Abstract
To explain how individuals’ self-perceived long-term mate value influences their mate preference and mate choice, two hypotheses have been presented, which are “potentials-attract” and “likes-attract”, respectively. The potentials-attract means that people choose mates matched with their sex-specific traits indicating reproductive potentials; and the likes-attract means that people choose mates matched with their own conditions. However, the debate about these two hypotheses still remains unsolved. In this paper, we tested these two hypotheses using a human’s actual mate choice data from a Chinese online dating system (called the Baihe website), where 27,183 users of Baihe website are included, in which there are 590 paired couples (1180 individuals) who met each other via the website. Our main results show that not only the relationship between individuals’ own attributes and their self-stated mate preference but also that between individuals’ own attributes and their actual mate choice are more consistent with the likes-attract hypothesis, i.e., people tend to choose mates who are similar to themselves in a variety of attributes.
Highlights
Two old Chinese adages ‘‘lang cai nv mao’’ and ‘‘men dang hu dui’’ may represent the classic standards of long-term human mate choice in traditional Chinese culture
Preference To assess how individuals’ own attributes are translated into their stated mate preference, we calculated a series of multivariate linear regressions (MLR) in which each of the attributes in individuals’ stated mate preference was regressed on all of their own attributes for women and men separately
In this study, using the data from a Chinese online dating website, we investigated patterns of human mate choice in China
Summary
Two old Chinese adages ‘‘lang cai nv mao’’ and ‘‘men dang hu dui’’ may represent the classic standards of long-term human mate choice in traditional Chinese culture. The adage ‘‘lang cai nv mao’’ means that women should choose talented men as long-term partners, and men should choose young and physically attractive women as long-term partners. The adage ‘‘men dang hu dui’’ means that a couple of partners should have the similar family backgrounds. The adage ‘‘men dang hu dui’’ may imply that similarity gives rise to attraction, as widely found in human society (the assortative mating in a trait-by-trait way). Some studies have shown that people would like to choose mates who are similar to themselves in variety of attributes, such as height, weight, religion, race, education, and income, etc. [12], [13]; and that established couples tend to be similar to each other on a lot of dimensions, such as age, race, religion, education, physical attractiveness and personality [14], [15], [16], [17], [18]
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