Life History Strategies and Individual Variation in Men's Desire to Appear Muscular.

Abstract

Self-presentation has been widely studied by scholars interested in verbal and nonverbal communication. Within a mating context, previous theories of emphasize the motive of appearing physically attractive. However, people are unlikely to adopt identical strategies to present themselves as attractive, but previous theories cannot explain this variation. I propose and test in this research a life history (LH) hypothesis of self-presentation using male muscularity as a test case. Previous research showed that American men generally desire to be more muscular, and I argue that American young adults desire to be differentially muscular depending on whether they adopt a fast or slow LH strategy. I tested this hypothesis by assessing in a survey American adult men’s LH strategy and their desired level of muscularity. Analyses revealed a significant positive correlation between depression (measuring the K-dimension of LH strategy) and men’s desires for muscularity (compared to their baseline muscularity) when they were considering a short-term but not a long-term relationship. There was no evidence that measures of mate competition (another major dimension of LH strategy) correlated with desires for muscularity for either short-term or long-term relationships. These findings provided partial support for the LH hypothesis of men’s desires for muscularity.