Sexual Strategies Theory • Emerged in 1993 • David Buss, Ph.D., a professor at the University of Texas at Austin • sexual strategies theory has one foot in traditional evolutionary theory and one foot in sexual selection. It uses both to explain why men and women appear to have different priorities when it comes to dating. • The theory is based on one assumption: When it comes to mating, men and women need different things. A woman, who has to carry a child for nine months, has to consider the long-term implications of choosing a mate. Therefore, she desires traits that demonstrate longterm “fitness” — like intelligence. Men, on the other hand, have less to lose when it comes to choosing a mate, so they can value shortterm fitness values, like attractiveness. Study Cross-trait assortment for intelligence and physical attractiveness in a long-term mating context • The study shows that women who were judged as attractive in their black-and-white 1957 yearbook photo ended up having husbands who scored higher on IQ tests • Turns out that while attractiveness work the same for both men and women intelligence doesn’t • The more intelligent a man is the more in demand he is • The more intelligent a woman is the less in demand she is • Less intelligent men have less opportunities to marry, either because intelligent women are unwilling to “marry down” or because the men don’t want to “marry up.” • an overabundance of intelligent, single women and an overabundance of less intelligent, single men is created • More intelligent women don’t need help to deal with life so they don’t try as hard to find a partner Study Gender Differences in Mate Selection: Evidence From a Speed Dating Experiment • both men and women really care a lot about attractiveness • women care about intelligence roughly twice as much as men • every point increase in a man’s intelligence rating (on a 1-to-10 scale) boosted the chances a woman would want to see him again by an average of 4.5 percentage points, while an equivalent increase in a woman’s intelligence increased the probability that a man would want to reconnect by only 2.3 percentage points. • A one-point increase in a woman’s attractiveness rating (on a 1-to-10 scale) boosted the chances that a man would want to see her again by an average of 14 percentage points. And this was a big factor for women, too: An equivalent increase in a man’s attractiveness raised the chances that a woman would want to reconnect with him by 12 percentage points. • Men valued women’s intelligence only until it matched their own, and they actually found women whose ambition exceeded theirs to be off-putting. • this finding aligns with other recent research • For instance, a team of economists at the University of Chicago showed that when women out-earn their husbands, marital satisfaction is lower, and divorce is more likely. Another recent study, of MBA students, suggests that single women are worried about this issue and try to avoid being penalized for it by potential mates: Single female MBA students hid their ambition on questionnaires when they expected male classmates to see their answers. • Women prefer richer men, while men show no such preference. In addition, women are dramatically more interested in partners of their own race, while men show no such preference • men are equally discerning when it comes to the women they’d like to see again no matter how many people are in a speed-dating pool. Their standards remain unchanged whether they meet 10 or 20 potential partners. Women, on the other hand, become pickier the more partners are “on the market.”
