Love at first sight
Changes in American Adults' Sexual Behavior and Attitudes, 1972-2012
Jean Twenge, Ryne Sherman & Brooke Wells
Archives of Sexual Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
In the nationally representative General Social Survey, U.S. Adults (N = 33,380) in 2000-2012 (vs. the 1970s and 1980s) had more sexual partners, were more likely to have had sex with a casual date or pickup or an acquaintance, and were more accepting of most non-marital sex (premarital sex, teen sex, and same-sex sexual activity, but not extramarital sex). The percentage who believed premarital sex among adults was "not wrong at all" was 29 % in the early 1970s, 42 % in the 1980s and 1990s, 49 % in the 2000s, and 58 % between 2010 and 2012. Mixed effects (hierarchical linear modeling) analyses separating time period, generation/birth cohort, and age showed that the trend toward greater sexual permissiveness was primarily due to generation. Acceptance of non-marital sex rose steadily between the G.I. generation (born 1901-1924) and Boomers (born 1946-1964), dipped slightly among early Generation X'ers (born 1965-1981), and then rose so that Millennials (also known as Gen Y or Generation Me, born 1982-1999) were the most accepting of non-marital sex. Number of sexual partners increased steadily between the G.I.s and 1960s-born GenX'ers and then dipped among Millennials to return to Boomer levels. The largest changes appeared among White men, with few changes among Black Americans. The results were discussed in the context of growing cultural individualism and rejection of traditional social rules in the U.S.
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Preferred Women's Waist-to-Hip Ratio Variation over the Last 2,500 Years
Jeanne Bovet & Michel Raymond
PLoS ONE, April 2015
Abstract:
The ratio between the body circumference at the waist and the hips (or WHR) is a secondary sexual trait that is unique to humans and is well known to influence men's mate preferences. Because a woman's WHR also provides information about her age, health and fertility, men's preference concerning this physical feature may possibly be a cognitive adaptation selected in the human lineage. However, it is unclear whether the preferred WHR in western countries reflects a universal ideal, as geographic variation in non-western areas has been found, and discordances about its temporal consistency remain in the literature. We analyzed the WHR of women considered as ideally beautiful who were depicted in western artworks from 500 BCE to the present. These vestiges of the past feminine ideal were then compared to more recent symbols of beauty: Playboy models and winners of several Miss pageants from 1920 to 2014. We found that the ideal WHR has changed over time in western societies: it was constant during almost a millennium in antiquity (from 500 BCE to 400 CE) and has decreased from the 15th century to the present. Then, based on Playboy models and Miss pageants winners, this decrease appears to slow down or even reverse during the second half of the 20th century. The universality of an ideal WHR is thus challenged, and historical changes in western societies could have caused these variations in men's preferences. The potential adaptive explanations for these results are discussed.
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Hui Jing Lu, Xiao Qin Zhu & Lei Chang
Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
Men's mate values are defined based on three broad categories-good genes, good providers, both of which are selected early across the animal kingdom, and good fathers that represent the last pedigree of primate evolution and may have contributed to the human development of modernity and gender equality. Women select long-term mates based on these 3 mate values, and women's mate preference over them depends on the prevailing ecological conditions. Based on 4 samples comprising a total of 1,257 Chinese women, we found that women in general and those with high socioeconomic status in particular (Study 1), as well as women in cities compared with rural women (Study 2), preferred good-father over good-provider and good-genes attributes in long-term relationships. Similar results were obtained in an experimental study (n = 123) where, under good economic compared to poor economic and control conditions, women prioritized good-father over good-provider and good-genes attributes. These findings indicate that in modern-day economies, in which a woman spends the same amount of time and energy on education and employment and acquires approximately the same amount of resources and same extent of safety and disease protection as men, her mate preference is likely to center on good-father attributes, as her reproductive success depends on a helper at the nest increasingly more than other mate contributions.
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Student Bodies: Does the Sex Ratio Matter for Hooking Up and Having Sex at College?
Timothy Adkins et al.
Social Currents, June 2015, Pages 144-162
Abstract:
Using the Online College Social Life Survey, we examine whether the sex ratio of the student body of a college or university affects whether heterosexual students hook up, have relationships, have intercourse, or have attitudes favorable toward casual sex. The gendered dyadic power model predicts that, if men are more interested in having sex than women, as the ratio of women to men goes up, men will increasingly have the upper hand and more sex will occur. Consistent with the prediction, we find that where the ratio of women to men is higher, students of both sexes hook up more and accumulate more sexual partners, but inconsistent with it, students are no more likely to have intercourse in a given hookup where the ratio of women is higher.
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Barnaby Dixson, Melanie Duncan & Alan Dixson
Archives of Sexual Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Women's breast morphology is thought to have evolved via sexual selection as a signal of maturity, health, and fecundity. While research demonstrates that breast morphology is important in men's judgments of women's attractiveness, it remains to be determined how perceptions might differ when considering a larger suite of mate relevant attributes. Here, we tested how variation in breast size and areolar pigmentation affected perceptions of women's sexual attractiveness, reproductive health, sexual maturity, maternal nurturing abilities, and age. Participants (100 men; 100 women) rated images of female torsos modeled to vary in breast size (very small, small, medium, and large) and areolar pigmentation (light, medium, and dark) for each of the five attributes listed above. Sexual attractiveness ratings increased linearly with breast size, but large breasts were not judged to be significantly more attractive than medium-sized breasts. Small and medium-sized breasts were rated as most attractive if they included light or medium colored areolae, whereas large breasts were more attractive if they had medium or dark areolae. Ratings for perceived age, sexual maturity, and nurturing ability also increased with breast size. Darkening the areolae reduced ratings of the reproductive health of medium and small breasts, whereas it increased ratings for large breasts. There were no significant sex differences in ratings of any of the perceptual measures. These results demonstrate that breast size and areolar pigmentation interact to determine ratings for a suite of sociosexual attributes, each of which may be relevant to mate choice in men and intra-sexual competition in women.
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The male-taller norm: Lack of evidence from a developing country
K. Sohn
HOMO - Journal of Comparative Human Biology, forthcoming
Abstract:
In general, women prefer men taller than themselves; this is referred to as the male-taller norm. However, since women are shorter than men on average, it is difficult to determine whether the fact that married women are on average shorter than their husbands results from the norm or is a simple artifact generated by the shorter stature of women. This study addresses the question by comparing the rate of adherence to the male-taller norm between actual mating and hypothetical random mating. A total of 7,954 actually married couples are drawn from the last follow-up of the Indonesian Family Life Survey, a nationally representative survey. Their heights were measured by trained nurses. About 10,000 individuals are randomly sampled from the actual couples and randomly matched. An alternative random mating of about 100,000 couples is also performed, taking into account an age difference of five years within a couple. The rate of adherence to the male-taller norm is 93.4% for actual couples and 88.8% for random couples. The difference between the two figures is statistically significant, but it is emphasized that it is very small. The alternative random mating produces a rate of 91.4%. The male-taller norm exists in Indonesia, but only in a statistical sense. The small difference suggests that the norm is mostly explained by the fact that women are shorter than men on average.
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Assortative mating without assortative preference
Yu Xie, Siwei Cheng & Xiang Zhou
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 12 May 2015, Pages 5974-5978
Abstract:
Assortative mating - marriage of a man and a woman with similar social characteristics - is a commonly observed phenomenon. In the existing literature in both sociology and economics, this phenomenon has mainly been attributed to individuals' conscious preferences for assortative mating. In this paper, we show that patterns of assortative mating may arise from another structural source even if individuals do not have assortative preferences or possess complementary attributes: dynamic processes of marriages in a closed system. For a given cohort of youth in a finite population, as the percentage of married persons increases, unmarried persons who newly enter marriage are systematically different from those who married earlier, giving rise to the phenomenon of assortative mating. We use microsimulation methods to illustrate this dynamic process, using first the conventional deterministic Gale-Shapley model, then a probabilistic Gale-Shapley model, and then two versions of the encounter mating model.
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Andreas Baranowski & Heiko Hecht
Archives of Sexual Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Since the publication of the seminal paper by Clark and Hatfield (1989), there has been an ongoing discussion about their finding that men accept sexual invitations from females more willingly than vice versa. We focused on two questions that have not yet been answered: First, what happens when the same request for casual sex is made in a different setting where social pressure is lower and such a request more common? To address this issue, 6 male and 8 female average looking confederates approached 162 men and 119 women either at a university campus or in a nightclub and asked for a date or for casual sex. The gender difference remained, with significantly more men than women consenting to a sexual invitation. The second issue concerned the perceived risk for women of accepting such an offer. We made up an elaborate cover story and invited 60 male and female participants into our laboratory. They were shown 10 pictures of persons of the opposite sex and led to believe that these people either consented to date or to have sex with them. The participants then could choose from the pictures who they wanted to meet to engage in a date or sex. In this subjectively safer environment, the gender difference disappeared, with the same proportion of men and women consenting to a date or sex. However, men were more liberal in their choice in either condition, compared to the female subjects. We conclude that while gender differences remained in both experiments, women were more liberal in a subjectively safer situation.
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Sex differences in preferences for humor: A replication, modification, and extension
Liana Hone, William Hurwitz & Debra Lieberman
Evolutionary Psychology, February 2015, Pages 167-181
Abstract:
Evolutionary-minded scientists have proposed that humor is a sexually selected trait in men that signals mate quality. Indeed, women tend to prefer men who make them laugh and men tend to prefer women who laugh at their jokes. However, it is unclear how robust this pattern is. Here we report a replication of one of the first studies (Bressler, Martin, and Balshine, 2006) to examine the sex differences in preferences for humor receptivity versus humor production. We replicate Bressler et al.'s (2006) findings that men prefer women who are receptive to their humor whereas women prefer men who produce humor. These findings held even after we modified Bressler et al.'s questionnaire for better conceptual validity. Furthermore, using a separate measure designed to assess trade-offs, we found that men viewed humor receptivity as a necessity and humor production as a luxury when they were asked to create an ideal long-term partner. For women, it was just the opposite. These results bolster the claim that sexual selection has shaped sex differences regarding preferences for a prospective mate's sense of humor and that what one means by "sense of humor" can vary.
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Geoff MacDonald, Patricia Baratta & Rebecca Tzalazidis
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Social psychologists theorize that individuals seek connection following rejection. However, accepting connection from a low status other may imply that one is of similarly low status, which may call into question one's prospects for future acceptance. Thus, we hypothesized that rejection would lead individuals to distance themselves from a low status other even when the low status other is accepting. In two studies, single, heterosexual, female participants received simultaneous acceptance/rejection feedback from one physically attractive man and one less attractive man. As predicted, rejected individuals derogated their rejecters as indicated by a decreased desire for affiliation and more negative evaluations. Moreover, participants rejected by the attractive man also derogated the unattractive man even when the unattractive man offered acceptance. These data may shed light on specific circumstances under which rejection leads to antisocial behavior.
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The Putative Son's Attractiveness Alters the Perceived Attractiveness of the Putative Father
Pavol Prokop
Archives of Sexual Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
A body of literature has investigated female mate choice in the pre-mating context (pre-mating sexual selection). Humans, however, are long-living mammals forming pair-bonds which sequentially produce offspring. Post-mating evaluations of a partner's attractiveness may thus significantly influence the reproductive success of men and women. I tested herein the theory that the attractiveness of putative sons provides extra information about the genetic quality of fathers, thereby influencing fathers' attractiveness across three studies. As predicted, facially attractive boys were more frequently attributed to attractive putative fathers and vice versa (Study 1). Furthermore, priming with an attractive putative son increased the attractiveness of the putative father with the reverse being true for unattractive putative sons. When putative fathers were presented as stepfathers, the effect of the boy's attractiveness on the stepfather's attractiveness was lower and less consistent (Study 2). This suggests that the presence of an attractive boy has the strongest effect on the perceived attractiveness of putative fathers rather than on non-fathers. The generalized effect of priming with beautiful non-human objects also exists, but its effect is much weaker compared with the effects of putative biological sons (Study 3). Overall, this study highlighted the importance of post-mating sexual selection in humans and suggests that the heritable attractive traits of men are also evaluated by females after mating and/or may be used by females in mate poaching.
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Andrea Meltzer et al.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
Three studies demonstrated that conception risk was associated with increased motivations to manage weight. Consistent with the rationale that this association is due to ovulatory processes, Studies 2 and 3 demonstrated that it was moderated by hormonal contraceptive (HC) use. Consistent with the rationale that this interactive effect should emerge when modern appearance-related concerns regarding weight are salient, Study 3 used a 14-day diary to demonstrate that the interactive effects of conception risk and HC use on daily motivations to restrict eating were further moderated by daily motivations to manage body attractiveness. Finally, providing evidence that this interactive effect has implications for real behavior, daily fluctuations in the desire to restrict eating predicted daily changes in women's self-reported eating behavior. These findings may help reconcile prior inconsistencies regarding the implications of ovulatory processes by illustrating that such implications can depend on the salience of broader social norms.
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Partner choice decision making and the integration of multiple cues
Ryan Schacht & Mark Grote
Evolution and Human Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Uncertainty about fitness-enhancing traits in a potential mate, as well as variability in social and ecological environments, favor the use of multiple cues in selecting a partner. Though how individuals respond with adaptive mating preferences is an open question. Here we investigate mate choice decision making among the Makushi of Guyana and compare two competing approaches: 1) A prioritized trait approach, in which preferences are determined by the independent evaluation of relevant partner traits; and 2) an integrative approach, in which preferences are determined by reducing multiple, interrelated traits to a few latent dimensions. Within these two approaches we measure the effects of several key factors - sex, adult sex ratio, and community-to-community variability - thought to pattern preferences. We find support for cue integration and contextual variability in preferences. Sex and adult sex ratio are weak predictors of preferences in the Makushi: preferences are best explained by unstructured community effects. These findings highlight two key issues in mate choice studies: 1) simple biologically-based models do not seem adequate to explain variation in preferences, either within or among populations; and 2) while context, generally speaking, matters in determining preferences, we lack theoretically-informed predictions about relevant contextual factors. The importance of cues, as well as what they signal in a potential partner, is likely to vary with location-specific factors that are yet unexplored.
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Bin-Bin Chen & Lei Chang
Evolutionary Psychology, March 2015, Pages 266-282
Abstract:
In three studies, we tested the hypothesis that men respond to intersexual and intrasexual selection by facultatively choosing between weapon-like and ornament-like behaviors. In the first two studies, we manipulated intersexual and intrasexual selection by having male participants take part in a simulated dating game (Study 1) or imagine having a date (Study 2). In both studies, participants were told either that the target female would choose her date (intersexual) or that male suitors would nominate one another (intrasexual). Under the intersexual selection condition, men demonstrated increased creativity levels and decreased aggression levels, whereas the opposite pattern was observed under the intrasexual selection condition. Study 3 showed that individual differences in creativity and aggression as personality traits similarly predicted intrasexual and intersexual mating strategies, respectively. These extend existing evolutionary mating research by specifying the mechanism of intrasexual or intersexual selection in shaping men's weapon-like or ornament-like situational response and personality development.
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Inge Boot, Jochen Peter, Johanna van Oosten
Journal of Media Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The aim of the present study was to investigate individual differences in the influence of the likability of a sexual female main character on women's willingness to have casual sex with a stranger. Specifically, we studied the moderating role of relationship status (Experiments 1 and 2) and satisfaction with one's relationship or with being single (Experiment 2). Women (aged 18-30), who were single or in a relationship, watched an erotic scene with a likable or unlikable sexual female main character who had casual sex. In both experiments, women in a relationship were less willing to have casual sex than single women, after they had seen a likable sexual female character. However, an unpredicted effect was found in Experiment 2. After seeing an unlikable sexual female character, women who were dissatisfied with their relationship or with being single were more willing to have casual sex than their satisfied counterparts.