Kind toward whom? Mate preferences for personality traits are target specific

The long and short of mistress relationships: Sex-differentiated mate preferences reflect a compromise of mating ideals

OBJECTIVE

Evolved mate preferences have taken center stage in evolutionary psychology research, yet this literature has been fairly muted on mate preferences for extrapair partners. Here, we examined the mate preferences for mistress relationships (the traits that men prioritize in a mistress and mistresses prioritize in their male partners) and compared these preferences to those of short- and long-term relationships.

METHOD

In two studies (N_{Study 1a}  = 104, N_{Study 1b}  = 191), we derived dimensions of mate preferences through exploratory factor analyses. In subsequent studies (N_{Study 2}  = 219, N_{Study 3}  = 101), we employed a budget allocation paradigm, where participants designed their ideal mates for different relationship types (short-term, long-term, and mistress relationships).

RESULTS

Whereas men focused on fulfilling short-term mating ideals (by prioritizing physical attractiveness) in a mistress relationship, women focused on fulfilling long-term (but also some short-term) mating ideals (prioritizing both physical attractiveness and social status) for a mistress relationship.

CONCLUSION

Findings indicate that mistress relationships reflect a compromise of men's and women's (conflicting) mating ideals and contribute to an understanding of relationships that are neither completely short- nor long-term in nature.

Rational information search in welfare-tradeoff cognition

One of the most important dimensions along which we evaluate others is their propensity to value our welfare: we like people who are disposed to incur costs for our benefit and who refrain from imposing costs on us to benefit themselves. The evolutionary importance of social valuation in our species suggests that humans have cognitive mechanisms that are able to efficiently extract information about how much another person values them. Here I test the hypothesis that people are spontaneously interested in the kinds of events that have the most potential to reveal such information. In two studies, I presented participants (Ns = 216; 300) with pairs of dilemmas that another individual faced in an economic game; for each pair, I asked them to choose the dilemma for which they would most like to see the decision that the individual had made. On average, people spontaneously selected the choices that had the potential to reveal the most information about the individual's valuation of the participant, as quantified by a Bayesian ideal search model. This finding suggests that human cooperation is supported by sophisticated cognitive mechanisms for information-gathering.

Why Warmth Matters More Than Competence: A New Evolutionary Approach

Multiple lines of evidence suggest that there are two major dimensions of social perception, often called warmth and competence, and that warmth is prioritized over competence in multiple types of social decision-making. Existing explanations for this prioritization argue that warmth is more consequential for an observer's welfare than is competence. We present a new explanation for the prioritization of warmth based on humans' evolutionary history of cooperative partner choice. We argue that the prioritization of warmth evolved because ancestral humans faced greater variance in the warmth of potential cooperative partners than in their competence but greater variance in competence over time within cooperative relationships. These each made warmth more predictive than competence of the future benefits of a relationship, but because of differences in the distributions of these traits, not because of differences in their intrinsic consequentiality. A broad, synthetic review of the anthropological literature suggests that these conditions were characteristic of the ecologies in which human social cognition evolved, and agent-based models demonstrate the plausibility of these selection pressures. We conclude with future directions for the study of preferences and the further integration of social and evolutionary psychology.

Attraction to Physical and Psychological Features of Children in Child-Attracted Persons

In an online survey of 274 self-identified child-attracted persons (CAPs), we examined the attraction ratings given to sets of 9 physical and 12 psychological features of children, and asked CAPs to identify additional features that were not listed. We also examined the relationships between these attraction ratings and attraction to children dimensions (age mono-/polymorphism, exclusivity of attraction to children, and gender attraction), history of falling in love with a child, and detected sexual offending history. There was relatively little differentiation across physical features and psychological features; all averages were approximately 4 or higher on a 5-point scale. Attraction ratings were mostly weakly and inconsistently related to our other study variables. The exception was that CAPs who had fallen in love with a child rated 11 out of 12 psychological features as more attractive than CAPs who had not fallen in love with a child, with small to moderate effect sizes. These two groups did not differ in ratings for physical features. Our qualitative content analysis of participant-suggested features revealed six physical themes (inter alia, face and head, children's bodies) and five psychological themes (inter alia, personality, harmlessness) that were important to CAPs' attraction to children.

Exposure to the COVID-19 pandemic environment and generosity

We report data from an online experiment which allows us to study how generosity changed over a 6-day period during the initial explosive growth of the COVID-19 pandemic in Andalusia, Spain, while the country was under a strict lockdown. Participants (n = 969) could donate a fraction of a €100 prize to an unknown charity. Our data are particularly rich in the age distribution and we complement them with daily public information about COVID-19-related deaths, infections and hospital admissions. We find correlational evidence that donations decreased in the period under study, particularly among older individuals. Our analysis of the mechanisms behind the detected decrease in generosity suggests that expectations about others' behaviour, perceived mortality risk and (alarming) information play a key-but independent-role for behavioural adaptation. These results indicate that social behaviour is quickly adjusted in response to the pandemic environment, possibly reflecting some form of selective prosociality.

Mate preference priorities in the East and West: A cross-cultural test of the mate preference priority model

OBJECTIVE

Mate choice involves trading-off several preferences. Research on this process tends to examine mate preference prioritization in homogenous samples using a small number of traits and thus provide little insight into whether prioritization patterns reflect a universal human nature. This study examined whether prioritization patterns, and their accompanying sex differences, are consistent across Eastern and Western cultures.

METHOD

In the largest test of the mate preference priority model to date, we asked an international sample of participants (N = 2,477) to design an ideal long-term partner by allocating mate dollars to eight traits using three budgets. Unlike previous versions of the task, we included traits known to vary in importance by culture (e.g., religiosity and chastity).

RESULTS

Under low budget conditions, Eastern and Western participants differed in their mate dollar allocation for almost every trait (average d = 0.42), indicating that culture influences prioritization. Despite these differences, traits fundamental for the reproductive success of each sex in the ancestral environment were prioritized by both Eastern and Western participants.

CONCLUSION

The tendency to prioritize reproductively fundamental traits is present in both Eastern and Western cultures. The psychological mechanisms responsible for this process produce similar prioritization patterns despite cross-cultural variation.

Mate Preferences and Their Behavioral Manifestations

Evolved mate preferences comprise a central causal process in Darwin's theory of sexual selection. Their powerful influences have been documented in all sexually reproducing species, including in sexual strategies in humans. This article reviews the science of human mate preferences and their myriad behavioral manifestations. We discuss sex differences and sex similarities in human sexual psychology, which vary according to short-term and long-term mating contexts. We review context-specific shifts in mating strategy depending on individual, social, and ecological qualities such as mate value, life history strategy, sex ratio, gender economic inequality, and cultural norms. We review the empirical evidence for the impact of mate preferences on actual mating decisions. Mate preferences also dramatically influence tactics of mate attraction, tactics of mate retention, patterns of deception, causes of sexual regret, attraction to cues to sexual exploitability, attraction to cues to fertility, attraction to cues to resources and protection, derogation of competitors, causes of breakups, and patterns of remarriage. We conclude by articulating unresolved issues and offer a future agenda for the science of human mating, including how humans invent novel cultural technologies to better implement ancient sexual strategies and how cultural evolution may be dramatically influencing our evolved mating psychology.

Cross-cultural invariances in the architecture of shame

Human foragers are obligately group-living, and their high dependence on mutual aid is believed to have characterized our species' social evolution. It was therefore a central adaptive problem for our ancestors to avoid damaging the willingness of other group members to render them assistance. Cognitively, this requires a predictive map of the degree to which others would devalue the individual based on each of various possible acts. With such a map, an individual can avoid socially costly behaviors by anticipating how much audience devaluation a potential action (e.g., stealing) would cause and weigh this against the action's direct payoff (e.g., acquiring). The shame system manifests all of the functional properties required to solve this adaptive problem, with the aversive intensity of shame encoding the social cost. Previous data from three Western(ized) societies indicated that the shame evoked when the individual anticipates committing various acts closely tracks the magnitude of devaluation expressed by audiences in response to those acts. Here we report data supporting the broader claim that shame is a basic part of human biology. We conducted an experiment among 899 participants in 15 small-scale communities scattered around the world. Despite widely varying languages, cultures, and subsistence modes, shame in each community closely tracked the devaluation of local audiences (mean r = +0.84). The fact that the same pattern is encountered in such mutually remote communities suggests that shame's match to audience devaluation is a design feature crafted by selection and not a product of cultural contact or convergent cultural evolution.

Endorsement of Social and Personal Values Predicts the Desirability of Men and Women as Long-Term Partners

A prospective romantic partner's desirability as a long-term partner may be affected by the values that he or she endorses. However, few studies have examined the effects of "values" on a person's desirability as a long-term partner. We hypothesized that individuals who endorse social values (vs. personal values) will be perceived as more desirable long-term partners (Hypothesis 1) and that the endorsement of social values will be especially desirable in a male (vs. female) long-term partner (Hypothesis 2). The current study employed a 2 (sex of prospective partner: male vs. female) × 2 (values of prospective partner: personal vs. social) × 2 (physical attractiveness of prospective partner: unattractive vs. highly attractive) mixed-model design. Participants were 339 undergraduates (174 men, 165 women), with ages varying between 18 and 33 years ( M = 19.9, SD = 3.6), and mostly in a romantic relationship (53.7%). Participants reported interest in a long-term relationship with prospective partners depicted in four scenarios (within subjects), each varying along the dimensions of values (personal vs. social) and physical attractiveness (unattractive vs. highly attractive). Individuals endorsing personal values (vs. social values) and men (vs. women) endorsing personal values were rated as less desirable as long-term partners. The current research adds to the partner preferences literature by demonstrating that an individual's ascribed values influence others' perceptions of desirability as a long-term partner and that these effects are consistently sex differentiated, as predicted by an evolutionary perspective on romantic partner preferences.

An Evolutionary Perspective on Mate Rejection

We argue that mate rejection and ex-partner relationships are important, multifaceted topics that have been underresearched in social and evolutionary psychology. Mate rejection and relationship dissolution are ubiquitous and form integral parts of the human experience. Both also carry with them potential risks and benefits to our fitness and survival. Hence, we expect that mate rejection would have given rise to evolved behavioral and psychological adaptations. Herein, we outline some of the many unanswered questions in evolutionary psychology on these topics, at each step presenting novel hypotheses about how men and women should behave when rejecting a mate or potential mate or in response to rejection. We intend these hypotheses and suggestions for future research to be used as a basis for enriching our understanding of human mating from an evolutionary perspective.

Additional Psychometric Data for the Mate Value Scale

We administered a revised version of the Mate Value Scale that focuses on individuals’ perception of their romantic partner's mate value. Students (N = 330) from four universities completed surveys. The measure demonstrated good internal consistency reliability. Multiple regression analyses indicate that those who perceive their mates as possessing a higher value tended to compromise more when faced with conflict with their partners, had less anxiety in close relationships, and had more passionate love attitudes. We argue that this pattern of associations provides additional validity data in support of the Mate Value Scale.

Variation in human mate choice: simultaneously investigating heritability, parental influence, sexual imprinting, and assortative mating

Human mate choice is central to individuals' lives and to the evolution of the species, but the basis of variation in mate choice is not well understood. Here we looked at a large community-based sample of twins and their partners and parents ([Formula: see text] individuals) to test for genetic and family environmental influences on mate choice, while controlling for and not controlling for the effects of assortative mating. Key traits were analyzed, including height, body mass index, age, education, income, personality, social attitudes, and religiosity. This revealed near-zero genetic influences on male and female mate choice over all traits and no significant genetic influences on mate choice for any specific trait. A significant family environmental influence was found for the age and income of females' mate choices, possibly reflecting parental influence over mating decisions. We also tested for evidence of sexual imprinting, where individuals acquire mate-choice criteria during development by using their opposite-sex parent as the template of a desirable mate; there was no such effect for any trait. The main discernible pattern of mate choice was assortative mating; we found that partner similarity was due to initial choice rather than convergence and also at least in part to phenotypic matching.