Abstract
Humans express a wide array of ideal mate preferences. Around the world, people desire romantic partners who are intelligent, healthy, kind, physically attractive, wealthy, and more. In order for these ideal preferences to guide the choice of actual romantic partners, human mating psychology must possess a means to integrate information across these many preference dimensions into summaries of the overall mate value of their potential mates. Here we explore the computational design of this mate preference integration process using a large sample of n = 14,487 people from 45 countries around the world. We combine this large cross-cultural sample with agent-based models to compare eight hypothesized models of human mating markets. Across cultures, people higher in mate value appear to experience greater power of choice on the mating market in that they set higher ideal standards, better fulfill their preferences in choice, and pair with higher mate value partners. Furthermore, we find that this cross-culturally universal pattern of mate choice is most consistent with a Euclidean model of mate preference integration.
Highlights
IntroductionPeople desire romantic partners who are intelligent, healthy, kind, physically attractive, wealthy, and more
People desire romantic partners who are intelligent, healthy, kind, physically attractive, wealthy, and more. In order for these ideal preferences to guide the choice of actual romantic partners, human mating psychology must possess a means to integrate information across these many preference dimensions into summaries of the overall mate value of their potential mates
We first analyzed a series of evolutionary agent-based models to examine the consequences of mate choice according to Euclidean mate preference integration
Summary
People desire romantic partners who are intelligent, healthy, kind, physically attractive, wealthy, and more In order for these ideal preferences to guide the choice of actual romantic partners, human mating psychology must possess a means to integrate information across these many preference dimensions into summaries of the overall mate value of their potential mates. We know that people around the world express preferences for potential mates who are kind, healthy, intelligent, and more[5] Despite this success in documenting the content of human preferences, little work has explored how, computationally, humans integrate their multiple ideals in order to evaluate and select actual partners. Selection would have strongly favored the evolution of adaptations that motivated humans to be discerning in mate choice
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