Evolutionary Psychologist Shares How Women Select Men

- Women are in fact choosier when it comes to sexual partners than men. The reason is that women have that nine-month pregnancy which is obligatory. - Speaker B introduces an item on the Sociosexuality Inventory that says sex without love is okay. It's another indication of the sex difference in choosiness and it's modulated by big five trait agreeableness.

Speaker A: Maybe, maybe we could, we could start our discussion of sexual differences and mating strategy with that. So first of all, what's the evidence that suggests that women are in fact choosier when it comes to sexual partners than men? And how much choosier are they?

Speaker B: Okay, okay, great question. Well, so maybe first we could just define for listeners what sexual selection theory is. Because most people, when they think about evolution, they think of survival of the fittest and that sort of nature revving tooth and clock.

Speaker A: Yes, and a kind of a randomness too, which, you know, kind of implicit in the natural selection theory where sexual selection is anything but random.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. So sexual selection. So if natural selection, this is oversimplified, but is the evolution of adaptations due to their survival advantage or the survival advantage that accrued to the possessors. So things like fear of snakes, fear of heights, spiders, darkness, strangers and so forth, food preferences, things that led to better survival. Sexual selection deals with the evolution of qualities that lead to mating success. And Darwin identified two causal processes by which mating success could occur. One is same sex competition or intrasexual competition. And the logic there is that whatever he thought about it in terms of contest competition, where there was a physical battle, like two stags locking horns in combat with the victor gaining sexual access to the female loser ambling off with a broken antler, dejected with low self esteem and probably needing some psychotherapy, but the logic was whatever qualities led to success in these same sex battles, whether it be athleticism, strength, agility, cunning or whatever, those qualities get passed on in greater numbers due to the sexual access that the victor has accrued, qualities associated with losing basically bit the evolutionary dust. The second component, so that's intersexual competition, which actually the logic is more general than Darwin envisioned. So like in our species, as we were alluding to, we often compete for position and status hierarchies. And so we, we can engage in intersexual competition without engaging in this physical battle or contest competition. Although I think that the contest competition was also part of human evolutionary history with males. The other component process is basically what Darwin called female choice. And the logic there is that whatever qualities, if there's some consensus about the qualities that are desired, that men possessing the desired qualities have a mating advantage, they get preferentially chosen. Those lacking the desired qualities basically become incels or involuntarily celibate, they get shunned, banished or ignored. Now the twist on that. And so I think sexual selection is by far a more interesting process and definitely has occurred with Respect to humans. But the twist there is that we have mutual mate choice at least when it comes to long term mating. Especially, I should say, especially when it comes to long term mating. And that gets to the issue of Trevor's theory of parental investment where he said he asked the question, well, which sex does the choosing, which sex does the competing? And his answer was the sex that invests more in offspring tends to be choosier. Sex that invests less tends to be more competitive for access to those desirable members of the opposite sex. But in long term mating, now we know from our reproductive biology that women have that nine month pregnancy which is obligatory. So women can't say, look, I'm really busy with my career, I really only want to put in three months. It's just part of our reproductive biology to produce one child. And men can produce that same child through one act of sex. And so women are at least in when it comes to sex, the choosier sex, the higher investing sex, in part because the costs of making a bad mating decision are much more severe for women than for men. Men and women hook up, have sex for one night. In the morning they both realize, oh, this is a mistake, I shouldn't have done that. Well, if the woman gets pregnant, then she might be pregnant with a guy who is not going to invest in her offspring. A guy perhaps is someone that has poor genetic material, it does not have a robust immune system, etc. So anyway, that's a long winded answer to your question about sexual selection.

Speaker A: Go ahead, please go ahead.

Speaker B: I was just going to say that you asked about the evidence for females being choosier and they are choosing choosier primarily in the context of casual sex or short term sex. So that's where you find the big sex differences. And so one of the classic. And there, there's a ton of evidence for this. This is a sex difference that I capture in the book under the category of desire for sexual variety. So men have a much greater desire for meaning a variety of sex partners than, than women do. And so the choosiness comes in on. I'll just give you one experiment. This is a classic study done by Elaine Halffield and Russell Clark where they had male and female confederates, which for listeners are members of the experimental team. It doesn't mean people from the South United States, but they had male and female confederates simply walk up to members of the opposite sex on a college campus and say, hi, I've been noticing you around campus lately. I find you very attractive. Would you. And they asked Them one of three questions. Would you go on a date with me tonight? Would you come back to my apartment with me? Would you have sex with me? And it was a between groups design. So they simply recorded the percentage of individuals who agreed to these three different requests. And of the women, about half, about a little over 50% agreed to go out on a date with the guy. 6% agreed to go back to his apartment, 0% agreed to have sex with him. Most women need a little more information about the guy before they're willing to have sex. Of the men approach, also about 50 by the female confederate, about 50% agreed to go out on the date, 69% agreed to go back to her apartment, and 75% agreed to have sex with her. And so if you talk about choosiness, are you willing to have sex with a total stranger who you've met for 30 seconds? Women unwilling to. And in general, men very willing to. And this is a study that's been replicated now in several European studies. Very difficult to do this, as you might imagine, to get this by the IRBs or ethics committees in the United States anyway. I assume it's similar in Canada or worse. Or worse. The kinds of studies we really want to do are more difficult to do nowadays, but it's been replicated in several western European countries. And you can get women off of the 0%. You can get a few percent of the women saying yes, if the guy's really, really charming, if he's Brad Pitt or I don't know what the modern equivalent is. Ryan Goslinger is one of the. Or perhaps a famous rock star. So. So, but that's one illustration of the answer to your question about, well, what is the evidence for female choosiness? Now, the interesting thing here's. I'll give you one more. So there are studies that ask what is the minimum percentile of intelligence that you would accept in a potential partner? And we explain percentiles to people so they understand 99th percentile, 1st percentile, 50th and so forth. And, and basically, for things like a marriage partner, men and women are roughly equal. They both are very exact. And they say what they want, like say 65th, 70th percentile intelligence, where the sex difference comes up is just a sex partner, a pure sex partner with no investment. Women still maintain, they still want, let's say, 60th or 60 plus percentile in intelligence, whereas men drop to embarrassing levels. That doesn't really, it becomes irrelevant. The 35th 40th percentile men go if she can mumble a little bit, that's fine. Or even not. So that's another indication of female choosiness. That is they maintain greater choosiness when it comes to short term sex and are simply less comfortable with having sex with total strangers or casual sex. And here's. I'll give you one more now that I'm rambling on and then we'll get to some other interesting issues. This is an item on the Sociosexuality Inventory that colleagues Steve Gangestad and Jeff Simpson developed a long time ago. But one of the items is that's an attitude item and it says sex without love is okay. Do you agree with that or disagree with that? And there you get a large sex difference. So in the seven point scale where four is the midpoint, men average about 5.5. So they say, yeah, sex without love. Yeah, yeah, that's okay. Women are about 3.5. Okay. They're below the that midpoint. It's another indication of this sex difference in choosiness.

Speaker A: Do you know if that's modulated by big five trait agreeableness?

Speaker B: Oh, that's a great question. I haven't seen any studies that link that. Okay, big five to that item were the Sociosexuality Inventory in general.

Speaker A: Yeah. Well, you'd wonder if compassion and empathy might be one of the things driving that and the value that's placed on that as a consequence of being high or low in agreeableness. And that would fit into some degree with the dark triad work because the primary difference there is. We'll talk about the dark triad in a minute. Is that the dark triad takes types are low and agreeableness centrally. It's not the only thing, but that's central and that's where there's a big sex difference.