Oliver Sng

Mate Preferences do Predict Attraction and Choices in the Early Stages of Mate Selection

Although mate preference research has firmly established that men value physical attractiveness more than women do and women value social status more than men do, recent speed-dating studies have indicated mixed evidence (at best) for whether peoples sex-differentiated mate preferences predict actual mate choices. According to an evolutionary, mate preference priority model (Li, Bailey, Kenrick, & Linsenmeier, 2002; Li & Kenrick, 2006; Li, Valentine, & Patel, 2011), the sexes are largely similar in what they ideally like, but for long-term mates, they should differ on what they most want to avoid in early selection contexts. Following this model, we conducted experiments using online messaging and modified speed-dating platforms. Results indicate that when a mating pool includes people at the low end of social status and physical attractiveness, mate choice criteria are sex-differentiated: Men, more than women, chose mates based on physical attractiveness, whereas women, more than men, chose mates based on social status. In addition, individuals who more greatly valued social status or physical attractiveness on paper valued these traits more in their actual choices. In particular, mate choices were sex-differentiated when considering long-term relationships but not short-term ones, where both sexes shunned partners with low physical attractiveness. The findings validate a large body of mate preferences research and an evolutionary perspective on mating, and they have implications for research using speed-dating and other interactive contexts.

Ecology-driven stereotypes override race stereotypes

Significance Ecological features shape people’s goals, strategies, and behaviors. Our research suggests that social perceivers possess a lay understanding of ecology’s influence on behavior, resulting in ecology-driven stereotypes. Moreover, because race is confounded with ecology in the United States, Americans’ stereotypes about racial groups may actually reflect their stereotypes about these groups’ presumed home ecologies. In a series of studies, we demonstrate that (i) individuals possess ecology-driven stereotypes; (ii) these stereotypes are not derivative of race stereotypes; and (iii) the application of race stereotypes to targets is greatly diminished when more immediate cues to home ecology are present. These findings have important implications for the conceptualization of race stereotypes, as well as for reducing the application of pernicious stereotypes to individuals. Why do race stereotypes take the forms they do? Life history theory posits that features of the ecology shape individuals’ behavior. Harsh and unpredictable (“desperate”) ecologies induce fast strategy behaviors such as impulsivity, whereas resource-sufficient and predictable (“hopeful”) ecologies induce slow strategy behaviors such as future focus. We suggest that individuals possess a lay understanding of ecology’s influence on behavior, resulting in ecology-driven stereotypes. Importantly, because race is confounded with ecology in the United States, we propose that Americans’ stereotypes about racial groups actually reflect stereotypes about these groups’ presumed home ecologies. Study 1 demonstrates that individuals hold ecology stereotypes, stereotyping people from desperate ecologies as possessing faster life history strategies than people from hopeful ecologies. Studies 2–4 rule out alternative explanations for those findings. Study 5, which independently manipulates race and ecology information, demonstrates that when provided with information about a person’s race (but not ecology), individuals’ inferences about blacks track stereotypes of people from desperate ecologies, and individuals’ inferences about whites track stereotypes of people from hopeful ecologies. However, when provided with information about both the race and ecology of others, individuals’ inferences reflect the targets’ ecology rather than their race: black and white targets from desperate ecologies are stereotyped as equally fast life history strategists, whereas black and white targets from hopeful ecologies are stereotyped as equally slow life history strategists. These findings suggest that the content of several predominant race stereotypes may not reflect race, per se, but rather inferences about how one’s ecology influences behavior.

The crowded life is a slow life: Population density and life history strategy.

The world population has doubled over the last half century. Yet, research on the psychological effects of human population density, once a popular topic, has decreased over the past few decades. Applying a fresh perspective to an old topic, we draw upon life history theory to examine the effects of population density. Across nations and across the U.S. states (Studies 1 and 2), we find that dense populations exhibit behaviors corresponding to a slower life history strategy, including greater future-orientation, greater investment in education, more long-term mating orientation, later marriage age, lower fertility, and greater parental investment. In Studies 3 and 4, experimentally manipulating perceptions of high density led individuals to become more future-oriented. Finally, in Studies 5 and 6, experimentally manipulating perceptions of high density seemed to lead to life-stage-specific slower strategies, with college students preferring to invest in fewer rather than more relationship partners, and an older MTurk sample preferring to invest in fewer rather than more children. This research sheds new insight on the effects of density and its implications for human cultural variation and society at large.

The behavioral ecology of cultural psychological variation.

Recent work has documented a wide range of important psychological differences across societies. Multiple explanations have been offered for why such differences exist, including historical philosophies, subsistence methods, social mobility, social class, climactic stresses, and religion. With the growing body of theory and data, there is an emerging need for an organizing framework. We propose here that a behavioral ecological perspective, particularly the idea of adaptive phenotypic plasticity, can provide an overarching framework for thinking about psychological variation across cultures and societies. We focus on how societies vary as a function of six important ecological dimensions: density, relatedness, sex ratio, mortality likelihood, resources, and disease. This framework can: (a) highlight new areas of research, (b) integrate and ground existing cultural psychological explanations, (c) integrate research on variation across human societies with research on parallel variations in other animal species, (d) provide a way for thinking about multiple levels of culture and cultural change, and (e) facilitate the creation of an ecological taxonomy of societies, from which one can derive specific predictions about cultural differences and similarities. Finally, we discuss the relationships between the current framework and existing perspectives. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Human Life History Strategies: Calibrated to External or Internal Cues?

Human life history (LH) strategies are theoretically regulated by developmental exposure to environmental cues that ancestrally predicted LH-relevant world states (e.g., risk of morbidity–mortality). Recent modeling work has raised the question of whether the association of childhood family factors with adult LH variation arises via (i) direct sampling of external environmental cues during development and/or (ii) calibration of LH strategies to internal somatic condition (i.e., health), which itself reflects exposure to variably favorable environments. The present research tested between these possibilities through three online surveys involving a total of over 26,000 participants. Participants completed questionnaires assessing components of self-reported environmental harshness (i.e., socioeconomic status, family neglect, and neighborhood crime), health status, and various LH-related psychological and behavioral phenotypes (e.g., mating strategies, paranoia, and anxiety), modeled as a unidimensional latent variable. Structural equation models suggested that exposure to harsh ecologies had direct effects on latent LH strategy as well as indirect effects on latent LH strategy mediated via health status. These findings suggest that human LH strategies may be calibrated to both external and internal cues and that such calibrational effects manifest in a wide range of psychological and behavioral phenotypes.

Evolutionary Approaches to Stereotyping and Prejudice

Males are stereotyped as more competitive than females, females as more caring than men, and African Americans as more physically aggressive and violent than European and Asian Americans. Heterosexuals are prejudiced against homosexuals, locals are prejudiced against immigrants, and religious people are prejudiced against atheists. As generalizations, these statements are supported by considerable bodies of empirical work, many of which are reviewed in the other chapters of this handbook. Werner Heisenberg, the theoretical physicist, noted that “what we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning” (1958/1999, p. 58). The findings just described characterize the nature of one small subset of stereotypes and prejudices and emerge from methods of questioning derived from a variety of theoretical perspectives – perspectives focusing, for example, on ingroup/outgroup distinctions, social identity and self-enhancement processes, and a need to justify discriminatory behaviors against others. As we will see throughout this chapter, however, the nature of stereotypes and prejudices is often more nuanced and complex than what the questioning favored by such approaches allows us to discern. These nuances have important implications not only for our understanding of stereotyping and prejudice but also for the theoretical frameworks aiming to explain them. Some of these nuances exist in the form of more textured conceptions of stereotyping and prejudice, missed by traditional methodological lenses focused at levels insufficiently fine to detect them. For example, when researchers use traditional measures to assess prejudices against groups as varied as gay men and Mexican Americans, respondents report feeling similarly prejudiced and negative toward the two groups. When researchers ask respondents about their specific emotional reactions to these groups, however, respondents report feeling quite differently toward the groups – feeling disgust toward gay men but fear of Mexican Americans (Cottrell & Neuberg, 2005). Other complexities have been missed because they occur beyond the scope of the investigative lenses derived from traditional frameworks. Consider, for example, that stereotypes of young African American men being dangerous are especially likely to come to mind for perceivers who are physically in a dark environment (Schaller, Park, & Mueller, 2003), or that a womans current ovulatory stage influences her prejudices against outgroup men (McDonald, Donnellan, Cesario, & Navarrete, 2015). As conceptual variables, environmental darkness and fertility status lie well outside the theoretical architectures of traditional theories.

Adopting a Group Attention Perspective: An Exploration of Moderators and Future Directions

Shteynberg (this issue) reviews how group attention increases the psychological prominence of the information observed in group settings, serves to better embed descriptive norms making them more dominant in people’s cognitions, and acts as an axis of group communication and cooperation. We find the research on group attention compelling and an interesting addition to this special issue on Intersubjective Norms. The findings regarding group attention suggest that it generally functions like a cognitive heuristic (i.e., an automatic process that occurs largely without people’s awareness or control). Yet, we question whether there are conditions under which individuals would not use group attention to determine descriptive norms and instead use other methods for focusing their attention (possibly moving them toward more deliberative cognitive processing). In this comment, we aim to highlight and suggest potential moderators of the phenomenon and directions for future research on this topic. As Shteynberg (this issue) describes, the “group” that one attends to can take many forms. It could be family, one’s community, or even mass media. It is possible that the nature and composition of the group could affect whether, and to what extent, group attention is utilized. The size and heterogeneity of the group as well as whether there are experts or authorities present may be important factors to consider. For example, if we focus on the composition of the group, we would expect individuals are more likely to use group attention when the group consists of people who are of the same ethnicity, cultural background, age, and gender compared with a group that shows more deviation from the perceivers’ typical in-group composition on those dimensions. In other words, it might be the case that individuals who are in culturally diverse groups are less likely to utilize group attention than those who are in culturally homogeneous groups. We expect this effect because individuals are more likely to use similar others as a reference group for their own behavior. This idea could be examined experimentally using a paradigm involving different confederate groups that were either similar to the participant or more heterogeneous and comparing the likelihood that a participant uses group attention under each condition. Likewise, it would also be interesting to do a naturalistic observation study to see whether individuals from