Women might like their men muscle-bound and svelte, but babies prefer fatter fathers, a new study has found.
Researchers from the University of Sheffield concluded that infants favoured chubby men because their bodies were more feminine and familiar.
Psychologists showed photographs of toned male models next to images of overweight men to three groups of babies, aged three months, six months and nine months.
The infants’ response to the different body shapes was monitored by video cameras, which tracked which physique their eyes lingered on.
Analysis of the video showed that nine-month-old babies “significantly” preferred the “less attractive physique”.
Six-month-olds could tell the difference between the two bodies but showed no obvious preference, while three-month-olds showed no signs of recognising any difference.
The researchers hypothesised that babies prefer fatter bodies because they were more prevalent in society, and thus the infants were more accustomed to seeing them, and less used to rippling muscles.
“Because unattractive body shapes are more common than attractive/athletic body shapes in our everyday environment, a preference for unattractive body shapes at nine months of age suggests that preferences for particular human body shapes reflect level of exposure and familiarity rather than culturally defined stereotypes of body attractiveness,” the researchers wrote in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.
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