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38 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
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Strategies of Human Matings: Abstract
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Modern humans have inherited the mating strategies that led to the success of their ancestors. These strategies include long-term mating, short-term mating, extra-pair mating, mate poaching, and mate guarding. The article supports the evolution-based hypotheses about the complexities of these mating strategies. Because of different mating strategies, the sexes evolved different solutions. These differences include possessing different mate preferences, different desires for short term mating and differences in the triggers that evoke sexual jealousy.
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strategies of human mating
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modern humans are all descendants of a long and unbroken line of ancestors who succeeded in the complex tasks involved required to mate successfully. Successful mating requires solutions to problems such as selecting a fertile mate, out-competing same sex rivals, fending off mate poachers, preventing the mate from leaving and engaging in all of the sexual and social behaviors needed to conceive. Desires are central to all facets of human mating, they determine which attraction tactics will be successful, such as the continual providing of resources that fulfill the desires of the mate.
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Sexual Selection and Parental Investment
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Darwin wondered why some sexes had seemingly costly adaptations that made them more noticeable to predators, and why males were consistently larger and more powerful than females, who faced the same environmental problems. His answer was the theory of sexual selection, the evolution of characteristics due to mating, rather than survival, advantage. Intrasexual competition was when members of the same sex competed with each other for mates. Evolution occurs as a result of the differential reproduction of the winners over the losers. Intersexual selection involves the preferences of members of one sex for members of the opposite sex who possess certain qualities. Desires thus shape the evolutionary trajectory as well. The two concepts can co-evolve, influencing each other.
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Parental investment theory
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the sex that invests more in offspring would be more choosy about mates. Evolution favored women (who typically bear the higher cost in child-rearing) who were choosy.
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The menu of human mating strategies
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in long-term mating both sexes typically invest heavily in any resultant offspring. As a consequence sexual selection theory has fashioned in both sexes high levels of choosiness. Humans are neither solely monogamous or solely promiscuous. Which strategies a particular person chooses are dependent on the circumstance; the sex ratio in the mating pool, a person's mate value, and even cultural norms.
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qualities desired in a marriage partner
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Women will want characteristics that reliably lead to increased reproductive success such as a male who is able to invest resources, willing to invest resources, able to protect, willing to protect, shows promise as a good parent and sufficiently compatible in goals and values to enable strategic alignment. Cross cultural studies show that differing cultures varied greatly in the value placed on some characteristics. Chastity varied the most significantly. worldwide men and women wanted mates who were intelligent, kind, understanding and healthy. mutual attraction/love was also very important. similar political and religious affiliation come into play as well.
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differences in genders
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Women, significantly more than men, desired good financial prospects. Women also tended to value qualities that known to be linked to resource acquisition, such as ambition, industriousness, social status and somewhat older age. Men desired partners who are good looking (indicators of fertility), cues to youth. Men also universally wanted mates who were younger than themselves, unless these men who very young themselves, in which case they actually preferred women who were slightly older. Basically, universal sex differences occur in precisely those domains predicted to involve sex-linked adaptive problems.
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desires in short-term mating
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men are predicted to have evolved a greater desire for casual sex. Another psychological solution to the problem of gaining sexual access to a variety of partners is to let little time elapse between meeting a female and mating with her. At every shorter interval, men exceeded women in the reported likelihood of having sex. Men also exhibit a much higher willingness to have sex with strangers, lower their standards in the context of short-term mating and show a marked decrease in attraction to a sex partner immediately following sexual intercourse.
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women's short-term mating strategies
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Although men have a greater desire for a variety of sex partners, they could not have evolved that desire in the absence of willing women. Given the high costs of short-term mating to women, it is unlikely that selection would have forged short-term mating psychology in the absence of substantial benefits. These benefits include resource accrual, producing more genetically diverse offspring, using short-term mating as a means to exit a poor mateship, clarifying mate preferences, and deterring a partner's future infidelity. Resource acquisition and mate switching come out empirically as the strongest, particularly when the current mate becomes more unreliable. The existence of already mated women who sometimes engage in sexual intercourse with other men (extra-pair mating) points to an adaptive problem that men face-the presence of mate poachers.
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The strategy of mate poaching
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a behavior designed to lure someone away from an existing mateship for the purpose of a brief sexual encounter or a long-term relationship. It is likely that mate poaching is an evolved mating strategy for the simple reason that desirable mates attract many suitors, and typically end up in mating relationships. Thus, in order to obtain a desirable mate, it is often necessary to seek those who are already “taken.”
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strategies of mate guarding
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jealousy might be a evolutionary adaption to the problem of mate poaching. As it turns out, men tend to get more upset over signals of sexual infidelity (signal of uncertainty regarding paternity) while women get more upset over signals of emotional infidelity (a signal of possible diversion of resources)
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Harry Harlow and the need to belong
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Tested the hypothesis that infant monkeys would form an attachment to a surrogate mother that provides warmth and comfort, rather than one that provides nutrients. Infant monkeys will prefer and form an attachment to a surrogate mother that provides warmth and comfort over a wire surrogate mother that provides nutrients, providing evidence of an evolutionary need to belong.
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The need to belong
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There is an evolutionary basis for the need to belong. Not only do elephant parents feed and protect young elephants, but they teach them appropriate social behavior that enables them to line in groups. If the young elephant grows up without adults, they are likely to become antisocial and aggressive and have difficulty living in groups.
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communal relationships
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relationships in which the individuals feel a special responsibility for one another and give and receive according to the principle of need; such relationships are often long term
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exchange relationships
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relationships in which individuals feel little responsibility toward one another; giving and receiving are governed by concerns about equality and reciprocity
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social exchange theory
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a theory based on the idea that all relationships have costs and rewards, and that how people feel about a relationship depends on their assessments of its costs and rewards and the costs and rewards available to them in other relationships
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equity theory
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a theory that maintains that people motivated to pursue fairness, or equity, in their relationships; rewards and costs are shared roughly equally among individuals
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attachment theory
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a theory about how early attachment with our parents shape our relationships for the rest of our lives.
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secure attachment style
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an attachment style characterized by feelings of security in relationships. Individuals with this style are comfortable with intimacy and want to be close to others during times of threat and uncertainty.
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anxious-preoccupied style
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An attachment style characterized by dependency or "clinginess". People with an anxious-preoccupied style tend not to have a positive view of themselves, but they value and seek out intimacy.
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dismissive-avoidant style
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an attachment style characterized by independence and self-reliance. People with a dismissive-avoidant style seek less intimacy with others and deny the importance of close relationships.
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fearful-avoidant style
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An attachment style characterized by ambivalence and discomfort toward close relationships. People with a fearful-avoidant style desire closeness with others but feel unworthy of others affection and so do not seek out intimacy.
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propinquity
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physical proximity
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proximity and friendship
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MIT apartment study, Residents near stairwells formed twice as many friendships with upstairs neighbors as those living in the middle apartments. people who lived next door to one another were four times more likely to become friends than people at opposite ends of the hallway.
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functional distance
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the tendency of an architectural layout to encourage or inhibit certain activities, including contact between people
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mere exposure effect
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the finding that repeated exposure to a stimulus (for example, an object or person) leads to greater liking of the stimulus. Zajonc tested this by showing people pictures of turkish words, the more people saw one the more they assumed it meant something good. He replicated the study with chinese pictographs and college yearbook photos as stimuli
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rats and the exposure effect
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rats who grew up listening to mozart moved to the side of the cage that played mozart more often. rats who grew up listening to the other guy moved to that side of the cage more often.
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complementarity
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the tendency for people to seek out others with characteristics that are different from and that complement their own
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halo effect
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the common belief-- accurate or not-- that attractive individuals posses a host of positive qualities beyond their physical appearance.
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reproductive fitness
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the capacity to get one's genes passed on to subsequent generations
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attraction to average faces
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researchers took features of many different facial photos and averaged them across in one photo. participants rated the faces that were averages of many to be the most attractive.
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attraction to exaggerated features
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to further explore attraction to faces, researchers made three different kinds of composite photos, a face created by averaging 60 faces, a face created by averaging only 15 of the most attractive faces and a face created by calculating the differences between the two composites and then exaggerating these differences by 50 percent. Participants responded to the exaggerated face as the most attractive.
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women's judgement of male attractiveness across the menstrual cycle
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women were asked to select the one face they thought was most attractive from a set of five such faces that varied from 50 percent masculinized to 50 percent feminized. The graph shows that the women tended to select somewhat feminized faces overall, but the mean degree of feminization of the selected face was less for women who were at a stage in their cycle when pregnancy was especially likely.
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triangular theory of love
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love has three major components: passion, intimacy and commitment. Having all three is consummate love, having only one of the three results in infatuation, liking, or empty love. various combinations of the two are romantic love, companionate love and fatuous love.
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investment model of interpersonal relationships
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a theory/model of relationships that states that three things make partners more committed to each other: rewards, prior investment in the relationship and a lack of alternative partners.
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four horsemen of the apocalypse
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criticism, defensiveness, stonewalling and contempt
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creating stronger romantic bonds
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capitalize on the good, be playful (playful activities cause arousal that people often attribute to their partner), idealizing your partner,
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your brain on love
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studies show that romantic love "deactivates" your amygdala, reducing one's awareness of potential risk.
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