08 Aug Men and Women Have Different Preferences in Mates
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Daniel Conroy-Beam
Department of Psychology
University of Texas at Austin
Austin, TX
Medical Research: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Response: The main finding is that sex differences in mate preferences are much larger than we previously appreciated. So large, in fact, that if we knew nothing about a person but what they desired in a mate, we could predict their sex with 92.2% accuracy.
Previous research has emphasized sex differences on individual preferences: how physically attractive should my mate be? How old should they be? How kind should they be? But we don’t pick our mates based on individual preferences; we use all of our preferences together. It’s not as though we want one partner who is attractive, and another who is intelligent, and another who is kind. We want one partner who is all of those things at once. We looking for partners with patterns of features. It turns out the patterns men and women are looking for are strikingly different. In fact, the patterns men are looking for barely overlap with the patterns women are looking for.
Medical Research: What should clinicians and patients take away from your report?
Response: What is a satisfying and fulfilling mate choice differs dramatically for men and women. Mate preferences influence the partners we try to attract and the consequences of our final mate choices. Our mate preferences help determine many aspects of our well-being: what social environments we inhabit; who we form relationships, marry, and spend our lives with; what our children are like and with whom we raise our children. The large sex difference in mate preferences suggest that at least this one path to well-being differs for men and women. That’s important to be aware of.
Medical Research: What recommendations do you have for future research as a result of this study?
Response: Future research would benefit from continuing to approach mate preferences holistically, as we did in this study. Mating is a big part of our psychology and our lives. Few decisions impact reproduction more than mating, and so evolution has built into us an intricate mating psychology. Understanding that psychology, and its effects on our lives, is critical. But some questions in mating have been very difficult to answer. How do we actually select our desired partners? How do we get our desired partners to select us? What happens to our relationships and our lives when our mates don’t fulfill our preferences? We suspect these questions have been hard to answer because researchers have been trying to understand mate preferences in isolation. Mate preferences don’t exist in isolation. Stepping back and looking at the bigger picture of how our many mate preferences work together to guide our behavior is going to be key to understanding mating and its many effects on our lives.
Citation:
Daniel Conroy-Beam, David M. Buss, Michael N. Pham, and Todd K. Shackelford
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Daniel Conroy-Beam (2015). Men and Women Have Different Preferences in Mates
Last Updated on August 8, 2015 by Marie Benz MD FAAD