A specific facial proportion shapes our assumptions about men’s parenting styles

A new study indicates that people tend to view men with wider faces as more capable of protecting children. The findings suggest that facial proportions guide our assumptions about a person’s parenting style, motivations, and mating strategies. The research was published in Evolutionary Psychological Science.

The study centers on the facial width-to-height ratio, a physical measurement that compares the horizontal distance across a person’s face from cheek to cheek against the vertical distance from the upper lip to the brow. Past research established that wider male faces tend to signal physical strength and aggression. For example, a 2015 meta-analysis found that men with larger facial width-to-height ratios are consistently perceived by others as more physically formidable and dominant.

Building on this, a 2021 study provided evidence that people actively prefer to recruit men with wider faces for group roles that require physical strength and defense. Separate research has also indicated that physical strength translates into specific parenting stereotypes. For instance, a 2022 study found that people judge physically strong men as better suited for protective parenting roles.

The new study merges these lines of inquiry. From an evolutionary perspective, human mothers historically faced intense physical and caloric demands when raising children. Identifying a mate or ally capable of offering physical protection would have provided a distinct survival advantage. The research team tested whether the facial cues that make a man look like a good fighter also lead people to view him as a better, more motivated protector of children.

“What motivated me to conduct this research was a growing interest in the parental motivational systems that clarified the multidimensional nature of parenting that necessitates people to make tradeoffs in some parental decisions,” lead author Mitch Brown, a teaching assistant professor in the Department of Psychological Science at the University of Arkansas, told PsyPost.

“Consideration of the tradeoff between protection and nurturance was the next logical step for formidability research with its own tradeoff logic,” Brown explained. “With facial width-to-height ratio being a common route to infer formidability with the primacy of face-to-face contact, while similarly connoting both anger and strength, the feature seemed to be an ideal way to model this tradeoff in perceptions.”

To investigate this, the researchers conducted four separate experiments. In the first study, 101 undergraduate students evaluated 20 standardized photographs of White male faces displaying neutral expressions. Half of the faces featured high facial width-to-height ratios, and the other half featured low ratios. The participants rated how effective each man would be at protecting and nurturing his children.

The participants rated the men with wider faces as more effective at protection, giving them an average score of 4.23 on a 7-point scale, compared to 3.84 for the men with narrower faces. The difference in nurturing ratings between the two groups was not statistically significant.

The second study tasked 111 participants with building a hypothetical coalition. Viewing the same set of faces, participants were asked to select up to five men who would be best at protecting offspring, and up to five who would be best at nurturing offspring. The participants also rated the faces for physical strength, aggressiveness, and warmth.

When selecting a team for protection, participants chose the men with wider faces much more often, picking an average of 2.78 men with high facial width-to-height ratios compared to just 1.15 men with low ratios. For the nurturing task, choices were evenly split. The tendency to choose wider-faced men for protection was strongly associated with perceiving them as stronger and more aggressive.

The third study, involving 194 participants, investigated how the brain processes these facial cues. Participants evaluated the same faces, but half the images were shown upright, and half were inverted upside down. Turning a face upside down disrupts configural processing, which is how the brain evaluates the overall arrangement of facial features rather than looking at individual parts in isolation.

When the faces were upright, the men with wider faces again appeared more effective at protection. However, when the faces were inverted, this protective advantage was not statistically significant. This suggests that perceiving protective ability relies on taking in the whole facial arrangement at once. In contrast, the men with narrower faces were still seen as slightly more effective at nurturing even when the images were upside down, suggesting that nurturing judgments might rely on specific, independent facial features.

“None of these results particularly surprised me, though I was particularly interested to see that the effects for Study 3 did not provide a clear answer for how perceivers view parental ability when facial process is disrupted,” Brown said. “Although perceivers were still able to infer men’s parental abilities through an inverted face, the effect was substantially muted from when the faces were presented upright.”

“This suggests that perceivers may be inferring a certain configuration of formidability that is based on specific figure,” he continued. “The confluence of these traits could have led selection to favor awareness of the broad constellation of formidability through various features that appears to be a broad judgment instead of many small ones, particularly ones that could be constrained by linguistic differences across cultures.”

However, Brown was careful to note that the facial width-to-height ratio itself is not necessarily a single evolutionary trait linked directly to hormones. “I am not indicating that fWHR itself is selected, nor am I arguing that the total feature is indicative of testosterone,” he clarified. “Rather, there appears to be a broad signal value that is apparent to perceivers through fWHR that is consistently informing perceptions of men’s parental abilities.”

The fourth study focused on the men’s presumed motivations rather than their abilities. A group of 206 participants rated the faces using modified questionnaires to assess how driven the men seemed to protect or nurture children. They also rated the men’s presumed interest in casual sexual encounters versus committed, long-term relationships.

The results indicated that observers assumed the men with wider faces were more motivated to protect children, scoring 3.51 on a 7-point scale compared to 3.40 for the narrower-faced men. Conversely, they viewed the men with wider faces as less motivated to nurture children, scoring 3.11 compared to 3.47. The wider-faced men also appeared more interested in short-term mating strategies, while the narrower-faced men seemed more inclined toward long-term relationships.

“The effects in this study are fairly large, which may reflect an apparently loud signal value in the faces,” Brown noted. “However, perceptions of ability appeared larger than that of motivation. This could reflect that fWHR may itself be a more reliable cue to physical ability rather than motivational states or traits.”

While laboratory settings isolate specific variables like face shape, real-world judgments involve much more context. “Additionally, having more information about a person beyond initial impressions would be informative in broader perceptions (thanks for stating something obvious that ignores the purpose of isolating variables, Reviewer 2),” Brown added. “But ancestral conditions likely saw individuals having to infer information relatively quickly without having the chance for fuller interactions, which may lead to an advantage in forming stereotypes with minimal information.”

These findings are in line with research covered by PsyPost in 2022, which found that physically stronger men are perceived as more effective protectors of offspring. The new study echoes this pattern, though it examined facial proportions rather than physical upper-body strength. Similar results were also seen in a 2023 study covered by PsyPost, which found that large neck muscles lead perceivers to rate men as more effective at protecting offspring.

However, the new results stand in tension with research covered by PsyPost later that same year. That 2023 study found no association between facial masculinity and a man’s actual or perceived involvement in paternal care. It is worth noting that the new study specifically evaluated perceptions of a man’s ability to protect offspring based on the facial width-to-height ratio, whereas the earlier study measured general perceptions of direct paternal care based on overall facial sexual dimorphism.

As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind. The researchers relied on a specific set of standardized photographs, which only showed faces and provided no information about body size. While facial width is associated with physical formidability, a person’s actual body mass could heavily influence these judgments in the real world.

Additionally, the participants were undergraduate students drawn from Western university populations. People from different cultures evaluate facial features differently, and these specific stereotypes might not translate universally across all societies. Future research could explore whether these facial cues align with reality by measuring men’s actual facial proportions and comparing them to their self-reported parenting styles and actions.

“Despite how informative fWHR may ultimately be for these stereotypes, it remains important to recognize that any kernel of truth may not be enough to make broad inferences for every part of normal life as an imperfect rule,” Brown said. “This research is merely identifying how facial structures connoting physical prowess forms the basis of stereotypes that could have been historically functional to maintain one’s fitness within group living.”

Looking ahead, the researchers hope to see how these initial impressions affect high-stakes, real-world decisions. “My next steps are to apply these ideas into legal domains,” Brown told PsyPost. “Although perceptions could be based in potential kernels of truth and could have an ancestral function, it would nonetheless be inappropriate for perceivers to rely on visual information as the basis of legal decision-making without concomitant evidence.”

“I am conducting research currently seeing how fWHR informs perceptions of whether men should receive custody rights in divorce proceedings,” he continued. “In other words, would the inferred aggression from fWHR impede fair treatment under the law.”

Ultimately, the findings highlight the complex and sometimes contradictory nature of how we interpret physical strength. “This research should reflect an effort to identify ambivalence in the signal value of formidability, which may make research on the topic more challenging to discuss,” Brown concluded. “Formidability is a wide concept with many facets in the broad construct. Future research would benefit from trying to parse those components apart, which may clarify the heterogeneity in the literature.”

The study, “Formidable Facial Structures Inform Perceptions of Men’s Ability to Protect Offspring,” was authored by Mitch Brown, Donald F. Sacco, Nicholas P. Maxwell, Lindsey E. Eagan, and Steven G. Young.