Physical attractiveness affects how one gets treated, but it is just a single component of one's overall “market value.” One's treatment depends on other markers of market value, including social status, competence, warmth, and any other cues of one's ability or willingness to confer benefits on partners. To completely understand biased treatment, we must also incorporate these other factors.

Mating motivations can explain attractiveness benefits, but what proximate mechanisms might serve as efficient causes of these biases? There is growing evidence that visual cues of physical attractiveness capture attention and facilitate memory, enhancing salience in ways that could underlie, for example, preferring one job applicant over another. All of these effects beg deeper questions about the meaning of attractiveness.

It is emphasized that in organizational settings, the responses to same-sex attractive others are enhanced among individuals high in intrasexual competitiveness; that especially attractive rivals who are perceived as unfriendly will induce competition; that among males, physical dominance may induce more competition than physical attractiveness; and that especially males may prefer to associate with attractive same-sex others for intrasexual collaboration.

The mating-related evolutionary explanation that Maestripieri et al. offer does not apply to (1) infants' positive biases toward attractive individuals and (2) adults' positive biases toward attractive infants and children. They are best understood when integrated into an evolutionary life history framework. I argue that the life history of positive biases toward attractive individuals is driven by fundamental trade-offs made throughout development.

All three critical points of the evolutionary explanation proposed by Maestripieri et al. may not withstand close scrutiny. Instead, there should be an alternative explanation that has nothing to do with genetic continuity, but stresses the rewarding property of attractiveness that results mainly from sociocultural value assignment and sexual experience pursuit.

An account of the “beauty premium” based only on mating motivations overlooks adaptationist models of social valuation that have broader explanatory power. We suggest a broader approach based on evolved preferences for attractive partners in multiple cooperative domains (not just mating), which accounts for many observations of attractiveness-based preferential treatment more comfortably than does the target article's mating-specific account.

Two further key aspects of prosociality as a sexual signal are explored here. First, the context in which it is used (in particular, relationship length) and, second, the different types of prosocial behaviors that exist in social interactions. Therefore, this commentary can show why prosocial behaviors are biased toward physically attractive individuals, as they can gain valuable information from them.

The target article is a qualitative review of selected findings in the physical attractiveness literature. This commentary explains why the meta-analytic approach, frequently used by other attractiveness reviewers, is preferable for drawing unbiased conclusions about the effects of attractiveness. The article's main contribution is affording a foundation for subsequent meta-analysis of the studies discussed in a subjective fashion.

Mating motives lead decision makers to favor attractive people, but this favoritism is not sufficient to create a beauty premium in competitive settings. Further, economic approaches to discrimination, when correctly characterized, could neatly accommodate the experimental and field evidence of a beauty premium. Connecting labor economics and evolutionary psychology is laudable, but mating motives do not explain the beauty premium.

Current perspectives on attractiveness-related prosocial biases emphasize the contribution of evolutionarily shaped mating drives. Here, we extend these concepts by highlighting the pivotal role of the hypothalamic peptide oxytocin in augmenting the salience and rewarding value of social stimuli, including the partner's face, thereby fostering social bonding in general and the stability of monogamous pair bonds and offspring care in particular.

This commentary makes three points: (1) the existing evidence does not consistently favor the proposed sex difference in attractiveness preferences, nor the fitness-related outcomes of attractiveness; (2) the neglected association of perceived attractiveness and trustworthiness allowed the authors to incorrectly attribute many findings solely to attractiveness, and (3) the importance accorded attractiveness in mate preferences is culturally shaped and likely evolutionarily novel.

When taking into account the chances of success, strategic mating motivations do imply a bias not toward the most attractive individuals, but toward average or mildly attractive individuals, undermining the explanation of Maestripieri et al. at a fundamental level. This leaves open the possibility of alternative explanations and calls for a full-fledged explicit model of courtship behavior.

To fully understand the attractiveness bias, we propose that contextual factors or affordances should be integrated into the mating-based evolutionary account of Maestripieri et al. We review examples highlighting the role of contextual factors in the perception of attractiveness and in attractiveness bias. These suggest contextual factors differentially afford the development of preference for attractive others into observed habits of mind.

Mating motivation likely plays a role in bias to attractive individuals, but there are other complementary theories drawn from the evolutionary literature related to competition, friendship, and leadership selection that also make relevant predictions concerning biases towards attractive individuals. The relative balance of these factors will be context dependent and so help explain why the pattern of bias is sometimes variable.

Maestripieri et al. seem to put forth an argument in which they become vulnerable to some of the same criticisms that they level against stereotype theory As a result, the explanatory utility of their account of attractiveness bias comes into question, and it is unclear whether it offers anything superior to stereotype theory in conceptual soundness.

The fact that attractive people benefit from their good looks is not bad per se. Rather, what is worrisome is the fact that unattractive people are discriminated against, and that such discrimination negatively affects many aspects of their lives. I focus on the moral implications of this discrimination and on the possible measures that could be taken to alleviate it.

Imagination, an important feature of the human mind, may be at the root of the beauty premium. The evolved human capacity for simulating the real world, developed as an adaptation to a complex social environment, may offer the key to understanding this and many other aspects of human behavior.

The influence of appearances goes well beyond physical attractiveness and includes the surprisingly powerful impact of “face-ism” – the tendency to stereotype individuals based on their facial features. A growing body of research has revealed that these face-based social attributions bias the outcomes of labor markets and experimental economic games in ways that are hard to explain via evolutionary mating motives.

Labor market and real-life studies were not designed to discriminate between evolutionary and taste-based and stereotype explanations for the beauty premium, have too many confounding effects, and lack crucial information. Smaller-stake and experimental studies provide more compelling evidence in favor of mating motives and suggest the direction of future research for the economists' field studies.

Predominant experience with females early in development results in infants developing an attractive, female-like facial representation that guides children's attention toward and affective preferences for attractive females. When combined with increased interest in the other sex at puberty, these early emerging biases might help explain the robust prosocial and financial biases men exhibit toward attractive women during adulthood.