Mate-Preference Talk in Speed-Dating Conversations

Abstract

In contrast to experimental psychological speed-dating research in which mate preferences are typically measured as survey responses triggered by a live interactional manipulation, the current study uses a discursive psychological perspective to examine actual mate-preference talk by potential romantic partners in live conversational contexts. Drawing on a corpus of 36 speed-dating interactions, this study examines how mate preferences were elicited, initially formulated, and how responses to mate-preference disclosures were organized across their environment of expansion. Three broad trends emerged. First, the vast majority of mate-preference disclosures were not only prompted, but were prompted in ways that occasioned delayed responses. Second, the majority of initial mate-preference formulations were delayed or mitigated, revealing that requests for and disclosures of mate preferences were delicate social actions. And finally, delayed responses often occasioned protracted expansion sequences which, at minimum, promoted cooperative topic expansion and, in some cases where the probes were inferentially elaborative (and thus more risky), topic expansion as well as affective participant stance alignment. This study reveals that stance affiliation may reflect the extent to which participants are able to incrementally coordinate inferential conjectures, a finding that suggests that social scientists interested in the genesis of close relationships would benefit enormously from an up-close analysis of the actual relational contexts in which relationships emerge.