No more Mr. Nice Guy: effects of salient motives on womens mate preferences

Abstract

The traditional view of attitudes held that people evaluate attitude objects as consistently positive or negative regardless of the circumstances. The construal view of attitudes, in contrast, holds that people evaluate objects flexibly and adaptively, depending on which associations happen to be activated in any given context (Lord Lepper, 1999). Attitudes and evaluation as defined by the construal model are tied to a vast amount of human behavior. In particular, evaluations are a key part of the process of human mate selection as it is defined by evolutionary biology and psychology. The present research seeks to further support the construal model for attitudes while simultaneously expanding the study of evaluation into motivation and human mate selection. Specifically, we examine how women evaluate potential partners when they are exposed to environmental cues signaling some threat in the environment. Over the course of 5 experiments we primed a variety of different environmental threats, primarily resource scarcity and disease threat, and examined how womens evaluations differed depending on the traits possessed by two potential mates. We hypothesized that womens evaluations would differ when primed with a threat, and that women would evaluate men who lacked traits important to mitigating an environmental threat less positively compared to women not so primed. Results were mixed, with Experiments 1 and 2 supporting this general hypothesis, and Experiments 3 - 5 returning null results. Implications for this research are discussed with a focus on future research, complications with the design of Experiments 3 - 5, and how best to address each limitation.