Good performance-high attractiveness effect: an empirical study on the association between athletes’ rankings and their facial attractiveness

Face attractiveness has been found to play an important role in human evolution, possibly because highly attractive faces were more likely to be associated with good health and reproductive ability. It is important to explore the association between athletic performance and face attractiveness of the world-class elite athletes to further understand the dominance of physical fitness of facial features in competitive sporting events environment. In this study, Experiment 1, Experiment 2, and Experiment 3 investigated the association between facial attractiveness scores and athletic performance in the conditions of absence of sports information, with sports information, and real-time measurement during the Tokyo Olympics, respectively. Experiment 4 further explored the variations in facial features of athletes in different sports through the sport judgment task. It was found that athletes with better performance were considered more attractive, demonstrating the existence of the good performance-high attractiveness effect. Female athletes showed a good performance-high attractiveness effect in the 3-meter diving and floor exercises, which emphasised fine control and aesthetics. Male athletes had the similar effect in the 100-meter sprint, although it was not so robust as the female athletes. Compared with triathlon, high attractiveness was considered to be the facial feature that floor exercise athletes should have. In conclusion, this study found that sports performance can be reflected in face attractiveness, and that different skill related physical fitness requirements have different performance patterns in face attractiveness, providing new evidence for the evolutionary theory of facial attractiveness.