How Do Ideal Friend Preferences and Interaction Context Affect Friendship Formation? Evidence for a Domain- General Relationship Initiation Process

This research examined how people’s ideal friend preferences influence the friendship formation process. In an extension of prior research on romantic relationship initiation, we tested whether the match between participants’ ideals and a partner’s traits affected participants’ interest in forming a new friendship in three contexts: evaluating a potential friend’s profile, meeting in-person, and chatting online. Results revealed that participants were more interested in becoming friends with a partner whose traits matched (vs. mismatched) their ideal friend preferences when evaluating his or her profile. After a live interaction, however, the effect of the ideal-perceived trait match manipulation on participants’ friendship interest was substantially reduced in both in-person and online chatting contexts. People’s ideal friend preferences may influence their friendship interest more strongly in descriptive (i.e., indirect) than interactive (i.e., direct) contexts, a finding that mirrors prior results from the romantic domain and documents a role for domain-general relationship initiation processes

Mate Value and Self-Esteem: Evidence from Eight Cultural Groups

This paper explores self-perceived mate value (SPMV), and its association with self-esteem, in eight cultures. 1066 participants, from 8 cultural groups in 7 countries, rated themselves on 24 SPMVs and completed a measure of self-esteem. Consistent with evolutionary theory, women were more likely to emphasise their caring and passionate romantic nature. In line with previous cross-cultural research, characteristics indicating passion and romance and social attractiveness were stressed more by respondents from individualistic cultures, and those higher on self-expression (rather than survival) values; characteristics indicative of maturity and confidence were more likely to be mentioned by those from Traditional, rather than Secular, cultures. Contrary to gender role theory, societal equality had only limited interactions with sex and SPMV, with honesty of greater significance for male self-esteem in societies with unequal gender roles. These results point to the importance of cultural and environmental factors in influencing self-perceived mate qualities, and are discussed in relation to broader debates about the impact of gender role equality on sex differences in personality and mating strategies

Disgust trumps lust:women’s disgust and attraction towards men is unaffected by sexual arousal

Mating is a double-edged sword. It can have great adaptive benefits, but also high costs, depending on the mate. Disgust is an avoidance reaction that serves the function of discouraging costly mating decisions, for example if the risk of pathogen transmission is high. It should, however, be temporarily inhibited in order to enable potentially adaptive mating. We therefore tested the hypothesis that sexual arousal inhibits disgust if a partner is attractive, but not if he is unattractive or shows signs of disease. In an online experiment, women rated their disgust towards anticipated behaviors with men depicted on photographs. Participants did so in a sexually aroused state and in a control state. The faces varied in attractiveness and the presence of disease cues (blemishes). We found that disease cues and attractiveness, but not sexual arousal, influenced disgust. The results suggest that women feel disgust at sexual contact with unattractive or diseased men independently of their sexual arousal

Psychological Science in the Wake of COVID-19: Social, Methodological, and Metascientific Considerations

The COVID-19 pandemic has extensively changed the state of psychological science, from what research questions psychologists can ask to which methodologies psychologists can employ to investigate them. In this article, we offer a perspective on how to optimize new research in the pandemic’s wake. As this pandemic is inherently a social phenomenon—an event that hinges upon human-to-human contact—we focus on socially relevant subfields of psychology. We highlight specific psychological phenomena that have likely shifted due to the pandemic and discuss theoretical, methodological, and practical considerations of conducting research on these phenomena. Following this discussion, we evaluate meta-scientific issues that have been amplified by the pandemic. We aim to demonstrate how theoretically grounded views on the COVID-19 pandemic can help make psychological science stronger—not weaker—in its wake

How do people translate their experiences into abstract attribute preferences?

In many literatures, scholars study summarized attribute preferences: overall evaluative summaries of an attribute (e.g., a person's liking for the attribute “attractive” in a mate). But we know little about how people form these ideas about their likes and dislikes in the first place, in part because of a dearth of paradigms that enable researchers to experimentally change people's attribute preferences. Drawing on theory and methods in covariation detection and social cognition, we developed a paradigm that examines how people infer summarized preferences for novel attributes from functional attribute preferences: the extent to which the attribute predicts an individual's evaluations across multiple targets (e.g., a person's tendency to positively evaluate mates who are more vs. less attractive). In three studies, participants encountered manipulated information about their own functional preference for a novel attribute in a set of targets. They then inferred a summarized preference for the attribute. Summarized preferences corresponded strongly to the functional preference manipulation when targets varied on only one attribute. But additional complexity (in the form of a second novel attribute) caused summarized and functional preferences to diverge, and biases emerged: Participants reported stronger summarized preferences for the attribute when the population of targets possessed more of the attribute on average (regardless of functional preference strength). We also documented some support for a standard-of-comparison mechanism to explain this inferential bias. These studies elucidate factors that may warp the translation process from people's experienced evaluative responses in the world to their overall, summary judgments about their attribute preferences

How do people translate their experiences into abstract attribute preferences?

In many literatures, scholars study summarized attribute preferences: overall evaluative summaries of an attribute (e.g., a person's liking for the attribute “attractive” in a mate). But we know little about how people form these ideas about their likes and dislikes in the first place, in part because of a dearth of paradigms that enable researchers to experimentally change people's attribute preferences. Drawing on theory and methods in covariation detection and social cognition, we developed a paradigm that examines how people infer summarized preferences for novel attributes from functional attribute preferences: the extent to which the attribute predicts an individual's evaluations across multiple targets (e.g., a person's tendency to positively evaluate mates who are more vs. less attractive). In three studies, participants encountered manipulated information about their own functional preference for a novel attribute in a set of targets. They then inferred a summarized preference for the attribute. Summarized preferences corresponded strongly to the functional preference manipulation when targets varied on only one attribute. But additional complexity (in the form of a second novel attribute) caused summarized and functional preferences to diverge, and biases emerged: Participants reported stronger summarized preferences for the attribute when the population of targets possessed more of the attribute on average (regardless of functional preference strength). We also documented some support for a standard-of-comparison mechanism to explain this inferential bias. These studies elucidate factors that may warp the translation process from people's experienced evaluative responses in the world to their overall, summary judgments about their attribute preferences