Mate Choice

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Mate Choice

• Psychology 3196

2
Questions

• Can I buy you a drink?
• Would you like to go out with me?
• Wanna have sex?
• (Clark and Hatfield, 1989)
• 73 percent of men
• NO women
• There is a difference here, why deny it?

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Sexual selection in humans

• Intra sexual and intersexual selection
• A woman can produce one child a year
• A guy can produce as many as he can
• Paternal investment slows reproductive rates of
  men
• So what are the humans like, are we like the deer
  or like well the Vulcans

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Reproductive systems

• 85 percent allow polygyny
• Prohibitions on polygyny are recent actually
• Essock-Vitale and Maguire (1985) interviewed
  women compared reproductive rates of women that
  had had affairs and that had not
• No difference

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We are mildly polygynous

• People divorce and remarry
• Men remarry younger women
• Men remarry more
• Capture the fertile years
• Plus the screwing around..

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Then again

• We are both, men and women, still choosy
• 27 percent of men did say no to the offer of sex
• This would not happen in other mammals usually
• So both sexes are choosy, it just depends on what
  for

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Beauty is in the adaptations of the beholder

• Well maybe we are after good genes (seems
  reasonable)
• Maybe attractiveness is related to parasite load
• We have to choose a mate that is most likely to
  produce pathogen resistant offspring

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MHC

• MHC genes build our immune system
• We should prefer mates that are similar in most
  characteristics but different in MHC genes
• Boy how could we test that?
• Umm, well go for a run and let me sniff your
  armpits

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Parental investment

• Mens is economic
• Womens is physiological
• So what should we prefer then?
• Women should rate economic stuff (oh say salary)
  as more important than men do
• But I thought women were in the work force and
  all that, and all the socialization
• Yes of course

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Is that your wallet in your pocket or are you
just glad to see me?

• Personal ads
• 11 to 1 ratio!
• Ask single women, they rate it more important,
  much more important, than men do
• Put downs of others resource acquiring ability
• THIS IS CROSS CULTURAL

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Structured powerlessness

• So, maybe women prefer this because, well that is
  how stuff works, I mean guys just have more
  access, so it makes sense to prefer guys with
  bigger wallets
• So then it would follow that women with much
  access to power would not care about a mans
  earning power

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Ummm no

• Newlyweds studied by David Buss
• No relationship between income and importance in
  men, a nice positive one in women
• It turns out, in fact, that women that will
  probably make more, or do make more actually care
  MORE about the earning power of their potential
  mate!

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Ok, what do men want?

• Women, lots and lots of fertile women.
• Men like youth
• Men like clear skin
• Men like symmetry
• The waist to hip ratio is a good indicator of
  fertility
• .7 or so

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Strategies mixed and pure

• People are unfaithful
• Hard to get rates, though the study at the
  beginning gives us an idea
• When messing around, what do we prefer?
• Mens standards are lower.
• jealousy

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Conclusions

• Do NOT fall for the naturalistic fallacy
• Nobody is saying we do this consciously
• Interesting though that now with women
  increasingly in the workforce and with men doing
  more childcare these differences seem to be steady