Figure 2. An example of a quartet used in Study 2.

A Delphi-based computer program was used to present the virtual women’s faces. For a given rater, four faces of the same virtual woman were selected, depending on the rater’s own traits (initially recorded in the computer program by the observer; see table 1). These four faces corresponded to the four cases of preferences: homogamy (the face displayed similar character states as the rater), heterogamy (the face displayed opposite character states), recessivity (the face displayed recessive character states) and dominant (the face displayed dominant character states). The rater was instructed to click on the woman that he would prefer to build a family with. Images are from virtual subjects.