Women's quest for jerks tied to hormones

Actor Phineas Clark plays a “cad” in a video for research by a UTSA professor on women’s perceptions of future partners. Actor Phineas Clark plays a “cad” in a video for research by a UTSA professor on women’s perceptions of future partners. Photo: Courtesy Photo Photo: Courtesy Photo Image 1 of / 5 Caption Close Women's quest for jerks tied to hormones 1 / 5 Back to Gallery

Ladies, remember falling for that handsome, adventurous guy your friends warned you about — the one who turned out to be Mr. Wrong?

It might be no fault of your intelligence that you overestimated the sultry scoundrel's potential as a long-term mate and family man, according to new research by a University of Texas at San Antonio professor.

Your hormones might have deluded you.

Previous research has found that estrogen has the power to increase women's desire for bad boys during ovulation, said Kristina Durante, assistant professor of marketing at UTSA.

But that finding didn't explain why women, typically less into casual sex than men, pursue relationships with men less likely to be faithful.

In a study published this month in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Durante might have found the key. Ovulating women unconsciously overestimated how great a partner and future father the charismatic cad will be, Durante said.

And Durante, the lead author of the study, “Ovulation Leads Women to Perceive Sexy Cads as Good Dads,” has some bad news for nice guys everywhere. She found no such favorable bias for more reliable men who did not happen to possess the traits of attractiveness and social dominance, characteristics linked to good genetics.

“If we were to turn back the clock a thousand years, I would probably have a bunch of sexy cads' babies,” Durante said. “That's the purpose of this overperception. Those women (through human history) ... ended up passing on this gene because their kids were healthier.”

Durante is 38 and a happily married mother of two. She typically studies consumer behavior in women, but the motivation for this research was more personal: She'd been dumped by “sexy cads” throughout her 20s.

While getting her doctorate at the University of Texas at Austin, she woke up one morning, and the attractive lout she'd been living with was gone forever. She recalled saying “enough's enough” at that point. “I wanted to look into the biology of it.”

Durante designed a study that asked UT-Austin students to view a concocted online dating profile of either a good-looking adventure-seeker or a reliable accountant and to imagine having a baby with him. The women who were ovulating tended toward higher estimates of how much the sexy man would contribute to child rearing — changing diapers, washing bottles and the like.

In the study's second phase, actors hired to portray both roles led University of Minnesota students to believe that they were interacting with twins one at a time over Skype. The ovulating women still wore rose-colored glasses when it came to the cad's contribution to their imagined relationship. But asked to imagine the guy involved with another woman, the unconscious bias vaporized and they could see his faults.

In the third phase, Durante surveyed more than 300 diverse women from across the United States and found that those who reached puberty earlier, which can indicate growing up in a harsh or unstable environment, had been quicker to reproduce and more likely to perceive Mr. Wrong with a favorable bias.

Durante said medical advances have made these evolved impulses less critical for a child's survival, but “our brains have not caught up to our modern environment.”

Asked about the study's implications, women on the UTSA campus and the nearby Shops at La Cantera said Durante's research resonated with their life experiences and that of their friends.

Bianca Cerqueira, a UTSA student getting her doctorate in biomedical engineering, said she believes that there are more biological drives at work than humans are usually aware of. Though now married, Cerqueira said friends and family warned her about a boy she dated in high school.

“Initially, you're like, ‘Oh, he's really hot,'” Cerqueira said. “Then you get to know him and you're like, ‘Eh, not so great.'”

Another already had coined a term — “stupid woman disorder” — for the “hormonal blinders” that let women go after good-looking slicksters instead of gentlemen.

But for men who think the study gives them incentive to misbehave, Durante had this advice: The strategy might be effective at first, but unless you're George Clooney, “you're going to find yourself alone in the nursing home. ... You don't want to be the old guy in the club.”

jlloyd@express-news.net

Twitter: @jlloydster