The Effects of Sex and Temporal Context on Feelings of Romantic Desire: An Experimental Evaluation of Sexual Strategies Theory

Abstract

According to evolutionary theories of human mating, people should feel the most romantic desire toward potential mates who possess reproductively adaptive attributes. Across five person-perception experiments involving staged interviews, we found that men’s and women’s feelings of romantic desire can be manipulated by varying adaptive attributes in a target person. For example, during some interviews, participants were exposed to an experimental confederate exhibiting cues to easy sexual access. Because men’s short-term sexual strategy is based on obtaining high numbers of partners, it was predicted that exposure to a target person suggesting easy sexual access would especially intensify men’s short-term romantic desires. The authors found evidence that targets who exhibited cues to easy sexual access were rated the most desirable by men in the context of short-term mating. Discussion focused on limitations of the current studies and on the importance of invoking methodological pluralism when testing evolutionary theories of romantic desire.