Men don't need to sink a load of pints in order to get the "beer goggles" effect.
Researchers found that a man given a blurred photo of a woman will see her as more attractive than she really is.
But a woman given a blurred image of a man will see him as less handsome than he really is.
It’s thought that men evolved to give women the benefit of the doubt looks-wise in order not to miss out on potential opportunities to mate.
People have concealed their real looks since the dawn of our species, the research published in the journal Evolution and Human Behaviour said.
“Physical appearance enhancement behaviours, which range from cosmetics to clothing to combing hair are ubiquitous across both time and space,” it said.
“They occur in virtually every known culture and may date all the way back to the emergence of homosapiens, or perhaps even earlier.”
An ancestral man did not have much to lose from making a bad choice about a potential mate.
Women, on the other hand, evolved to be less gung-ho because regrettable mating decisions had more consequences for them.
In ancestral environments, babies without a father were more likely to die, and women were less able to go on and mate again compared with men.
The study involved 398 heterosexual men and women, who were shown blurred and clear pictures of 24 unfamiliar opposite-sex faces.
Lead researcher Dr David Lewis, from Murdoch University in Australia, said the biases could affect how men and women behave when dating online.
“One area of dating in the modern world where these biases could be particularly relevant is online dating,” he said.
“When a man views a woman’s online dating profile, he may be more likely to ‘swipe right’ even if that profile is missing a great deal of information.
“When a woman is in a similar situation evaluating a man’s profile, she may be less likely to ‘like’ or ‘match’ that man’s profile.
“If so, that could eliminate the possibility of that man and woman ever interacting.”
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