Good news for men with very attractive partners: in scientific terms, you’re probably having more sex (in-pair copulations) than other guys.
However, according to a new study, the reason that you’re doing this is to mark your territory, and hold on to a partner who’s more likely to be pursued by other men and thus put you at risk of being cheated on.
It might seem obvious that more attractive partners inspire more frequent sex, but according to Farnaz Kaighobadi, a PhD student in Evolutionary Psychology, at Florida Atlantic University, the reasons are found in our evolutionary past, and run much deeper than simply thinking your mate is pretty hot.
Farnaz Kaighobadi claims:
In this context, sex is a “mate retention behaviour” designed to hold on to a partner who might otherwise stray and to increase the odds that any children born are those of the woman’s mate. Other such behaviours range from kind gestures like buying small gifts or offering compliments to nasty traits like sifting through a partner’s mail or threatening anyone who shows interest in them.
The underlying reasons are deeply unconscious.
It’s not like men are sitting there and thinking, ‘My partner is attractive so it’s likely she’s going to be unfaithful, so let me have more sex with her; it could be simply, ‘My partner is hot, I’m going to have more sex with her.’
Men reported that they have sex with their partners an average of 3.3 times in a typical week, Kaighobadi says, and they assigned them an average attractiveness rating of 7.9 on a scale of 0 to 9. Then, with each one-point increase in attractiveness, the frequency of sex increased by 40 percent, she says.
The study involved 277 heterosexual men, and was co-authored by Todd Shackelford. It will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Personality and Individual Differences.
Kaighobadi also noted:
It’s not yet clear how this dynamic plays out in same-sex couples.
Posted by Jonathan as Sociobiology at 11:54 PM EDT
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The problem with Science books is that they’re mostly tucked away in Libraries or technical sections of Bookshops; so that many of the more interesting points they make are often lost to the general public, or sometimes the ideas just become twisted to suit the ideals of noisy braggarts with their own private agendas.
In terms of the scientific aspects of seduction, we have already disproved the notion that amongst human society there is some sort of top dog or alpha male. But looking back at that article there is very little mentioned about human hierarchies and rank; while most reasonably intelligent observers of human society would note that human society is much more complex than the simple and often somewhat bizarre alpha / not-alpha theories touted by various commercial seduction operations.
In purely biological terms, relative resource holdings are best and most decisively demonstrated in the struggle between individuals for access to mates. For both humans and other animals, the most intense of these struggles typically involve males, the reason for this lying in the asymmetry of the reproductive strategies of the two sexes. Females, who in most species invest heavily in the gestation and care of offspring, have limited reproductive capacity relative to males, whose only contribution in many instances consists of just a few sperm cells. This asymmetry means that any single male is capable (in theory) of siring an almost unlimited number of progeny. Thus, the result for males is a genetic tournament with enormously high stakes. As an example, in one species of seal, 4 percent of the breeding-age males sire almost 90 percent of all surviving offspring.1
The variability of male reproductive success in humans, although smaller than in many other animal species, is nonetheless substantial. More than 85 percent of past and present human societies for which data is available were polygynous.2 And, in such societies, high-ranking males often take numerous wives, with the biggest winners enjoying prodigious reproductive success. For example, Moulay Ismail (1646-1727), the last Sharifian Emperor of Morocco, fathered more than a thousand children during the course of his lifetime.2 But even people who would be delighted if everyone had lots of grandchildren thus have ample reasons to want high relative incomes.
In modern industrial societies, of course, there is no longer a strong link between income and the number of grandchildren one expects to have, since the government generally subsidises families that have numerous children. Even so, there is still evidence that relative earning power continues to be an important factor in mate selection. And, according to various relationship surveys, women consider earning power the most important characteristic when evaluating potential mates; and, apparently recognizing the growing importance of two-earner families in modern society, men in the same surveys usually rank a woman’s earning power second behind physical attractiveness.
Anyway, to continue, over the course of human evolution, if individuals differed in the intensity of their respective desires to achieve high rank, and if those with more intense desires were more likely than others to achieve it, then it would be most unusual if the relentless forces of natural selection had not produced a human brain that strongly motivated its owner to seek high rank.
So, it seems natural to ask why a brain moulded by natural selection would urge us to seek relative rather than absolute wealth, as in most cases, a person who maximizes their absolute wealth will have maximized their relative wealth as well. We might also ask why our inner voices don’t simply urge “Do the best you can,” rather than “Try to achieve high rank.” After all, most of us are destined to be outranked by at least some people in virtually every domain of life, making a relentless focus on relative position seem more like a formula for misery than a useful motivational tool.
Evolutionary Psychologists stress, however, that the purpose of human motivation is not to make us happy, but to make us more likely to succeed against the competition. Someone who is unhappy about his low relative position in one arena may be more motivated to compete in a different arena. For instance, a talented entrepreneur who is not willing to put in 80-hour work weeks will have a better chance of becoming a success in a small regional town than in Central London.
There is also the linguistic problem that a command like “Do the best you can” is hopelessly vague. Each of us has a unique mix of talent, ability and experience, so in most cases, doing the best we can doesn’t yield much fruit, unless we first discover just what it is that we’re good at. For example, once you’ve chosen to become an Accountant, it may be sensible to say try to become the best Accountant you can; but how did you know that becoming an Accountant was the right choice in the first place?
Much of human learning takes place as a result of the positive or negative reinforcement we receive from different actions. Slowly, and often by trial and error, we purge our mental inventories of behaviours that don’t work, and then replace them with ones that do. If you’re tone deaf, your relatively poor performance in primary school music classes will have spared you the trouble of seeking a career as a Pianist. If you are a slow runner, your poor performance in early races will have steered you away from training for the Olympics. Then, with a little luck, your strong early performance in some other field will have helped guide you towards a career that provided a more fertile ground for your talents. Thus, when it comes to finding the right field to compete in, an inner voice urging “Try to achieve high rank” is likely to be far more informative than an inner voice urging “Do the best you can.”
There is yet another important reason for being concerned about rank per se, and this is that rank serves as a convenient benchmark for us to use in regulating the amount of effort we expend. To use the military as a vivid illustration, we know that human beings under duress can accomplish extremely demanding physical tasks with little sleep for weeks at a time, even when faced with imminent threats of death. However, there are limits, because each persons struggle for survival typically plays out over many decades, and the expenditure of maximum possible effort at every moment is almost certain to be a losing strategy. So, to avoid burning out, we also need to set aside time to reflect and restore ourselves.
A far better general strategy is therefore to conserve energy for the occasions when threats to survival are greatest. Here, also, an intrinsic concern about relative position appears almost tailor-made for the task at hand. So, as a general rule, the farther an individual fell in her local pecking order, the more serious were the threats to her survival. A decline in rank typically provokes distress and anxiety, and these feelings can often spur the additional effort it requires to recover lost ground.
This is not to say that anxiety vanishes once someone achieves a threshold level of high rank. On the contrary, we all know people whose drive to advance remains unsatisfied no matter how much they may have achieved. This could be explained in part by the fact that individuals differ in their respective drives to succeed, and those with the highest drives are more likely than others to have made it near the top.
But the Evolutionary Psychologist’s perspective suggests the additional possibility that we ought not to have expected the relationship between subjective well-being and relative income to have been a simple, static one in the first place. From an evolutionary design standpoint, the most successful organisms will be concerned not just with their relative position but with changes therein, since in competitive environments, complacency about high rank often results in losing it.
Thus, psychological well-being seems attuned to relative income in roughly the following way: Increases in relative income increase wellbeing, and reductions in relative income reduce wellbeing, but both effects tend to decay at least partially over time.3 Once people become adapted to their new circumstances, these constitute a new norm against which further changes are reckoned. (Hence the folk wisdom that “Life is a journey, not a destination”)
The Evolutionary Psychologist’s framework also calls attention to the fact that the relevant reproductive battles were typically decided by competitive balance in highly local environments. For instance, an ape’s reproductive success depended not on how strong he was relative to the entire population of apes on the African continent, but on his strength relative to rivals in his immediate vicinity. Similarly, the economic and psychological rewards of today’s tennis player depend not on his performance vis-à-vis all other athletes, but on how well he performs relative to other tennis players in the particular arena in which he competes. Achieving high or improving rank in this ‘local hierarchy’ will make him feel good, and the reverse will be true for low rank or downward movements.
People in each different category are involved in their own competitions to move forward in their local hierarchies. But in each case, only half of the contestants can rank in the top half.
References:
1. Dawkins, R., ‘The Selfish Gene‘ (1989) United Kingdom: Oxford University Press
2. Wright, R., ‘The Moral Animal‘ (1994) New York: Pantheon
3. Diener, E. & R. Lucas, ‘Personality and Subjective Well-Being’ in Understanding Well-Being: Scientific Perspectives on Enjoyment and Suffering (1998) eds. Daniel Kahneman, Ed Diener & Norbert Schwartz, New York: Russell Sage
Posted by Jonathan as Sociobiology, Sociology at 3:02 AM EDT
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Woman’s voices becomes more alluring when they are most fertile, according to a study of vocal changes during ovulation, conducted by researchers from the State University of New York at Albany.
Nathan Pipitone and Gordon Gallup recorded women counting from one to ten at four different points in their menstrual cycle, which they had graded from low to high risk of conception. They then played the voices back at random to a mixed sex panel of students, and found that the female voice altered according to the time of the month, whilst there was no effect if the woman was taking oral contraception. So, the study suggests sex hormones can alter the workings of the voice box.
The Scientists wrote:
The results showed a significant increase in voice attractiveness ratings as the risk of conception increased across the menstrual cycle in naturally cycling women. There was no effect for women using hormonal contraceptives. More work is needed to identify the biological mechanisms that underlie these perceptual differences, but growing evidence points to the impact of hormones on the larynx as being the source of these changes
Both men and women judged the voices to be sexiest when they were recorded at periods of peak fertility, and less attractive during non-fertile periods, although the changes might be too subtle to pick up in many situations. However, if the findings can be replicated, they will add further weight to the theory that women unconsciously give off cues about their fertility, similar to animals when they are “in heat”.
Dr Gallup also noted that it was not just men who have learnt to spot barely perceptible changes in women’s voices; women can also notice the effect, perhaps to monitor the competition.
Dr David Feinberg of McMaster University in Canada told The BBC:
The missing link here is finding out how this works in plain conversation - in a bar, for example
While it’s possible, the other issue is that women do have mood changes across their menstrual cycle, and people might just be attracted to a happy-sounding woman, rather than a fertile one.
Previous research came to similar conclusions about fertility cues, after a team based at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, found that lap dancers earned more in tips on their fertile days.
Geoffrey Miller, who led that research commented:
The voice changes might explain some of the shift in lap dancer tip earnings, dancers certainly chat with their customers.
However, he went on to explain, visual attractiveness also appeared to change during the menstrual cycle, so voice quality is unlikely to be the whole story.
The full research paper is to be published in the Journal of Evolution and Human Behaviour.
Posted by Jonathan as Sociobiology at 12:28 PM EDT
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Might Charles Darwin have been wrong about the sexual attraction of the peacock’s tail?
A controversial new study from Japan has found no evidence for the traditional view that peahens choose their sexual partners based on the quality of a peacocks’ feather train.
This runs counter to the long-held belief that male peacock feathers evolved in response to female mate choice. It could also indicate that certain other elaborate features in turkeys, chickens, grouse, quails and pheasants, as well as peacocks, are not necessarily linked to fitness and mating success.
For Indian peafowl (Pavo cristatus), which the researchers studied, male vocalisations appeared to do a better job of getting the attention of females than their visually screaming “attire.”
Mariko Takahashi, an animal behaviourist at the University of Tokyo in Japan, and her team, studied a free-ranging population of Indian peafowl at Izu Cactus Park, Shizuoka, Japan, from 1995 to 2001. They photographed each male during the tail-fanning display ritual, and counted the number of eyespots (a measure of tail quality). Next they examined whether females chose mates with the best-quality tails.
During spring periods, the scientists observed male and female mating success, from both male and female perspectives, with a focus on what are known as “male shivering displays“.
During such a display, a male shows and shakes its train directly towards a visiting female at close range. The shaking produces a distinct rustling noise, and females appear to actively solicit shivering displays by running around the males they seem to prefer.
The scientists took these behavioural indicators of mating success and related them to several aspects of peacock train fanciness, including train length and number of eyespots. The researchers also documented the number and duration of shivering displays.
Over the seven years of observation, Takahashi’s team observed 268 successful matings. But surprisingly they found that females mated with drab-tailed peacocks as often as with flashy males. Therefore, they concluded that the peacock’s train is not the object of female sexual preference.
In fact, researchers were unable to link any single male trait with his mating success, and Takahashi and her team found little train variance among males in the population they studied. They also couldn’t detect any link between a particular male’s fitness and his train.
So, the scientists think that male mating calls, which consist of multiple notes and sound very different than the noises females make, could affect mating success. The train might originally have served as a sign to females; hypothesizes Takahashi, but like last year’s fashions, they have now become obsolete.
The findings are published in the journal Animal Behaviour.
Posted by Jonathan as Biology, Sociobiology at 12:36 AM EST
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As someone familiar with dieting, I’m very aware that when temptation comes my way, in the form of a cream bun or a chocolate, immediate gratification tends to win over my long-term goals. This is almost a universal psychological phenomenon. However some researchers believe that those in committed partnerships will tend to show the opposite, favouring the long term goal of a committed relationship to short term gratification, e.g. starting an affair.
While leading a research team at the University of California, Gian Gonzaga came to the conclusion that people in love are blinded to the charms of other potential partners. In a study of 60 heterosexual students, who had been in a relationship for an average of three years, they showed each subject a photo of a stranger, who they found to be attractive, and then asked the subject to write a five minute essay on what was attractive about that person, followed by another brief essay describing an ideal first meeting.
The subjects were then split into three groups and each group was asked to write a further two five-minute essays. One group had to write about the time they had felt the most love for their current partner and when they last felt such love; another group were to write about the time they felt the most sexual desire towards their current partner and the most recent time. The last group were told to write about whatever came to mind.
While writing their second essay, all the subjects were instructed not to think about the attractive person in the photo. Then, during the last essay they were encourage to do so, having been given a piece of paper to record every time their attention turned to thoughts of the person in the photo. The number of ticks made by a subject was then recorded.
When allowed to think about the attractive stranger, the “love” group marked their paper only one-third as often as the “sexual desire” group, and only one-sixth as often as the control group. Also, when prompted at the end of the experiment, the “love” group remembered significantly fewer details about what had made the person in their photo more attractive than the other two groups.
When people are instructed to not think of something, a “rebound effect” occurs, causing the taboo thought to present itself even more frequently than it otherwise would. Each groups’ repressed thoughts might have expressed equally high “rebound” during writing the final essay, but this wasn’t the case.
Gian Gonzaga said:
Feeling love for your romantic partner appears to make everybody else less attractive.
Posted by Oliver as Psychology, Sociobiology at 3:32 PM EST
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Ant colonies are often cited as the model for social co-operation, with individuals working together for the benefit of the colony, rather than for selfish promotion of their own individual genes. But that isn’t the case claim researchers from the University of Leeds and the University of Copenhagen.
It seems that ants can be as sneaky as humans, since Dr. Bill Hughes and Professor Jacobus Boomsma have found evidence that certain ants are able to cheat the system, ensuring that their offspring become reproductive queens rather than sterile workers.
It had been thought that a larvae’s chance of becoming queen was purely a matter of luck, but the researchers have found that it largely depends upon who its father was - A handful of breeding males pass on a genetic advantage that give their offspring a much better chance of growing up into a queen, instead of being condemned to the life of a worker.
Dr Hughes explained:
The accepted theory was that queens were produced solely by nurture: certain larvae were fed certain foods to prompt their development into queens and all larvae could have that opportunity, but we carried out DNA fingerprinting on five colonies of leaf-cutting ants and discovered that the offspring of some fathers are more likely to become queens than others.
These ants have a ‘royal’ gene or genes, giving them an unfair advantage and enabling them to cheat many of their altruistic sisters out of their chance to become a queen themselves.
The mechanism by which male ants are able to pass on an unfair advantage to their offspring remains unclear, but researchers believe they must limit themselves intentionally, because these ‘royal’ genetic lines were always rare in each colony.
If too many larvae grew into queens, it could upset the balance of the colony, reducing its survival prospects. Additionally, the imbalance would be noticed by the “commoner” workers, who might then kill the surplus.
Queen leaf-cutter ants have multiple matings and are able to store the sperm throughout their lives. It is thought that males who pass on the “royal gene” to their offspring, mate with lots of females but provide only a small quantity of sperm each time. This way they have many offspring, but spread throughout several colonies.
Dr Hughes added:
The most likely explanation has to be that the ants are deliberately taking steps to avoid detection. If there were too many of one genetic line developing into queens in a single colony, the other ants would notice and might take action against them. So we think the males with these royal genes have evolved to somehow spread their offspring around more colonies and so escape detection. The rarity of the royal lines is actually an evolutionary strategy by the cheats to escape suppression by the altruistic masses that they exploit.
Dr Hughes and Professor Jacobus Boomsma said the royal gene discovery, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, debunks the notion of unadulterated egalitarian cooperation within ant colonies.
When studying social insects like ants and bees, it’s often the cooperative aspect of their society that first stands out
However, when you look more deeply, you can see there is conflict and cheating – and obviously human society is also a prime example of this. It was thought that ants were an exception, but our genetic analysis has shown that their society is also rife with corruption – and it’s royal corruption at that.
Posted by Jonathan as Biology, Sociobiology at 12:35 PM EST
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Taller people have generally been perceived to be more attractive; and now researchers have discovered that the average Polish woman (about 5′4″ tall, with an inside leg measurement of 29″) would need longer 30.5″ legs in order to reach perfection.
That’s the conclusion of Polish Psychologists Boguslaw Pawlowski and Piotr Sorokowski at the University of Wroclaw, who wanted to investigate whether relative leg lengths affected such perceptions.
They asked 218 male and female volunteers to rank the attractiveness of seven male and seven female subjects from digitally altered images, which had been changed so that they were all the same height but with leg lengths that varied between 5, 10 or 15 percent from the Polish national average.
The team found that regardless of the volunteers own body shape and leg length, the most attractive legs for both men and women were judged to be those which were five per cent longer than average, followed by both normal-length legs and ones that were ten per cent longer than the norm. Surprisingly, legs fifteen percent longer than normal were not considered attractive.
Dr Boguslaw Pawlowski then confused the issue, by claiming “Long legs are signalling health”.
So, why then were really long legs considered less attractive than average legs?
He went on to point out that short legs are associated with a higher risk of cardiovascular disease and type II diabetes in both sexes. And also higher triglyceride levels (linked to atherosclerosis, heart disease and strokes) as well as insulin resistance in men.
Although the study, reported in New Scientist, only looked at Polish people, Dr Pawlowski suspects each culture would prefer leg lengths slightly longer than the community norm.
Posted by Jonathan as Psychology, Sociobiology at 2:34 AM EST
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Zoologists studying the mating rituals of the African Topi species of antelope, in the Masai Mara game reserve of Kenya, have reported some extraordinary behaviour.
It has long been established in biology that there are fundamental differences in the strategies of the two sexes. Males are supposed to distribute their sperm far and wide, to all comers, whereas females are noted for being choosier about whom they decide to let fertilise their valuable eggs.
Yet, the Topi have reversed this sexual stereotype, and it seems, according to Jakob Bro-Jorgensen (Zoological Society of London) that males literally have to fight off the females, who vehemently wanted to mate with them.
Topi antelopes have breeding grounds in which the males defend small territories called “Leks” (a word meaning “to play” in Swedish,) where each male advertises his sexual availability. Female Topis express preference for mating with males with the most centrally-positioned lek, and males compete to occupy these central territories. This, so far, is stereotypical of animals that breed in a lek.
However, sometimes a male with a centrally-positioned lek can find this to be an exhausting experience, and then often find that they have to turn away familiar females in favour of unfamiliar females, who are visiting for the first time.
Dr Bro-Jorgensen said:
I was interested to see that in cases where the male antelope was free to choose between females, he deliberately went for the most novel mate, rather than the most high ranking. However, some pushy females were so aggressive in their pursuit of the male that he actually had physically to attack them to rebuff their advances
When biologists talk about the ‘battle of the sexes’, they often tacitly assume that the battle is between persistent males who always want to mate, and females who don’t. However, in Topi antelopes, where females are known to prefer to mate with males in the centre of mating arenas, we’ve found a reversal of these stereotypic sex roles
When analysing sex strategies in the animal kingdom zoologists like to utilize the idea of economic investment, i.e. males invest relatively little in each sperm cell, so provided a male does not have to rear all the young he sires (in reproductive terms) it’s best for him to distribute his investment far and wide, in the hope that some of it will pay off.
Females, however, begin with a more substantial investment. Each of her eggs is a relatively precious commodity that needs to be carefully managed. It would pay her, for instance, to invest much more (in terms of time and effort) to ensure that her fertilised egg has a good chance of reaching adulthood. This explain why females of so many different species stick around to rear their young, and why they are choosy about which male they decide to mate with.
The lek system of mating is not unique to Topi antelopes. Leks are especially common in birds, where they are a useful way of letting females “play the field” and choose the best male, usually the one with the most centrally-located lek.
Similarly to the Topi, the males of some lek-mating birds, such as the Capercaillie Grouse (Tetrao urogallus) have also been observed to reject sex after excessive amounts with the queue of females. But the females just go away and come back the next day.
So why doesn’t the Topi female just do the same? The answer seems to be because she is only in oestrus for a day or so, and cannot afford to risk being barren for the entire breeding season, according to Dr Bro-Jorgensen.
The females have just a single day to ensure that they become pregnant, and preferably with a quality male, so they must focus all of their energies into ensuring that males mate with them in that time, the males, however, must focus on maximising the potential of their sperm to ensure they impregnate as many females as possible. It was not uncommon to see males collapsing with exhaustion as the demands of the females got too much for them
The Topi and the Capercaillie demonstrate a system of mating called polygyny, where a male mates with more than one female. A lek system of mating is just one expression of polygyny, and is an extreme example of female choice. Females are free to mate with any male, but are psychologically drawn to those that other females are interested in.
A harem system is another form of polygyny. Here, males dominate the females and guard them against the advances of other males, examples being Sea Lions or Gorillas. Some polygynous species are also territorial, where defending a resource-rich plot of land means that females will mate, so that they can be allowed to stay in that male’s territory.
The other form of polygamy is polyandry; here a female has more than one male as a mate, although this is rare. One of the best examples is the Dunnock (Prunella modularis), here females can have two “husbands” at the same time to help rear their young. And, this system has been shown to favour females because they can rear more young with two mates. The males however are probably less happy because they have to compete for access to the female. Indeed, it has been shown that a male Dunnock that is not allowed frequent-enough access to his shared “wife” will not feed the resulting offspring.
Even monogamy is not always what it seems to be. Since the invention of DNA fingerprinting, biologists have discovered that most supposedly monogamous species engage in what has come to be known as extra-pair copulations. DNA studies of offspring from species of socially monogamous birds have shown that the species are not sexually monogamous, as once thought. Both males and females will go for extra-pair sex. Amazingly, only a very few species are truly monogamous.
So, everything is not what it often seems, especially when it comes to the sexual games that animals play.
We should not regard coyness as the only natural female sex role just as we should not expect that it is always the natural male sex role to mindlessly accept any mating partner. Nature favours a broader range of sex roles.
Said Dr Bro-Jorgensen.
Posted by Jonathan as Sociobiology at 10:41 PM EST
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Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice begins with the proposition that “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife,” although it later transpires that it is the women in the story, who are actually desirous of rich husbands.
Anyway, the same idea in one form or another has been repeated at various times before and since. Notably by Frank Pedersen, of the University of Delaware in 1991, who suggested that people would change many aspects of their behaviour as a consequence of competition introduced by sex-ratio fluctuations; for men, this apparently would result in greater fidelity, greater commitment to a career, and increased investment in children, when women are scarce.
There has however been little or no attempt to provide any evidence for this theory until recently, when a paper ‘Driving a hard bargain: sex ratio and male marriage success in a historical US population’, was published in the journal Biology Letters by PhD candidate Thomas Pollet and Dr Daniel Nettle of Newcastle University, who suggest that a man’s wealth is particularly important, if he wants to settle down, according to their study of the “marriage market”.
The researchers examined data from the American 1910 census, claiming that in this period, demographically, the United States had not settled down. And therefore the differences in sex ratios found throughout the states would enable them to compare the socioeconomic status of married and un-married males.
The study took a sample of one man in 250 from the census and assigned him a socioeconomic status score of between zero and 96, based on a scale drawn up in 1950 (which was the closest available to the census date).
Then, mathematical models predicted that when men and women are in equal supply, the men who are married will have a slightly higher socioeconomic status than unmarried men. Whilst when men and women are in unequal supply, the marriage prospects of a male pauper would be “drastically reduced”.
Here we show that if men are abundant, this will influence the market value of their desired traits, that is, women can demand more.
As the sex ratio increases, married men are predicted to need up two or three times the socioeconomic status of unmarried men.
According to the researchers, and by way of illustration, in states where the sexes were equal in number, 56% of low-status men were married by the age of 30, as opposed to 60% of high-status men. When there were 110 men for every 100 women (in Arizona, for example), the women were more choosy, and only 24% of low-status men were married by 30 compared with 46% of high-status men.
Mr Pollet said:
Thus, much about the varying ethos of male and female behaviour across populations and across time could in principle be explained with reference to the sex ratio, these questions are ripe for future investigation, but our study has clearly established the more limited fact that sex ratio fluctuations in modern humans can put one sex in the driving seat and allow them to drive a hard bargain.
On the other hand, the researchers could just have re-discovered that women aren’t as willing as men to live in harsh environments, since (to use the example of Arizona in 1910) conditions would have been rather more desert-like than today (especially without air-conditioning), and most likely full of prospectors, and miners (who are statistically more likely to be men) trying to find the next gold rush, rather than marry a woman.
The study also assumes that marriage is the ultimate ideal for a man, and confuses being rich with having social status. These factors may turn out to be small limitations, but it seems to me that the study would be comparing the marriage prospects of New York bankers from rich families with the more modest livelihood of a Cowboy, or the unpredictable career of a Prospector / Miner.
It also appears to me, that wealth aside, many of the professions a less well off man might choose for his career could expose him to risks that would shorten his life expectancy considerably. I.e., if he doesn’t live long enough to hit 30, because he’s killed in a mine collapse, shot by Red Indians or crippled in some sort of riding accident, then his chances of getting married automatically go to zero.
A better way to examine the American Census data, especially since American Censuses are not subject to a 100-year closure period, as in the UK, could be to compare the 1910 census with the 1920 census and the 1930 census. The 1920’s were a period of great prosperity for America, whereas 1930 would be a year after the start of America’s great depression. So, comparing these periods of time would seem (to me) to give a rather truer picture of whether of not relative prosperity changes a man’s probability of marriage.
Posted by Jonathan as History, Sociobiology at 6:15 PM EST
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In a recently published article, Susan M. Hughes, Marissa A. Harrison, and Gordon G. Gallup, Jr. surveyed 1,041 students (using three different questionnaires) about their attitudes to kissing (journal of Evolutionary Psychology [5(3):612-631, 2007]). The study found only five people who had never experienced romantic kissing, and more than 200 who estimated having kissed 21 or more partners.
According to the study, kissing between sexual or romantic partners occurs in over 90% of human cultures, and even some non-human animals, such as Bonobos appear to engage in kissing-like behaviours, blowing in each other’s faces, licking, sucking or rubbing their partner’s faces before sex.
Many of the responses to the surveys were predictable: women, for example, placed more emotional importance on a kiss, valuing kisses during and after sex, and continuing throughout a relationship; whilst men tended to see kissing as a means to obtain sex or initiate reconciliation; and placed less importance on kissing throughout the progression of a relationship.
In contrast, females kissed to establish and monitor the status of their relationship, and to periodically gauge the level of commitment of a partner.
Slightly over half the men claimed they would have sex with someone without kissing, compared to just fifteen percent of the women. Men were also more likely to claim that a “good kiss” was one with tongue contact, where ‘my partner makes little moaning noises’.
In separate research, another survey (Gallup, 2007) revealed that 59% of male respondents and 66% of female respondents had found themselves interested in someone, only to discover that they were no longer attracted after they’d kissed them for the first time.
The researchers therefore speculate that the exchange of saliva during kissing may have biological consequences, since male saliva contains measurable amounts of testosterone, which could affect libido. And, since males have reduced chemosensory detection compared to females, they may require greater salivary exchange in order to respond to the various components in a female’s saliva.
Dr. Gallup said:
The complicated exchange of information that occurs during a kiss may inform evolved, unconscious mechanisms about instances of possible genetic incompatibility.
In other words, while many forces lead two people to connect romantically, the kiss, particularly the first kiss, can be a deal breaker.
The researchers concluded that the study provides evidence that romantic kissing evolved as an adaptive courtship strategy that functions as a mate-assessment technique, a means of initiating sexual arousal and receptivity, and also as a way of unconsciously maintaining a bonded relationship.
The full paper can be found here; and I’m grateful to Oliver, for drawing my attention to this research.
Posted by Jonathan as Biochemistry, Sociobiology at 10:07 AM EST
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