel most interesting of which is positive social knowledge which relates to the halo effect which I'm sure many of you have heard of where you get positive attributes ascribed to you just for being physically attractive or positive social knowledge is a similar bias there are physical differences as well between athletes and non-athletes where athletes generally have to stay in shape for most sports from F1 to football there is also a selection bias whereby athletes are typically selected for their ability to

stay in shape or having healthy identifacial development and more correctly having better genetic Health they don't have the special facial shapes that is exclusively gained through sports but if you want to find attractive facial structure look no further than the world's top models because athletes are not selected for their beauty it's just a second byproduct that comes from their sport official attractiveness is more a combination of genetics chance and environmental factors because they're not selected to be good looking just like models athletes are also an excellent shape and as a byproduct of that they tend

to be more attractive than the average person that's really the question we're trying to answer here though most athletes may not have the same model-esque bone structure they are doing the best with the facial features that they were dealt and it's not what they're selected for in the first place even among athletes there is a beauty bias so more attractive athletes are more successful and skilled and they will be more likely to gain higher paying contracts and sponsorships because at the end of the day sport is really for the entertainment of the masses and so

we're all at risk of preferring more better looking Sportsmen's and women's but overall evolutionary physical fitness explains most of why athletes are considered beautiful and social perceptions explains the rest of it this doesn't mean that all athletes are attractive obviously but it is an observable Trend and the facial appearance of athletes do vary just like they do in the general population but on average athletes are more attractive than the average person that being said if you'd like to learn more about your face where you sit on this spell curve attractive and less attractive and your

facial morphology the shape itself and get an assessment performed by a team of doctors and dentists over at the coup's website as always I'll catch you all in the next one