Intelligence and good looks are qualities everyone likes in a partner, but a new study finds that women generally prefer men in moderation.
Researchers at the University of Western Australia found that women find extraordinarily handsome or smart men somewhat undesirable.
The same phenomenon was not observed in men, who were perfectly well-attracted to extreme intelligence and stunning looks in potential female partners.
Hundreds of people were asked about what they found attractive in a potential romantic partner. Participants rated four qualities base on how desirable they were — looks, intelligence, kindness and being easy-going, reports the Daily Mail.
The subjects of the study were asked to say how attracted they would be to potential partners who were, for example, smarter than just 1 percent of the population i.e. real dummies.
Then they were asked about the attractiveness of a potential partner who exhibited the same quality more than 10, 25, 50, 75, 90 and then 99 percent of the population.
For each percentage, participants rated the qualities on a six-point scale from 'extremely unattracted' to 'extremely attracted.'
For the most part, the more kind, clever, good-looking and easy-going a potential partner was, the more attractive they were rated.
But female participants' attitudes about intelligence and looks in males began to regress at the very top of the scale.
"[The] sort of continuous measurement used in our research is making it clear that several of these characteristics are associated with a threshold effect," said study co-author Dr. Gilles Gignac. "In other words, you can have too much of a good thing."
The findings show women believe a male partner would be attractive as long as he wasn't smarter than as much as 99 percent of the population. The same drop-off in the scale was observed for physical attractiveness and for being easy-going.
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