Unrestricted sexuality promotes distinctive short- and long-term mate preferences in women

The dual-sexual strategy hypothesis claims that women select different men for short- and long-term relationships. In short-term relationships, women are attracted to good genes (e.g., masculinity, attractiveness); in long-term relationships, material traits (e.g., good income, patient) are favoured. A potential predictor of women's mating strategy is sociosexuality, a measure of an individual's willingness to engage in casual, uncommitted sex. We asked whether women high in sociosexuality (i.e., unrestricted sexuality) would demonstrate greater distinctiveness between short- and long-term mate preferences. In an online study, participants (N = 459) from India and the USA were apportioned a ‘mate budget’ to construct their ideal short- and long-term partners. Mate Dollars could be spent on either genetic or material traits. As expected, genetic traits were favoured for short-term relationships; material traits were favoured for long-term relationships. However, women with a more restricted sexuality preferred short-term mates who closely resembled their long-term preferences. Women from the USA (with typically less restricted sexuality) showed more distinctive preferences than in India (with typically more restricted sexuality). Thus, a woman's sociosexuality influences the distinctiveness of her short- and long-term mate preferences

Who punishes promiscuous women? Both women and men are prejudiced towards sexually-accessible women, but only women inflict costly punishment

Across human societies, female sexuality is suppressed by gendered double standards, slut shaming, sexist rape laws, and honour killings. The question of what motivates societies to punish promiscuous women, however, has been contested. Although some have argued that men suppress female sexuality to increase paternity certainty, others maintain that this is an example of intrasexual competition. Here we show that both sexes are averse to overt displays of female sexuality, but that motivation is sex-specific. In all studies, participants played an economic game with a female partner whose photograph either signalled that she was sexually-accessible or sexually-restricted. In study 1, we found that men and women are less altruistic in a Dictator Game (DG) when partnered with a woman signalling sexual-accessibility. Both sexes were less trusting of sexually-accessible women in a Trust Game (TG) (study 2); women (but not men), however, inflicted costly punishment on a sexually-accessible woman in an Ultimatum Game (UG) (study 3). Our results demonstrate that both sexes are averse to overt sexuality in women, whilst highlighting potential differences in motivation

Mate choice, mate preference, and biological markets : the relationship between partner choice and health preference is modulated by women's own attractiveness

Although much of the research on human mate preference assumes that mate preference and partner choice will be related to some extent, evidence for correlations between mate preference and mate choice is mixed. Inspired by biological market theories of mate choice, which propose that individuals with greater market value will be better placed to translate their preference into choice, we investigated whether participants' own attractiveness modulated the relationship between their preference and choice. Multilevel modeling showed that experimentally assessed preferences for healthy-looking other-sex faces predicted third-party ratings of partner's facial health better among women whose faces were rated as more attractive by third parties. This pattern of results was not seen for men. These results suggest that the relationship between mate preference and mate choice may be more complex than was assumed in previous research, at least among women. Our results also highlight the utility of biological market theories for understanding the links between mate preference and partner choice

http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk Original citation

Previous research suggests that people who score higher on measures of pathogen disgust demonstrate (1) stronger preferences for healthy individuals when assessing their facial attractiveness and (2) stronger negative attitudes about obese individuals. The relationship between pathogen disgust and attractiveness judgments of faces differing in cues of weight has yet to be investigated, however. Here we found that men's, but not women's, pathogen disgust was positively correlated with their preference for facial cues of lower weight. Moreover, this effect of pathogen disgust was independent of the possible effects of moral and sexual disgust. These data implicate pathogen disgust in individual differences in preferences for facial cues of weight, at least among men, and suggest that the sex-specific effects of pathogen disgust on preferences for facial cues of weight may be different to those previously reported for general negative attitudes about obese individuals

Political attitudes and disease threat : regional pathogen stress is associated with conservative ideology only for older individuals

What environmental factors are associated with individual differences in political ideology, and do such associations change over time? We examine whether reductions in pathogen prevalence in US states over the past 60 years are associated with reduced associations between parasite stress and conservatism. We report a positive association between infection levels and conservative ideology in the USA during the 1960s and 1970s. However, this correlation reduces from the 1980s onwards. These results suggest that the ecological influence of infectious diseases may be larger for older people who grew up (or whose parents grew up) during earlier time periods. We test this hypothesis by analyzing the political affiliation of 45,000 Facebook users, and find a positive association between self-reported political affiliation and regional pathogen stress for older (> 40 years) but not younger individuals. It is concluded that the influence of environmental pathogen stress on ideology may have reduced over time

Parasite-stress promotes in-group assortative sociality: the cases of strong family ties and heightened religiosity

Throughout the world people differ in the magnitude with which they value strong family ties or heightened religiosity. We propose that this cross-cultural variation is a result of a contingent psychological adaptation that facilitates in-group assortative sociality in the face of high levels of parasite-stress while devaluing in-group assortative sociality in areas with low levels of parasite-stress. This is because in-group assortative sociality is more important for the avoidance of infection from novel parasites and for the management of infection in regions with high levels of parasite-stress compared with regions of low infectious disease stress. We examined this hypothesis by testing the predictions that there would be a positive association between parasite-stress and strength of family ties or religiosity. We conducted this study by comparing among nations and among states in the United States of America. We found for both the international and the interstate analyses that in-group assortative sociality was positively associated with parasite-stress. This was true when controlling for potentially confounding factors such as human freedom and economic development. The findings support the parasite-stress theory of sociality, that is, the proposal that parasite-stress is central to the evolution of social life in humans and other animals

You're not my type : do conservatives have a bias for seeing long-term mates?

When choosing a mate, humans favour genetic traits (attractiveness, high sex drive) for short-term relationships and parental traits (warmth, high status) for long-term relationships. These preferences serve to maximise fitness of future offspring. But this model neglects the role of social norms in shaping evolved mating strategies. For example, in conservative cultures, individuals are likely to face costs such as punishment for short-term mating. Here we show that conservatives over-perceive some mates' suitability as long-term partners. Study 1 found that conservatives were less likely to use a short-term strategy that was distinctive from their long-term strategy. Study 2 showed that conservatives over-perceived hypothetical mates as long-term investing partners, despite their lack of commitment-compatible traits. Conservatism was measured at the regional- (India, USA, UK) and individual-level. Our results demonstrate how social norms may bias behaviour. We anticipate our findings to be a starting point for more sophisticated models, drawing on developments from evolutionary and social psychology

Individual-level analyses of the impact of parasite stress on personality : reduced openness only for older individuals

The parasite stress hypothesis predicts that individuals living in regions with higher infectious disease rates will show lower openness, agreeableness, and extraversion, but higher conscientiousness. This paper, using data from over 250,000 US Facebook users, reports tests of these predictions at the level of both US states and individuals and evaluates criticisms of previous findings. State-level results for agreeableness and conscientiousness are consistent with previously reported cross-national findings, but others (a significant positive correlation with extraversion, and no correlation with openness) are not. However effects of parasite stress on conscientiousness and agreeableness are not found when analyses account for the data’s hierarchical structure and include controls. We find that only openness is robustly related to parasite stress in these analyses, and we also find a significant interaction with age: Older, but not younger, inhabitants of areas of high parasite stress show lower openness. Interpretations of the findings are discussed

The comparative method in cross-cultural and cross-species research

Comparative methodology is controversial in biology and the related field of research on behavioral and psychological traits across human cultures. We critically examine this controversy. We argue that the widely held opinion of non-independence among historically-related cultures and species errs by not recognizing and incorporating into research the two distinct and complementary categories of causation that account for an extant trait—the phylogenetic origin of the trait (cultural or otherwise) and the maintenance of the trait after its phylogenetic origin. Phylogenetic correction for non-independence is required in the comparative study of a trait’s phylogenetic origin, but is irrelevant for the comparative study of the causation of a trait’s maintenance after its phylogenetic origin. Across cultures, even closely related cultures, causes that are specific to each culture act to maintain cultural similarities, which makes such similarities independent. Among species, even closely related species, similarities are maintained by lineage-specific, and hence independent, evolutionary causal processes. Comparative methodology has been criticized as being inferior to other types of scientific methodology (e.g., experimentation), because it is based on correlational data. This criticism is erroneous because, all scientific findings are correlational, and in hypothesis testing, the ability of an empirical finding to address causation depends solely upon the control of confounding variables, not the type of scientific method itself