Among other untested critiques of the methods used in extant studies of women’s preferences for masculine male faces, Scott and colleagues argue that a two-alternative forced-choice (2AFC) paradigm with manipulated stimuli that differ in a single dimension (shape masculinity) should not be used to assess masculinity preferences because such a method can artificially induce preferences where none would be detected using other methods, such as rating paradigms. Here, I experimentally test this claim by directly comparing masculinity preferences measured using identical stimuli in both a 2AFC paradigm and a rating paradigm. Contrary to Scott and colleagues’ speculation, the 2AFC masculinity preference score (1) was less, rather than more, different from chance than the rating score, (2) positively correlated with the rating score (r = .58) and (3) predicted women’s actual and ideal partner’s masculinity, while the rating score did not. These findings highlight the need to experimentally test suspected methodological problems before dismissing studies that used these methodologies.
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