Are There Differences in Experts’ and Lay Assessors’ Attractiveness Judgments of Non-Professional Men’s Dance/Gait Movements?

Studies investigating attractiveness perceptions of men’s dance have suggested that individual differences in dance performance provide mating-related information (Fink et al., 2015). “Good” male dancers, in the perceptions of these raters, displayed larger and more variable movements, especially in the head/neck and trunk region (Neave et al., 2011). Women judged these types of dancers to be higher on attractiveness, and they allocated more visual attention to their moves (Weege et al., 2012), as compared to the moves of dancers they judged to be “bad.” Also, dancers’ physical strength has been found to correlate positively with these lay assessments of men’s (but not women’s) dance attractiveness (Hugill et al., 2009; McCarty et al., 2013; Weege et al., 2015a). Research evidence has been less clear regarding relationships between dancers’ personalities and these dance attractiveness ratings. Weege et al. (2015b) found no relationships between men’s self-reported personality characteristics on the Big-Five personality factors (Costa & McCrae, 1992) and women’s assessments of their personality, based on the men’s dance movements. However, dance attractiveness ratings have correlated negatively with dancers’ self-reported neuroticism, suggesting that raters attributed and assigned preferences to aspects of dancers’ personalities from basic kinematic characteristics of the dancers’ movements (amplitude, speed, and velocity; see also Koppensteiner & Grammer, 2010, 2011).

These past studies on dance perception in the context of interpersonal attraction have relied primarily on non-professional raters and dancers as participants. Despite individual variation in experience and dance frequency among” non-dancers”, both the lay judgments and the dance movements of “non-dancers” are likely to differ from those of professional dancers. The reasoning implicit in the prior research emphasis on laypersons is that, regardless of observer differences in attractiveness perceptions of skill differences among dancers, the attractiveness of characteristic body movements will be reliably discerned. Variations in dance attractiveness ratings based on brief movement sequences (i.e., without identity and contextual information) have seemed to suggest that motion information alone affects attractiveness judgments. Although culture-specific preferences in attractiveness assessments have been reported, the identification of what represents “good” and “bad” dancing has seemed to be shared across Western cultures (Fink et al., 2014). It could be argued—especially for attractiveness judgments of non-professional dancers—that apparent similarities between judgments by lay assessors and dance experts are due to a type of subdued dance movements shown by lay dancers who rarely exaggerate dance movements in the manner of professional dancers. However, an absence of research in this area leaves this possibility untested, and it remains unclear whether men’s dance attractiveness as perceived by professional raters would be as influenced by mating related information as seems to have been the case for lay raters.

Prior research has suggested that familiarity with the observed dance action influences dance perception such that experts process motion information differently than non-experts (Calvo-Merino et al., 2010). Dance expertise modulates the observer’s visual sensitivity to biological movements (Orlandi et al., 2017), possibly because extensive training and practice has improved the rater’s motor skills and body awareness, leading to activational changes in the rater’s Action Observation Network (AON; e.g., Buccino et al., 2004; Cross et al., 2009; Neal & Kilner, 2010). The AON integrates observed actions with individual motor skills and has shown stronger activation among expert than non-expert dancers (Burzynska et al., 2017). Thus, there may be differences in functional brain connectivity between these groups due to differences in individual skills, repertoire, and training (Calvo-Merino et al., 2005; Turella et al., 2013); and these differences may affect the aesthetic assessment of dance (Kirsch et al., 2013; Kirsch & Cross, 2018). Many experimental studies investigating the neurobiological underpinnings of dance expertise and their effects on perception have either used choreographed dance movements or have focused on specific types of dance (e.g., ballet; Calvo-Merino et al., 2005, 2010) and compared dance experts’ with non-experts’ responses to these stimuli. Yet, studies focusing instead on dance attractiveness and interpersonal attraction have typically recruited non-professional dancers as assessors, leaving open the question of whether there are differences between lay assessors’ and dance experts’ attractiveness assessments of non-professional dancers.

To better understand any differences in dancer attractiveness perceptions between lay and expert dance observers, we presented brief sequences of non-professional men’s dance movements to both dance experts and lay assessors who rated them for attractiveness. To identify any specific perceptual differences between these groups, we also collected and compared their separate assessments of the non-professional male dancers’ gait attractiveness. Unlike prior researchers who compared perceptions of dance experts’ and laypersons’ specific dance choreography (e.g., Brownlow et al., 1997), we did not expect our two rater groups to show differences in their attractiveness ratings of non-professional men’s “free” dance or gait movements. We expected individual, but not group, differences in these attractiveness assessments, as individual differences have been reported in previous studies using similar stimuli (e.g., Neave et al., 2011; Weege et al., 2015a, 2015b). We also expected to find a positive correlation between ratings of dance and gait attractiveness.

The main findings of the present study were: (a) dance experts provided higher attractiveness ratings than lay assessors; (b) men’s gaits were judged higher on attractiveness than their corresponding dances; and (c) male dance experts provided higher attractiveness ratings than female dance experts, whereas, for lay assessors, this gender difference tended to be in the opposite direction. We did not detect an interaction effect of Group * Type on attractiveness ratings. This would have suggested a difference in attractiveness assessments between dance experts and lay assessors for one of the two types of body movement (i.e. dance or gait). One might have speculated that expertise in professional dance might cause dance experts to be less positive about non-dancers, compared to lay assessors because dance experts regularly view professional dance choreography; but this was not found. In fact, dance experts (especially men) provided higher attractiveness judgments than did lay assessors. Moreover, there was no Group * Type * Gender interaction detected for attractiveness assessments, suggesting that the absence of a difference between dance experts and lay assessors for (non-professional) men’s dances and their gaits generalized across men and women.

We expected no rating differences between dance experts and lay assessors, but we did expect individual differences between raters. More specifically, we reasoned that observers with a professional background in dancing might be more sensitive to individual variation in body movements, and might thus pay closer attention to the presence (or absence) of certain characteristics (see Pollick et al., 2013). Asking dance experts and lay assessors about the importance of several capacities and skills as determinants of male dance attractiveness revealed several group differences between assessors. Dance experts emphasized musicality, muscular strength, coordination, emotional expression, and artistic abilities. However, these group differences in areas of perceived dance movement importance did not translate into group differences in attractiveness ratings of men’s dances and gaits between dance experts and lay assessors. We consider it plausible that these findings may have been different, had these raters’ judgments been directed toward professional dance choreography, as there would have then been specific factors professional judges would likely have considered, following both guidelines provided by professional dance associations and these raters’ personal experiences.

The fact that men’s gaits received more positive judgments than their dance movements was unexpected, but this finding applied to both groups of assessors and was independent of their gender. Dance, and “good” dancing, in particular, is a complex behavioral expression for both professional and non-professional dancers. Although people are sensitive to individual differences in men’s gait (Fink et al., 2016, 2017), gait movements show less variation than dance movements, perhaps contributing to the more positive assessments of men’s gait than dance. Gait may have been less likely than dance to produce a polarizing or display on the attractiveness dimension. Fink et al. (2014, 2015) have suggested that dance is particularly relevant in mate selection because of its power to provide information about individual variation in mating-related qualities. Because of gender-specific interest in mating-related quality cues, men and women may assess dances (and gaits) of opposite-gender individuals selectively. For example, women may prefer “good” male dancers as mates because this attribute signals strength and vigor to them (Neave et al., 2011), and men may judge women’s dances and their gaits higher in attractiveness when these movements are recorded in times of high (vs. low) fertility (Fink et al., 2012). Despite these theories, we did not detect gender differences in the attractiveness ratings of either dance experts or lay assessors, except that male dance experts were more positive than female dance experts about men’s gait movements. Whether or not this difference can be generalized as a meaningful and robust finding in replicating studies will require further investigation. Our findings should be interpreted with caution given our small sample sizes, especially when comparing male and female expert raters.

In a related observation, possibly due to insufficient statistical power, we found only one statistically significant relationship (sexual expression and gait attractiveness for dance experts) between ratings of the importance of various skills and capacities for men’s dance attractiveness. The patterns of the relationships we observed among dance experts and lay assessors seem noteworthy. While it may seem intuitive that dance experts would be perceived importance in several skills and capacities for men’s dance attractiveness, the absence of observed stronger relationship perceptions among lay assessors was surprising and would seem to reflect, in part, their experience differences in assessing dance movements. Dance experts are trained to evaluate several aspects of dance, whereas lay assessors provide judgments intuitively.

Visual and physical experiences and skills of raters can affect their perception and aesthetic appraisal of dance (Calvo-Merino et al., 2006). Most prior studies supporting this effect considered specific forms of dance, such as ballet. Torrents et al. (2013, 2015) reported relationships between kinematic characteristics of dance and dance experts’ “beauty” assessments, similar to results obtained with non-experts. Specifically, Torrents et al. (2015) found that independent of expertise, positive dance assessments were predicted by basic movement characteristics such as movement amplitude. Thus, aesthetic perception when observing isolated specific contemporary dance movements was similar for raters of different dance backgrounds. This result seems consistent with studies that found, even with non-professional dancers, that individual differences in dance attractiveness were driven by certain kinematic characteristics. Bronner and Shippen (2015) noted that, in ballet, dancers make their movements attractive by making them appear effortless. Similarly, apparent effortlessness in displaying vigorous and skillful body movements may make men’s dances appealing – not among humans but also in other taxa (Barske et al., 2011; Byers et al., 2010).

This study found that dance experts provided higher attractiveness judgments of non-professional men’s dances and gaits than did lay assessors, and this rater difference was larger for male than female dance expert judges. Dance experts, more than lay assessors, emphasized the importance of several skills and capacities as determinants of men’s dance attractiveness. Among many variables that might be specifically addressed in replication studies, we particularly recommend having dance experts and lay assessors rate professional dances as “stimuli” rather than the freestyle dances used in this study. In addition to asking raters about their specific determinants of dance attractiveness, it would be useful to secure ratings of these determinants to explain what factors drive visual attractiveness decisions.

We thank Bettina Weege, Nick Neave, and Kristofor McCarty for their support with data collection, and Vladimir Selivanov - Vice president of the Russian Dance Sport Federation (FDSARR) - for his assistance with the recruitment of Russian dance professionals. Two anonymous reviewers and the editor provided valuable suggestions to an earlier version of the manuscript.

Part of the work was conducted during the stay of two authors (BF, YA) at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg in Delmenhorst (Germany). This study was conducted within the scope of the program of fundamental studies of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, RAS, Moscow (YA) and the Basic Research Program of 2019 at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (MLB); and funded by the German Science Foundation, DFG, FI1450/7-2, and the Leibniz ScienceCampus Primate Cognition (BF).