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War and Marriage: Assortative Mating and the World War II GI Bill
Matthew Larsen et al.
Demography, October 2015, Pages 1431-1461
Abstract:
World War II and its subsequent GI Bill have been widely credited with playing a transformative role in American society, but there have been few quantitative analyses of these historical events’ broad social effects. We exploit between-cohort variation in the probability of military service to investigate how WWII and the GI Bill altered the structure of marriage, and find that it had important spillover effects beyond its direct effect on men’s educational attainment. Our results suggest that the additional education received by returning veterans caused them to “sort” into wives with significantly higher levels of education. This suggests an important mechanism by which socioeconomic status may be passed on to the next generation.
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Women’s Preference for Attractive Makeup Tracks Changes in Their Salivary Testosterone
Claire Fisher et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Previous research suggests that women’s motivation to appear attractive is increased around the time of ovulation. However, the specific hormonal correlates of within-woman changes in motivation to appear attractive have not been investigated. To address this issue, we used a longitudinal design and a data-driven visual preference task. We found that women’s preference for attractive makeup increases when their salivary testosterone levels are high. The relationship between testosterone level and preference for attractive makeup was independent of estradiol level, progesterone level, and estradiol-to-progesterone ratio. These results suggest that testosterone may contribute to changes in women’s motivation to wear attractive makeup and, potentially, their motivation to appear attractive in general. Our results are also consistent with recent models of the role of testosterone in social behavior, according to which testosterone increases the probability of behaviors that could function to support the acquisition of mates and competition for resources.
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The Pupils are the Windows to Sexuality: Pupil Dilation as a Visual Cue to Others’ Sexual Interest
David Lick, Clarissa Cortland & Kerri Johnson
Evolution and Human Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
In order to ensure successful mating opportunities, it is critical that human perceivers accurately infer others’ sexual interests. But how do perceivers achieve these inferences? For over 50 years, scientists have documented that the pupils dilate in response to sexual arousal. Despite the potential importance of this cue for mate selection, however, extant data have focused almost exclusively on the perspective of the individual experiencing arousal. Here, we demonstrate that outside observers exploit pupil dilation as a visible cue to others’ sexual interests. We used reverse-correlation methods to derive facial images based on perceivers’ mental representations of both state-based (sexually aroused, sexually unaroused) and trait-based (sexually promiscuous, sexually non-promiscuous) markers of sexual interest. Next, we explored the phenotypic features that differentiated these faces, specifically the dilation of the pupils contained within each reverse-correlation image. Consistent with the notion that pupil dilation is a reliable cue to sexual arousal, sexually interested faces contained objectively larger and darker pupils than did sexually disinterested faces. Moreover, these differences were perceptually obvious to naïve observers. Collectively, our results suggest that perceivers attend to an external cue – pupil dilation – when forming decisions about others’ state-based and trait-based sexual interests.
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Individual Aesthetic Preferences for Faces Are Shaped Mostly by Environments, Not Genes
Laura Germine et al.
Current Biology, 19 October 2015, Pages 2684–2689
Abstract:
Although certain characteristics of human faces are broadly considered more attractive (e.g., symmetry, averageness), people also routinely disagree with each other on the relative attractiveness of faces. That is, to some significant degree, beauty is in the “eye of the beholder.” Here, we investigate the origins of these individual differences in face preferences using a twin design, allowing us to estimate the relative contributions of genetic and environmental variation to individual face attractiveness judgments or face preferences. We first show that individual face preferences (IP) can be reliably measured and are readily dissociable from other types of attractiveness judgments (e.g., judgments of scenes, objects). Next, we show that individual face preferences result primarily from environments that are unique to each individual. This is in striking contrast to individual differences in face identity recognition, which result primarily from variations in genes [1]. We thus complete an etiological double dissociation between two core domains of social perception (judgments of identity versus attractiveness) within the same visual stimulus (the face). At the same time, we provide an example, rare in behavioral genetics, of a reliably and objectively measured behavioral characteristic where variations are shaped mostly by the environment. The large impact of experience on individual face preferences provides a novel window into the evolution and architecture of the social brain, while lending new empirical support to the long-standing claim that environments shape individual notions of what is attractive.
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Biased Sex Ratios Influence Fundamental Aspects of Human Mating
Justin Moss & Jon Maner
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
The operational sex ratio — the ratio of men to women in a given population — affects a range of social processes. The current research demonstrates that biased sex ratios (greater numbers of one sex than the other) influence fundamental aspects of people’s mating strategy. When the sex ratio was favorable (one’s own sex was in the minority), both sexes adopted strong sex-typical sociosexual orientations (relatively restricted for women; relatively unrestricted for men). When the sex ratio was unfavorable (one’s own sex was in the majority), both sexes shifted toward the orientation typically favored by the other sex: Women became more unrestricted and men became more restricted (Experiment 1). When the sex ratio was unfavorable (relative to favorable), participants also displayed greater aggression toward a romantically desirable (but not undesirable) same-sex partner (Experiment 2). Exploratory analyses suggested that the sex ratio effect was present for unprovoked aggression but not provoked aggression (given the exploratory nature of that analysis, the aggression effect should be considered with some caution). Findings suggest that people’s mating strategies are adaptively calibrated to contingencies within the local mating ecology.
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David Frederick & Brooke Jenkins
Evolutionary Psychology, September 2015
Abstract:
People with traits that are attractive on the mating market are better able to pursue their preferred mating strategy. Men who are relatively tall may be preferred by women because taller height is a cue to dominance, social status, access to resources, and heritable fitness, leading them to have more mating opportunities and sex partners. We examined height, education, age, ethnicity, and body mass index (BMI) as predictors of sexual history among heterosexual men and women (N = 60,058). The linear and curvilinear associations between self-reported height and sex partner number were small for men when controlling for education, BMI, and ethnicity (linear β = .05; curvilinear β = −.03). The mean and median number of sex partners for men of different heights were: very short (9.4; 5), short (11.0; 7), average (11.7; 7), tall (12.0; 7), very tall (12.1; 7), and extremely tall (12.3; 7). Men who were “overweight” reported a higher mean and median number of sex partners than men with other body masses. The results for men suggested limited variation in reported sex partner number across most of the height continuum, but that very short men report fewer partners than other men.
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Genetic and socioeconomic study of mate choice in Latinos reveals novel assortment patterns
James Zou et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 3 November 2015, Pages 13621–13626
Abstract:
Nonrandom mating in human populations has important implications for genetics and medicine as well as for economics and sociology. In this study, we performed an integrative analysis of a large cohort of Mexican and Puerto Rican couples using detailed socioeconomic attributes and genotypes. We found that in ethnically homogeneous Latino communities, partners are significantly more similar in their genomic ancestries than expected by chance. Consistent with this, we also found that partners are more closely related — equivalent to between third and fourth cousins in Mexicans and Puerto Ricans — than matched random male–female pairs. Our analysis showed that this genomic ancestry similarity cannot be explained by the standard socioeconomic measurables alone. Strikingly, the assortment of genomic ancestry in couples was consistently stronger than even the assortment of education. We found enriched correlation of partners’ genotypes at genes known to be involved in facial development. We replicated our results across multiple geographic locations. We discuss the implications of assortment and assortment-specific loci on disease dynamics and disease mapping methods in Latinos.
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Sisterly Love: Within-Generation Differences in Ideal Partner for Sister and Self
Robert Biegler & Leif Edward Ottesen Kennair
Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
Conflicts among relatives may be explained by reference to patterns of genetic relatedness. We suggest that the same conflicts over partner choice that have previously been found between female parents and offspring may also occur between sisters. This provides a test of whether the previous intergenerational effects were mainly due to cohort/intergenerational differences or whether the genetic conflict theory is the better explanation of the findings. Two hundred seventy-nine women who had sisters rated the relevance of 133 traits for their own and their sister’s ideal male long-term partner. Although sisters agree on the importance of the majority of traits, there are also systematic and predictable differences. Women consider traits indicating genetic fitness to be more important for their own ideal partners than for their sister’s ideal partner. Similarly traits that might provide benefits to other, extended family members are prioritized for their sister’s ideal partner. This replicates the findings from an earlier mother–daughter comparison.