Mate preferences in the US and Singapore: A cross-cultural test of the mate preference priority model

By Norman P. Li, K. Valentine, Lily Patel. 2011

116 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Sex differences have been found in mate preferences across several decades. Especially for long-term partners, men tend to value physical attractiveness and women tend to value social status. However, the sexes both value various other traits even more highly. Such findings thus diminish the importance of the sex differences and challenge the theoretical importance that evolutionary psychologists place on physical attractiveness and social status. Using a budget allocation methodology to examine mate pref- erences in both the US and Singapore, we found not only the usual sex differences, but also evidence that men prioritize physical attractiveness and women prioritize social status as necessities in their long-term mates. We also found that both sexes tend to value physical attractiveness as a necessity in short-term mates. Results replicate previous budget allocation findings and provide cross-cultural validation for a mate preference priorities model.

Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Marketing, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/00216ad840334e74c5ef2c586a059275ef3eaaa0

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Citations in the corpus

How the Dark Triad traits predict relationship choices (2012, background): “…2011) and it may be a more ecologically valid technique to understanding mate choices because of the constrained nature of the decision making it requires of participants (Li et al., 2002, 2011) it creates a somewhat ipsative data structure which pose special problems for correlational analyses.”
Is Man the Measure of All Things? A Social Cognitive Account of Androcentrism (2018, background): “While the workplace provides a status-based incentive for women to adopt agentic traits (Levanon & Grusky, 2016), arguably the home environment creates incentives for men to adopt communality to fulfill relational obligations (Li et al., 2011), and while women increasingly enter the labor force (33%”