The Dating Game

Satoshi Kanazawa has a blog on Psychology Today and has two postings looking at an interesting experiment in dating.

In his first posting:

...in these speed-dating events, men are far less selective than women in their mate choice; after meeting all of the potential dates, men check “yes” for a far larger number of women (indicating their desire to see them again) than women do for men. This is not surprising, as it mirrors most real-life dating situations where men come on to women far more frequently and aggressively than women come on to men. ...

Finkel and Eastwick wondered, “What if we changed that? What happens if we reverse the arrangement, and have men seated at their tables while women go around the room meeting men at their tables for their brief dates?” ...

What they discovered was truly astonishing. In the traditional “men rotate, women sit” arrangement, men were significantly less selective in their mate choice; they checked “yes” for a larger number of women than women did for men, and they experienced greater sexual attraction and romantic chemistry with the women than women did with men. This is not at all surprising, as it is what evolutionary psychology would predict and it is what we normally observe in real life (less selective, more aggressive men, and choosier and more coy women). In sharp contrast, in the novel “women rotate, men sit” arrangement, women were just as aggressive and, as a result, less selective, as men were in their mate choice; they checked as many “yeses” for men as men did for women, and they experienced as much sexual attraction and romantic chemistry for the men as men did for women. ...

Finkel and Eastwick reason similarly to explain their findings. The mere act of physically approaching their potential romantic partner, behavior far more typical of men than women, makes people more confident and increases their attraction to their potential partner. In other words, by acting more like men (by physically approaching their dates), they begin to think more like them as well (by being more confident, aggressive, and less selective).

In his second posting:

...my friend and LSE colleague, Diane J. Reyniers, reminded me that Finkel and Eastwick's finding may not be as devastating to evolutionary psychology as I first feared and that we might indeed be able to account for them from a strictly evolutionary psychological perspective.

Here's what Diane suggests. Suppose women have an evolved psychological mechanism in the domain of mate selection that produces a two-stage decision rule.

1. Do not approach men, but instead wait to be approached, unless I see an exceptionally desirable man (say, in the top 1% in desirability), in which case, approach him.

2. Reject 99% of men who approach me (because most of them are losers, anyway), but say yes to a much higher proportion (say, 50%) of the men that I approach, because, if I approached them, it means that I had already determined them to be of exceptionally high quality.

Under most real-life circumstances, this evolved psychological mechanism would result in women being much more cautious and "coy" than men, as, by definition, there are very few men of exceptionally high quality that women would want to approach. As a result, most of the time, men approach women, women wait to be approached, and women reject most of the men who approach them, both now and throughout evolutionary history.

What the novel institutional arrangement of "women rotate, men sit" in Finkel and Eastwick's experiment does is to force women to approach men. Because women are approaching men, the situation may trick women's brains into thinking that the men they are approaching are of exceptionally high quality.

I suspect there will be a long and fruitful series of experiments to investigate this phenomenon. For me the important takeaway point is that there is nothing simple about the sexes and human behaviour. Worse, science is as subject to intellectual fashions as any other human endeavour, so I expect opinions to gyrate for many, many decades to come.

If you like to ponder this area, I would suggest David Buss's The Evolution of Desire and Helen Fisher's Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray