Mate Preference Necessities in Long- and Short-Term Mating: People Prioritize in Themselves What Their Mates Prioritize in Them

• Main Author: LI, Norman P.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2007
• Subjects: human mate selection; long-term mating; short-term mating; self-ideals; gender differences; physical attractiveness; social status; Gender and Sexuality; Social Psychology
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/723; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soss_research/article/1722/viewcontent/Li2007.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

People were given highly constrained low budgets of mate dollars to allocate across various characteristics pertaining to their ideal partners and to their ideal selves for long- and short-term mating. First, results replicated findings from LI et al. (2002) and LI and KENRICK (2006). For ideal long-term mates, men prioritized physical attractiveness and women prioritized social status. For ideal short-term mates, both sexes prioritized physical attractiveness. Second, people's design of their ideal selves mirrored what the opposite sex ideally desired in their mates. For a long-term mating context, men prioritized social status in themselves and women prioritized physical attractiveness in themselves. For ideal short-term selves, both sexes prioritized physical attractiveness. Findings were consistent with a domain-specific view of psychological mechanisms, in that processes for valuing potential mates and processes for valuing one's own mate value may be specialized mechanisms.