High heels as a supernormal stimulus
If high heels are so uncomfortable, why do women wear them?
Now that the holiday party season is over, many women will be gratefully tossing their high heeled shoes to the back of the wardrobe and nursing their blistered feet and sore legs. Shoes with high heels are simply more uncomfortable that flats, or at least that’s what I’ve heard from my female friends.
But if high heels are so uncomfortable, why do women wear them?
As someone who owns a pair of dress shoes but is more likely to seen gallumphing around in comfy basketball trainers, I find it hard to see why anyone would want to cram their toes into a tiny point and prop their heels up on an 8 inch stiletto. But fashion isn’t about being comfortable, it’s about looking good, and looking good usually means looking attractive. So, do high heeled shoes really make a woman appear more attractive?
You may have heard people claim that a high heel improves the shape of your lower leg, or enhances your posture, but these claims aren’t all that scientific. Paul Morris and his colleagues in the departments of Psychology and Sports and Exercise Science at the University of Portsmouth in the UK, decided to apply a little more rigor. They had 12 women who wore high heels regularly but not exclusively slip into a pair of six inch heels or a pair of flats and take a stroll on a treadmill. Meanwhile, their walking style was recorded using an 8 camera motion analysis system, similar to the setup Peter Jackson uses to capture actor Andy Serkis’s performance in the Lord of the Rings movies. Here though, Morris didn’t use the motion data to create a lifelike animated character like Gollum, but something rather simpler: a so-called point-light display. That’s a type of video where you can’t see the person who’s been recorded, but you can see how they move thanks to a number of dots — or point lights — placed at strategic locations on the body, usually joints like the hips, knees and ankles.
Thirty second clips of these point-light videos were shown to 15 men and 15 women, who rated them for attractiveness. Despite the fact that the raters could only see how the walkers moved, and had no idea about their physical appearance, women in high heels were rated as more attractive than those in flats.
In fact, women in flats were rated as 12% less attractive than women in heels.
Morris and his colleagues also performed a complicated gait analysis, the sort of thing Olympic athletes are subjected to in order to measure the efficiency with which they move. They found that high heeled shoes produced a walking pattern combining reduced knee bending with shorter stride length and greater hip rotation, all of which are more typical of a female than a male walking style. In other words, high heels might add to the biological differences between men and women, making women walk like especially feminine females. This, in turn, might make them more attractive.
So, despite the fact that wearing high heels can result in chronic pain, it looks like six inch heels are here to stay. But when you’re out enjoying the January sales, remember to stock up on blister plasters too.
Morris, P. H., White, J., Morrison, E. R., & Fisher, K. (in press). High heels as supernormal stimuli: How wearing high heels affects judgements of female attractiveness. Evolution and Human Behavior. Read summary
The content of this post first appeared in the December 2012 episode of The Psychology of Attractiveness Podcast.
Photograph by Mambomamba Bamboo is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
