The effects of female status on sex differentiated mate preferences
Abstract
Mate preferences provide an opportunity to explore the validity of evolutionary
and social role origin theories of sex differences in human behaviour. In
evolutionary models, preferences are sex-specific adaptive responses to
constraints to reproductive success. In social role models, sex differences arise
from the allocation of men and women to different gender roles. I explored the
effects of the status of women on preferences to assess the validity of the origin
theories. I developed an adequate measure of female status (i.e. resource
control), and explored its effects on female preferences in an online survey
(Chapter 3), a mail-shot survey (Chapter 4), and a sample of non-industrial
societies (Chapter 5). Results implicated a role of constraints on women in the
expression of female-typical preferences. In an experimental manipulation of
female perceptions of their status, results enabled greater confidence in the
attribution of causal direction to relationships (Chapter 6). In Chapter 7, I
explored the conditions under which the relationships of interest occurred. In
Chapter 8, to further explore the origin models I investigated the effects of
resource control on the magnitudes of sex differences in preferences. In Chapter
9, I explored relationships between a characteristic more closely related to the
male gender role (i.e. apparent intelligence) and femininity in female faces.
Women who were considered to look more intelligent were perceived as less
feminine. In Chapter 10, I investigated the effects of reproductive strategy on
mate preferences. Results were consistent with evolutionary models of
behaviour. I argue that “status” is a multidimensional construct, and that its
effects on mate preferences are complex, that while results were generally more
consistent with an evolutionary than the biosocial model, integration of models
would provide greater insight into human mate preferences.
Type
Thesis, PhD Doctor of Philosophy
Rights
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/
Collections
Except where otherwise noted within the work, this item's licence for re-use is described as Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported
Items in the St Andrews Research Repository are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.