What people say, and what they do
What Men And Women Say And Do In Choosing Romantic Partners Are Two Different Matters:
When it comes to romantic attraction men primarily are motivated by good looks and women by earning power. At least that’s what men and women have been saying for a long time. Based on research that dates back several decades, the widely accepted notion permeates popular culture today.But those sex differences didn’t hold up in a new in-depth study of romantic attraction undertaken by two Northwestern University psychologists. In short, the data suggest that whether you’re a man or a woman, being attractive is just as good for your romantic prospects and, to a lesser extent, so is being a good earner.
You can read the full preprint yourself. The standard caveats about taking one social psychological study of 20 year old college students tracked for 30 days and generalizing apply here; the point isn’t that this punctures all of the trends which we observe (I doubt it does), rather, it refines our understanding of the pattern of variation and the central tendencies as a function of particular parameters. Additionally, instead of just trusting what people say, and their own self-conceptions, you need to actually study how people behave. With something like sexual preferences inferring that one’s avowed preferences don’t match one’s revealed preferences isn’t that difficult; psychologists have to use more tricky techniques when it comes to something like fleshing out how people really conceptualize the God they say they believe in. But the general lesson holds.
Update: See this comment. Hey, it’s social psychology….
Labels: Psychology
But in reality men and women were equally inspired by physical attraction and equally inspired by earning power or ambition. “In other words good looks was the primary stimulus of attraction for both men and women, and a person with good earning prospects or ambition tended to be liked as well,” said Eli Finkel, assistant professor of psychology at Northwestern. “Most noteworthy, the earning-power effect as well as the good-looks effect didn’t differ for men and women.”
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Completely unbelievable study. Take a look at Table 2 in the paper:
http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa
Now why would someone report a “meta-analyzed effect size r” rather than the results of a multiple regression, particularly when the male and female columns *do* appear to have different betas for each of the univariate regressions? Reminiscent of the way one might use F_st to collapse variation across individual SNPs into a meaningless overlap number…
I wonder whether Dr. Finkel’s background might make him more likely to advocate the axiom of equality.
study of 20 year old college students
I might add that even if the observations are correct for this population (and not the result of shameless data massaging as suggested above), the behavior of twenty year olds may well be different than that of slightly older people.
looks and game matter more than money in my opinion. mainly because when you’re approaching etc girls don’t know who the hell you are or how much you make. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMylQ7UuOcU
Guys of recent savage history with more type-A personality will have edge in this finding your own mate game. Civilized people have to relearn animal’s way of love.
I posted this previously, but since it’s funny and to the point, I’ll do so again:
How to impress girls with dancing
Students were asked to rate their peers in terms of attractiveness and EXPECTED future financial success. Wouldn’t be surprised if their expectations were heavily biased in favour of the attractive ones, and had little to do with ACTUAL future earning power.