Evolution Influences Mate Preferences: What Men And Women Really Want

Ask anyone, and they will likely tell you men and women have a very different idea of "the perfect partner." This difference, a new study from the University of Texas at Austin finds, may be rooted in evolution.

To examine how gender influences mating preferences, researchers  studied 4,764 men and 5,389 women from 33 different countries and 37  different cultures. They found even in countries promoting gender equality,  mating preferences still varied. Study co-author David Buss, a  psychology professor, said this rejects the existing idea men and women  are identical in their underlying psychology.

"The genders differ strikingly in their evolved mate preferences in some domains,” Buss explained in a press release.  “The same holds true in highly sexually egalitarian cultures such as  Sweden and Norway as in less egalitarian cultures such as Iran.”

When it comes down to it, researchers discovered that what we want in a mate  is linked more to our gender than our individual experiences and  preferences. As a result, they found that they could predict a person’s  sex with 92.2 percent accuracy purely based on what they said they  wanted in a significant other.

“The large overall difference between men's and women's mate  preferences tells us that the sexes must have experienced dramatically  different challenges in the mating domain throughout human evolution,”  said Daniel Conroy, lead author and graduate researcher.

As expected, men have a tendency to look for partners who are  younger and more physically attractive, while women look for older and more financially established mates,  with higher social status and ambition. These eye roll-inducing gender  roles may have evolved with men and women over time.

"Because women bear the cost of pregnancy and lactation, they often  faced the adaptive problem of acquiring resources to produce and support  offspring, while men faced adaptive problems of identifying fertile  partners and sought cues to fertility and future reproductive value,"  Conroy-Beam said.

The study claims that this is just an example of natural selection at  work, in which the sexes each face their own reproductive challenges  and must adapt and find mates who will provide healthy children. If we  did not evolve to favor these characteristics, the chances of  perpetuating the species, so to speak, would not be as high.

This is not to say our individual preferences are meaningless. In  fact, men and women still look for and value certain characteristics,  like a pleasing disposition, sociability, as well as shared religious  and political views. So when it comes down to it, evolution doesn't have  teh final say over who we choose to spend our lives with, but it is a  big part of it. Basically, researchers concluded, a lot more goes into  this decision than we think.

"Few decisions impact reproduction more than mate choice,"  Conroy-Beam said. "Mate preferences will therefore be a central target  and driver of biological evolution. We have found some promising initial  results, and we think this holistic approach will help answer a lot of  questions in mating research in the future."

Source: Conroy-Beam D, Buss D, Pham M, et al. How sexually dimorphic are human mate preferences? Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. 2016

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