Neck attractive? The perception of a man’s fathering skills is influenced by the size of his neck, researchers find

They say never judge a book by its cover.

But what about judging a man’s fathering skills by his… neck?

Researchers have found that our perception of how protective or nurturing a man will be toward his children is influenced by the size of his trapezius muscle.

This is the muscle that starts at the base of the neck, runs over the shoulders and extends to the middle of the back.

“We’re talking about muscles that are both connected to the neck and visible during face-to-face interaction,” says study co-author Dr. Mitch Brown.

For the study, Dr Brown from the University of Arkansas in the US and his team asked 305 people to look at four computer-generated images of the same man.

In the images, the man had neck muscles of different sizes, but everything else was the same.

The men and women were asked to rate the man in the photos on several characteristics, including how effective he would be at protecting and caring for offspring.

The images were viewed in random order and participants were not told in advance how many photos of different people they were going to view, to avoid distracting from the purpose of the study.

When the man had a larger trapezius, he was, on average, seen as a better protector of his children.

But on the other hand, he was considered worse at caring for his offspring than if he were less muscular in this area.

Dr. Brown said we evolved to use a man’s neck as an efficient way to determine his physical prowess.

It would have been important for our ancestors to quickly know if someone was strong so we could decide whether to avoid them, because of their potential to harm us, and the neck is ‘more reliable than the face and more direct than the body ‘. a cue’.

“(Assessing the neck) is a nice compromise between the immediacy of facial perception and the accuracy of body perception,” said Dr. Brown, a self-described “evolutionary psychologist with a big neck.”

‘Body signals are less direct when milliseconds can count, while faces may not be the most reliable.’

This judgment of physical prowess then translates into the perception of whether a man will be more of a protector or a caregiver of children.

‘We do not consider large trapezii to be diagnostic of nurturing due to the concurrent perception that large trapezii imply aggression,’ says Dr Brown, whose research has been published in the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology.

In the experiments of Dr. Brown also manipulated another muscle group of the neck, the sternocleidomastoids, but these had no real effect on people’s perceptions of the men’s fathering skills.

“The effects were specific to trapezii (muscles),” said Dr. Brown.

‘There appears to be a signaling value associated with trapezii aggression that is absent in sternocleidomastoids; the latter implies formidability, but there is not a certain level of hostility in it like trapezii.’

It comes after a study published in 2020 found that men with an overall ‘dad body’ were considered better fathers than those with a more toned physique.

People regard fathers with a little more weight as less dominant, and therefore warmer and more involved, researchers from the University of Southern Mississippi discovered.