For 30 years, researchers and journalists have been saying that most men really don't like the degree of thinness that is characteristic of fashion models and in the name of which other women torture themselves with diets.

In a new study, US authors concluded that women greatly overestimate the extent to which men find skinny girls attractive. The researchers studied men's and women's perceptions of the appearance of fashion models depicted in the illustrations in magazines, as well as how, according to representatives of the opposite sex, the other would evaluate the shape of the model.

The first survey involved more than 500 college students who rated the size and attractiveness of 13 models from women's fashion magazines. Respondents also indicated how, in their opinion, the other gender would evaluate models on these parameters. In the second phase of the experiment, more than 700 U.S. men and women aged 18 to 86, randomly selected on Amazon, performed the same task.

It turned out that both men and women overestimate how perfect their partners seem to be the bodies of models of the opposite sex (both in terms of thinness and attractiveness). This misconception was more pronounced in the case of women who evaluated how men would react to the bodies of slender girls.

There is a lot of evidence that women are mistaken when they think that men prefer thinner ones.

While much of the previous research was based on the results of experiments in which participants were asked to evaluate the silhouettes of women's bodies, the authors of the new study took a different approach. They asked respondents to evaluate images of real women in the media.