Unmasking the greatest fallacy ever told



When reading the blog of the prestigious social psychologist Paul Eastwick, I can not stop shuddering with some of the extravagant conclusions of social psychology on this keynote topic. The manifest negligence might be due to academic censorship (Academia is not tolerant of controversy that challenges conventional assumptions about the fitness landscape), weakness/futility of empirical studies used, or both.

“Here’s one of my own findings in which I have a high degree of confidence. In a meta-analysis I conducted about five years ago, we examined whether a partner’s attractiveness was more romantically appealing to men than to women. We acquired a large collection of published and unpublished datasets (k = 97, N = 29,780) that spanned a variety of paradigms in which men and women reported on partners they had (at a minimum) met face-to-face. Overall, we found that the sex difference in the appeal of attractiveness was not significantly different from zero…..] (Evolving Blog. “Going on the record via preregistration”).



The apparent mindset of social psychologists is contingent on biased findings.

These results don’t support predictions previously presented consistent with contemporary sexual selection theory and endorsed by ecologically valid research (e.g. online dating) : Females are more selective (i.e. given that females are more sexually choosy) in choosing mates and vary less in their tendency to be selective than do males.

Upfront, the semantic construction of this topic is wrong. This concept should be replaced by for the appeal for physical appearance/morphology (i.e epigamic traits). Therefore the cornerstone would be relationship between phenotype (more concretely morphological features) and mating success; which further determines the shape, direction and intensity of sexual selection. Romantically appealing of attractiveness is a circular/redundant concept. It’s like saying romantically attracted to attractiveness, or romantically appealing of sex-appeal.



Therefore there is no such thing as romantic appealing for attractiveness. Attractiveness is not an intrinsic quality, but the result of a perceptual process derived from the interaction between the epigamic characteristics of the emitter and the sensory properties of the receiver (mate chooser). The product of this interaction is an aesthetic judgement/assignment of an attractive value to a certain configuration of morphological cues/signals. The second step is a decisional process. It describes the construction of the decision variable which integrates a value ( assigned attractiveness ) of prospective mates into a quantity that is used by a decision rule to produce a choice.

What sex gives more importance to physical appearance? It is as simple as answering the question on what sex has a more pronounced mating bias with respect to aesthetic features, or what sex is more selective based on physical traits. In other words: after the acquisition of visual information and its cognitive processing, what is the difference across sexes in assigning an attractiveness value to prospective mates?.

So what we are looking for is to quantify the covariance between secondary sexual characters and mating success for women and men, and later we can compare the differences between sexes. Or said in more colloquial terms, trying to quantify how each gender weighs and values opposite-sex physical traits and the degree of discrimination based on those same aesthetic characteristics when they are choosing mates.

Do both sexes rate equally morphology on opposite-sex? or perhaps, does one of them rate more harshly? Obviously the answer is the second one. And of course it’s not the male sex, like most social psychologists claim, contrary to the most solid principles on evolutionary biology.

The Darwin-Bateman theory of the sex roles, extended by Robert Trivers, formed the theoretical bedrock of the emerging field of behavioural ecology. Social psychology get stuck at this step, never progressing to detailed and testable models of cognitive adaptations that exploit mating cues to make real mate choices.

Bateman’s principles explain sex roles and sexual dimorphism through sex-specific variance in mating success, reproductive success and their relationships within sexes (Bateman gradients). Empirical tests of these principles come clearly under appropriate scrutiny. Ecologically valid data sets prove that mate choices are more variable in males than in females, resulting in a steeper male Bateman gradient, consistent with Bateman’s principles.

Not providing qualitative support for Bateman’s principles, social psychology research demonstrates how current approaches can generate a misleading view of sex differences and roles. Online data and speed dating (despite its shortcomings) supports the observation that, unlike female preferences, male ‘preferences’ are inclusive of a broad range in female variance.

While females are the reproductively limiting sex, male preferences are so much more inclusive of female variance, women shows a higher requisite stimulatory threshold to induce her mating response. Females have an optimum mating rate that is lower than the males, with high-rate fitness optima, and correspondingly high male optimal mating rate).

In more colloquial terms, what this means is that male/female ‘leagues’ are asymmetrical – with male ‘rank’ being bottom heavy in distribution, while female ‘rank’ being top heavy.

I would appeal to work in mating Leks with high ecological validity and discard studies as serveys (i.e. summarized preference), laboratory-based research, such as the use of confederates, or asking participants to rate how likely they would be to go on a date based upon a hypothetical situation.

If you consider that females are the reproductively limiting sex (rate limiting in reproductive success) – which manifests in *all* dimensions of mate choice (in other words, females are more selective in all their mating considerations, including epigamic cues) – then one obvious implication of this is that, given sufficient latitude -i.e. mating leks- (ie. relieved of systemic constraint, which would otherwise limit their choices), female choices will always tend towards a narrow male morphotype distribution.

Online studies support predictions previously presented consistent with contemporary sexual selection theory and endorsed by ecologically valid research: Females are more selective (i.e given that females are more sexually choosy) in choosing mates and vary less in their tendency to be selective than do males.

In terms of online dating interaction, there is a strong agreement in the literature that females receive much more initial contacts and get higher reply rates when they send messages to desirable males. In line with the above, males also receive significantly fewer replies, messages and matches in general, whereas females can expect a lot of reciprocation. (Bapna et al. 2013, Fiore et at 2005, Fiore et al 2010, Hitsch et al 2010, Hitsch et al 2010b, Kreager et at 2014, Lewis, K 2013, Scharlott et at 1995, Xia et at, 2014, Shaw Taylor et al 2011. ). Women are rather picky in their decision of who might be their potential date.

Log files from online dating prove that women are much pickier in their communications, due to the relative rarity of a women initiating contact with men on the dating sites. Males send out more messages but receive fewer messages. And females are more likely to be contacted but less likely to reply to male messages.

Females are more selective, given that message frequency is a corollary of selectivity: Cupid on Trial: A 4-month Online Dating Experiment Using 10 Fictional Singletons

Measures based on between-sex average variance in mating success alone provide at best a partial picture of sexual selection. It is necessary to obtain data where can be scaled the intra-sex variance and the quantification of mate choices monopolization across phenotypes, measuring sexual selection on phenotypic traits.

If we try to explain a modal tendencies in the online population, the mating system for men seems hugely skewed: Estimating The Mating Pool Size. Part 1: Male Profile , but unlike female preferences, male ‘preferences’ are inclusive of a broad range in female variance: Estimating The Mating Pool Size. Part 2: Female Profiles.

Males have evolved as more tolerant of female morphological variance (i.e female physical attractiveness) than the reverse, given that females are rate-limiting in reproductive success.

On Tinder, a dating App, the data plotted exposed a probability density function for mating like a Pareto type I/power law: Tinder Experiments II: Guys, unless you are really hot you are probably better off not wasting your time on Tinder — a quantitative socio-economic study. These mating distributions for males granted by skewed female preference functions give a qualitative understanding of the real distribution given the Gini coefficient near to G=1 or α = 1 for a Lorenz curve: Tinder Experiment. Inferring Population Preference Functions Using A Simple Binary Task Choice on A Dating App

Differential of matches achieved by average looking females and males on Tinder: Tyson et al 2016 and B. Seefeldt 2014).



Female status as ‘rate-limiting’ necessarily skews male:female prospects accordingly, destroying any notion of symmetry that Eastwick et al are supposing: Female Mating Skew II: Supported By Online dating Experiment . The prevalence of this agrees with a severe mating imbalance.



Females are selecting a smaller elite portion of potential male mates: Plenty Of Fish Experiment: Study 1 , Plenty Of Fish Experiment: Study 2 , Plenty Of Fish Experiment: Study 4. Females Profiles. Plenty of Fish Experiment: Study 3

If a large majority of men are interested in dating an average looking girl (judging from their immense mating pool available) while almost no woman (or none) is willing to dating an average-looking man. How can someone dare to say that physical traits are more romantically appealing to males?. In other words, a conventionally looking woman is attractive to the vast majority of the male population, while a conventional looking man is unattractive for the overwhelming majority of the female population.

Let’s see another study where females receive much more initial contacts, more matches/reciprocity and get higher reply rates: Quantification Of Dating Pools Through A Online Dating System.

Sexual equity arguments (or worse, those pointing to the greater male selectivity) belie even a cursory appreciation for dimorphic sex-biology, where determined/antagonistic skews in sensory-sexual valence are differentially deemed by dimorphic bio, with females designated the more valent sex.

If you want to observe differences in mating success between male and female phenotypes in nature. Which sex reject more certain opposite-sex conspecifics in favour of others?

Laboratory, questionnaires, speed dating and couples: Unsuitable empirical tests for to analyze mate preference functions.

[ ……..and it did not matter whether the study examined initial attraction (e.g., speed-dating, confederate designs) or established relationships(e.g., dating couples, married couples).”(Evolving Blog. “Going on the record via preregistration”

Neglect of the topic limits the ability to formulate empirically grounded models of sexual selection, to understand how mating decisions are made in different contexts and to be able to define a human mate choice model mathematically. There are strong anomalies in the literature: while surveys (summarized preferences) are futile, laboratory settings models are not being realistic and plausible, and other widely used settings (e.g. speed dating), even being more realistic, have little ecological validity.

They are not synthesizing real and empirical data from the wild, not withstanding strong empirical tests, and not contributing to the logical integration of proximate and ultimate approaches to mating decisions.

First, summarized preferences are pitfalls without out-cognitive modelling; then the conclusion will outline a normative and descriptive alternative. Here “mating preferences” come from self-reported marks on item likert scales, and they are not reliable/verifiable. Marks on scales are uninformative about for the knowledge of mate preference functions, and it’s a cue-cataloguing a rather weak method for characterizing our adaptations for mate choice.

The self inference (often intentionally adulterated), by means of intensity paper-marks, of the importance given by our brain to each one of the epigamic cues is absolutely useless. Mate choice is a processing-information mechanism by computational rules, which can only be tested through behavioural execution during the actual assessment/choice process (in an ecologically natural environment).

Regardless of the validity of surveys (I.e questionnaires are not reliable/verifiable and lack validity for a number of reasons. Participants may lie; give answers that are socially desired and so on), the ability to introspection on the cognitive machinery used to choose a partner is limited, since any decision process involves a heuristic mechanism that can not be unravelled through the placement of a cross with a pencil on a scale. What translation/interpretation is supposed to have these scores in terms of a preference function? What phenotypes of the opposite sex are accepted and which are rebuffed? What are the mate responsiveness or discrimination against potential natural morphotypes? Where the acceptance threshold would lie? Which would represent the peak of preference?etc.

Speed dating:

Non–representative Sampling: samples are systematically different from the population. (Self-selection bias, decision to participate may be correlated with traits that affect the study, making the participants a non-representative sample). Consider the aversion to a context where a highly selective individual (i.e. females as choosy sex) must face blind dates.

First, because of the uncertainties for a person with reasonable options, to resort to a stressful method of interaction with male strangers, against the advantages of selecting potential partners with some less restrictive environment, with a much larger prospect size, and in a more comfortable way than in blind dates (e.g bars/nightclubs, online dating) The small proportion of women who decide to sign in such events is undoubtedly unrepresentative of the general population.

Those individuals who are highly motivated to try a last redoubt where to find a couple (i.e. usually those who find more obstacles to find receptive partners into more conventional mating leks, typically individuals who get less mating reciprocity) are over-represented.

Uncommon/unnatural environment mating Lek: Speed dating is a real staging , but extremely infrequent for most people. In speed dating, people are placed in situations they would rarely encounter in everyday life. While the majority of young people are immersed relatively frequently in mate-searching environments such as single bars/nightclubs and to a lesser extent on dating websites/apps.

There are few dating companies outside of the USA, UK and Australia. In Europe, for example, only in the largest cities there are some speed dating events available for single people. It has to be a biased example of women with less choosiness and who have had a scarce mating success over more favorable environments. Which, as a woman, is already an indicator that we are talking about some hypothetical subset of below-average attractive women with a low niche of opportunity, since most women enjoy a sufficient number of male prospects (abundant mating pool).

Speed-dating studies cannot be considered similar to what a person might encounter at a bar or party, since that many artificial constraints reduce their ecological validity.

In short, speed dating / blind dates have a low “generalizability across people”. Therefore we can not generalize from the people who participated in the speed dating to people in general.

The pool of participants immersed on blind dates/speed dating samples is self-selecting. Speed dating/blind dating and laboratory experiments are not representative of typical human mating behavior. Only if these artificial settings would converge beside naturalistic methods, one could be confident of the results.

In any case, the speed dating data agree with the asymmetry described above, where women are more selective:

1) Belot and Francesconi (2006) reported data on approximately 1800 women and 1800 men who participated to 84 speed dating events. As emerged in many previous psychological studies [Trivers 1972], women are much choosier than men: On average, women choose 2.6 men and see 45 % of their proposals matched, while men propose to 5 women and their proposals are matched in only 20 % of the cases. About 36 % of men and 11 % of women do not get any proposal. And 38 % of men and 46 % of women do not choose anyone.

2) Berlin Speed Dating Study (BSDS) made a set of carefully controlled experimental speed-dating sessions run at Humboldt University in Berlin: The mean offer rate of men was 41%, and 31% among women.

3) Kurzban & Weeden (2004) analyzed the percentage of yeses that a person received from members of the opposite sex, a measure of desirability in this context. On average, men were chosen by 34% of women (S.D.=21%), and women were chosen by 49% of men (S.D.=22%)

4) A a set of speed dating events conducted by the Department of Psychology at the University of Groningen (Jessica Pass, 2009), found their study was able to replicate earlier findings on mate acceptance in a speed-date setting. Consistent with previous findings (e.g., Kurzban & Weeden, 2005; Todd et al., 2007), women were choosier than men: on average, female participants accepted 26.3% of their dates, compared to 49.3% for male participants (t(90) = 5.21, p < .01).

Laboratory Settings

Artificial trials: Surveys where a photograph-evaluation (either a binary / dichotomous judgment or on numbered likert-type scales) contexts is required , but where the evaluator are not going to be able to interact with the rated subjects. These kind of settings are artificial and distant from real life. It is more important to ensure that a study is high in psychological realism ( i.e. how similar the psychological processes triggered in an experiment are to psychological processes that occur in everyday life.

– Humans use multiple morphological cues to assign an attractiveness value to prospective mates. On this study Eastwick and Smith are using a single criteria of choice (facial portraits). But it happens that mate choice is multivariate, humans select mates by several criteria. Mate choice is based on multiple traits. Males and females may utilize different criteria, reflecting their sex roles. A study with some ecological robustness should examine the preferences for mates varying in several traits: facial attractiveness, body attractiveness, body size/height, since humans make discriminations regarding all of these traits. The stimuli (photographs/videos) displayed should contain a complete full-body picture or a set of images containing both facial portrait and body portrait, and indicating the height of each individual. A sample of facial stimuli where not even the trunk of potential partners is shown would be fully deficient, and again lacks any ecological validity.

Moreover, when you ran a preference function test, you’re scoring with a likert scale “how much are preferred. This leads to a high degree of vagueness/confusion because we still don’t know which phenotypes would be chosen as potential partners.

Therefore acceptance thresholds should have been tested through binary choice: repeated sequential sampling of rejection/acceptance responses (binary); i.e. who is preferred and who is not. This task tend to reduce the burden of ambiguity entailed by a simple rating likert scale. (e.g. a person can be scored by someone with an “5” being chosen/accepted as mate; and another people can score like a “7” to some individual but reject him/her, since its acceptance threshold lies above 8).

External validity is improved by use of field settings or online dating data recollection. These photograph-evaluation contexts on laboratory experiments are conducted in artificial situations and that it cannot be generalized to real life.

This means that the kinds of psychological processes triggered would differ widely from those of a real mate choice lek, reducing the psychological realism of the study.

If individuals are aware that they are not immersed within a real situation of mate choice, with possible gains/benefits and costs associated with their selection process, there will be an absolute lack of ecological and external validity of the configuration. Therefore, describing an experimental mating situation to participants and then asking them to respond normally will produce responses that may not match the behavior of people who are actually in a real mating lek. We cannot depend on people predictions about what they think that they would do in a hypothetical situation, or what they want to convey to the researcher; we can only find out what people will really do when we construct a situation that triggers the same psychological processes as occur in the real world, and with stimuli similar to those found into naturalistic environments.

Furthermore the presence of some type of Hawthorne effect is likely when performing these types of experimental configurations, where the subject is fully aware that his behavioral actions are being monitored by some researcher, filling out questionnaires, etc. In mating real-life settings (e.g. online dating, street/bars-nightclubs courtship approaching) where people could not possibly have known that an experiment is being conducted, and with a full ecological validity of the evaluation process (acceptance/rejection has real consequences) sexual dimorphism emerges.

Eastwick dismiss the data collection of online dating because they consider that they lack internal validity (due to the non-standardization of photographic stimuli):

“Nevertheless, these purported demonstrations of the physical attractiveness sex difference are not especially definitive. These studies all examined a naturalistic context in which users could decide which photos of themselves to share with dating site users, and this element of the procedure opens the opportunity for several possible confounds to emerge…A clearer test of the attractiveness sex difference that avoids such confounds would entail the use of standardized stimuli that depict real people but do not allow the stimuli themselves to choose how they want to appear in the photograph” (PW Eastwick, 2018).



This is a minor and easily remedied problem. Making the appropriate adjustments by collecting profiles that meet certain validation criteria (eg, a minimum number of photographs: a single photograph may be unreliable with respect to the actual appearance, but several pictures showing face and body tend to have a fairly high precision and verisimilitude with respect to in vivo physical appearance).

Anyway, the tendency to publish online mainly better-looking photos is sexually isomorphic, and any margin of error with respect to reliability/verisimilitude regarding real appearance versus photographic appareance gap can be neglected when we’re trying to quantify between-sex mating success variance.

Dating couples/ Married couples:

Mate preference should be distinguished, both conceptually and empirically, from mate choice. Preference comprises the sensory and behavioural components that influence to mate differentially with certain phenotypes, whereas choice is the pattern of mating that is influenced not only by preference, but also other factors such as mates availability, costs of choice, etc..; which can not be deduced using this method, and that we only know the features of one only chosen partner.

It is useful to extract measures from preference functions that correspond to biologically meaningful properties for mate choice behaviour.

Social structure constrains mating preference because it defines the social spaces in which such interactions take place. Social structure is said to define the exposure to mating opportunities (i.e., potential persons with whom to interact). Choice is highly dependent on the own attractiveness of an individual, as well as on ecological and social factors. Individuals are expected to vary considerably in condition, and this can create substantial differences in their ability to express a preference.

Ecological conditions might influence the amount of time and energy required for finding prospective partners and for mate sampling. Social factors, such as population density and operational sex ratio, are also be of importance. Thus, constraints influence choosiness, which in turn affects the expression of the preference functions.

Due to the limitations for extracting mate preference-based measures from marriages/dating couples, researchers have developed a host of proxy measures that depend of asking in surveys on generalized aspects of partner satisfaction and relationship quality. As with any questionnaire, participants may provide the answers that they feel they should. Moreover, because the data are quantitative, it does not provide in-depth replies. Studies must involve direct observation strategies.

As, again, we’re only concerned with near moments of *sexual/romantic choice* (given its necessary evolutionary implications), so in any observation of long-term mate pairings, direct benefits can be a *huge* confounding variable if not controlled for(ie. where such pairings are not observing anything about sexual choice). If we don’t follow from common premises, we are fated to disagreement.

We should take great care when designing studies of mate choice if our goal is to project our conclusions to natural populations or to make quantitative predictions about how mate choice translates into selection on epigamic traits. If either is our aim, we need to rely on field studies or experimental studies conducted under settings that closely mimic those in the wild.

“Even though prior studies of this sex difference were underpowered, the sex difference was there in our new study: r(Men) = .41, r(Women) = .28, q = .13, 95% CI (.18, .08). There is no chance that the prior studies were powered to find a sex difference as small as what we found. But it was hiding in there, nevertheless.” (Evolving, “Two Lessons From a Registered Report”).

Honestly I do not think that trying to compare r coefficients is useful or enlightening, and less taking into account as it belongs to regressions from data obtained by disparate experimental methods. To clarify results, it would be necessary to plot mating success data (number of people of the opposite sex who choice/rejects an individual as mate, within the sub-population collated), on relative frequency histograms /Probability Density Functions for males and females. Or even better histograms displaying mating success according to a previously established ranking of physical attractiveness (to avoid possible reasoning endorsing spurious correlations on mate choice and non-morphological characteristics, i.e. direct beneficts)

First, the correlation analysis satisfaction versus partner attractiveness is based on obtaining data through surveys, which again enlist volunteer data/surveys of insignificant samples make for spurious argument. Second, surveys are not a reliable indication of data (ie. there is consistent evidence of falsified reporting – and every indication that males embellish, while females understate), especially when it disagrees so strongly, not only with what sexual evolution predicts, but what other controlled testing reveals of male/female mating preferences, and the resultant asymmetry). There are a plenty of factors (not related to mate attractiveness) that can influence relationship satisfaction and there is a tendency with Likert scales for people to respond towards the middle of the scale, perhaps to make them look less extreme.

The statistical analytical result presented is based on calculation of correlation coefficients of the cartesian product romantic desire versus attractiveness (which is analogous to mate preference function, being the romantic desire/preference the dependent variable and attractiveness being the independent variable). But coefficient r measures the strength/direction of a linear relationship between two variables on a scatter-plot. It happens that while male functions are mainly fairly linear, the same usually does not occur for female mate function, which are skewed nonlinear functions. So, it may provide false results for non-linear relationships.

When plotted on linear axes, directionally female skew functions assumes a familiar J-shaped curve which approaches each of the orthogonal axes asymptotically.

IGreater selective bias female in mating leks corresponds fully to screening of aesthetic signals (ignoring spurious correlations), and it is not accompanied by weighting of non-aesthetic benefits. Which comes to indicate the greatest importance given by females on the male appearance, that in reverse, like social psychology claims.

Strategic female duplicity



1. If men and women truly differ in the extent to which they believe attractiveness to be important in a partner, what factors interfere with the application of these ideals when they evaluate partners in real life? (Evolving Blog. “Going on the record via preregistration”).

This would only support that there are a great disparate quantity between what females claim (not what they believe), and what they demonstrate.



2. If there is essentially no difference between men and women in how much they actually prefer attractiveness in a real life partner, what sorts of social-cognitive biases might produce the sex difference in how much people think they prefer attractiveness in a partner?“(Evolving Blog. “Going on the record via preregistration”).





Male evolutionary agendas are more served by strategic knowledge availed by high aptitudes for logic and rational inference, as this lends more strongly to active utility in competitive environments where evolutionary success is incumbent upon contesting scarcity (especially reproductive/female access).

On the contrary, relaxed competitive rigors in female evolution have largely deprived females of such demands, instead selecting for passive strategies in the manipulation of male proxy (lending more to emotional appeals of ad-hominen tactics with respect to argument).

Haven’t you ever wondered why females are so acutely hypersensetive to any form of criticism as a general case?.

It is because female evolutionary success is more entangled in extraneous (socially or individually mediated) proxy benefits (an anxiety which was fixed by selective pressure during reproductive intervals when females were critically vulnerable to ecological stress), and are thus fanatically defensive of any information (true or not) that can potentially marginalize this ‘proxy’ through the effects of reputation (e.g. labeled as extremely shallows, etc.).

Females are not so quite obtuse in introspective capacity they first appear (Hadjistavropoulos et al, 1994). They can intuitively infer that the vast majority of males are getting a raw deal in the fitness landscape due female choosiness, and thus fear potential reprisals (even if only in a passive aggressive form of denying them mate-independent welfare privileges, which would otherwise temper their sexual choices with a more pragmatic bent which is scarcely in evidence today).

Thus, tendencies to preserve information and statu quo assymetry which expidite strategic pluralism (in the form of a cryptically imbalanced mating dynamic with respect to female mating skew), is an optimization of female evolutionary success.

In fact, the basis of any difference resolves to the fact that female biology is rate-limiting in reproductive success (hence their lower optimal mating rate), justifying their greater mate selectivity, contrary disposition, characteristic/strategic duplicty, etc.

Everything else is a popular fiction – spurious PR, designed to spin female agendas into something more noble than base reality.

Relationship satisfaction isn’t a putative index to the actual pre-mating preference functions.

“This paper found the expected sex difference in a sample of N = 458 married couples. In brief, they found that women’s attractiveness predicted men’s satisfaction at r = .10, whereas men’s attractiveness predicted women’s satisfaction r = -.05. That’s an r(difference) of .15—still pretty small, but not zero (p = .046).” (Evolving Blog. “Going on the record via preregistration”).



On the other hand, when an indirect metric is used to infer preferences (such as relational satisfaction surveys) the result will be futile.

Obtaining a score, even if it was relatively honest, will not tell us anything about the original pre-mating preferences. Since a myriad of factors will affect the relationship satisfaction status. And if only the factors relative of attractiveness were at stake, we would find a plethora of viable options resulting in different levels of pairing satisfaction for wide range of mate attractiveness

If a female pair assortatively with respect to quality (i.e. attractiveness) and although the male partner may not match her ideal preference, he will be the closest that she can achieve owing to the limited number of perfect males left available for long-term relationship. So that female could be ‘satisfied’ with her partner because he is the best that she will get;

By the other hand, female preference is quality/condition-dependent and a few females choose trade-off physical appearance; she pairs with an average-looking or unattractive male because they may confer different benefits than the more showy males For example, highly attractive males are high-risk’ for investments and less attractive prospects can provide higher levels of faithfullness and paternal care to offspring.

Otherwise, we could expect those females paired with the least ornamented males to be dissatisfied with their partners, or maybe satisfied as they are the result of active choice and match a female preference.

Moreover, most females would prefer to pair with the most attractive males and consequently are those that lose out in the scramble competition. In this scenario, we might expect many females to be dissatisfied with their partners.

But, since the sample contains young couples, the paired women should be relatively satisfied insomuch as they are still youngs and they are not under pressure to mate with a low-quality male. So they could have remained unmated and to keep searching.



How should actually preferences be measured? Preference underlie mate choice, and we should know the chooser probability of favoring or spurning a certain morphotype. In other words, we would like to know, how often the same individual, given the same experience and same conditions, would mate with a particular phenotype given a large number of opportunities.

We can’t rewind time and replay life tape again and again, so we are faced with an inherent trade-off. If we measure preferences (for paired people) based on current partner (e.g. long-term couples), we can measure them only once per individual.

Using only one realized mate choice (partner) limits our ability to measure a wide range of phenotypes and the chooser responsiveness to morphological variation.

Furthermore, a pair bonding changes the individual experience and motivation. Therefore it would also be futile to try to artificially collate in a laboratory experiment (lacking the minimum ecological validity) the mate preferences for already paired individuals.

We must use direct essays of preference, which will be predictive of a mating outcome in nature. In this case we can measure response to a lot of stimuli (e.g. through data mining from dating sites or carrying out field research: interactions-courtship).

How do we measure mating choice and preference functions rigorously, and how do we compare its strength between the sexes?

Online dating research provides a high ecologically valid context ( although investigators use online data inefficiently – just logistic regressions for some parameters without appropriate graphics and data analisis or fails to notice statistically significant relationships).

Field courtship interactions are a great promising terrain yet to be explored. The few field studies carried out (Clark & Hatfield, Guéguen, Hald, Voracek et al), were focused to assess only the acquiescence rate to sexual offers, and this methodological details are not appropriate to quantify dating success on phenotypic traits derivated of courtship attemps.

References

1. Bapna, R., Ramaprasad, J., Shmueli, G. and Umyarov, A., “One-way mirrors and weak-signaling in online dating: A randomized field experiment”, International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS 2013): Reshaping Society Through Information Systems Design,3, 2013, pp. 2748-2762.

2. Belot, M., & Francesconi, M. (2006). “Can anyone be the one? Evidence on mate selection from speed dating”.

3. Eastwick, P. W., & Smith, L. K. (2018). “Sex-differentiated effects of physical attractiveness on romantic desire: A highly powered, preregistered study in a photograph evaluation context”. Comprehensive Results in Social Psychology.

4. Eastwick, P. W. Evolving (2018). “Two Lessons from a Registered Report”.

5. Eastwick, P. W. Evolving (2018). “Going on the record via preregistration.”

6. Fiore, A. T., and Donath, J. S., “Homophily in online dating: when do you like someone like yourself?”, In CHI’05 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM, 2005, pp. 1371-1374.

7. Fiore, A. T., Taylor, L. S., Zhong, X., Mendelsohn, G. A. and Cheshire, C., “Who’s right and who writes: People, profiles, contacts, and replies in online dating”, In hicss, IEEE, 2010, pp. 1-10.

8. Jon Millward (2012). Cupid on Trial: A 4-month Online Dating Experiment Using 10 Fictional Singletons.

9. Hadjistavropoulos, T., & Genest, M. (1994). The underestimation of the role of physical attractiveness in dating preferences: Ignorance or taboo? Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science / Revue canadienne des sciences du comportement, 26(2), 298-318.

10. Hitsch, G. J., Hortaçsu, A. and Ariely, D., “Matching and sorting in online dating” The American Economic Review, 2010a, pp. 130-163.

11. Hitsch, G. J., Hortaçsu, A., and Ariely, D., “What makes you click? -Mate preferences in online dating”, Quantitative marketing and Economics, 8(4), 2010b, pp. 393-427.

12. Human Mating Blog (2014). Female Mating Skew II: Supported By Online dating Experiment.

13. Human Mating Blog (2015). Quantification Of Dating Pools Through A Online Dating System.

14. Human Mating Blog (2015). Plenty Of Fish Experiment: Study 1, Study 2, Study 3 and Study 4.

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