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Full-Text Articles in Psychology

Height And Body Mass On The Mating Market: Associations With Number Of Sex Partners And Extra-Pair Sex Among Heterosexual Men And Women Aged 18–65, David A. Frederick, Brooke N. Jenkins Sep 2015

Height And Body Mass On The Mating Market: Associations With Number Of Sex Partners And Extra-Pair Sex Among Heterosexual Men And Women Aged 18–65, David A. Frederick, Brooke N. Jenkins

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

People with traits that are attractive on the mating market are better able to pursue their preferred mating strategy. Men who are relatively tall may be preferred by women because taller height is a cue to dominance, social status, access to resources, and heritable fitness, leading them to have more mating opportunities and sex partners. We examined height, education, age, ethnicity, and body mass index (BMI) as predictors of sexual history among heterosexual men and women (N = 60,058). The linear and curvilinear associations between self-reported height and sex partner number were small for men when controlling for education, BMI, …


The Validity Of Sex-Differentiated Mate Preferences: Reconciling The Seemingly Conflicting Evidence, Norman P. Li, Andrea L. Meltzer Apr 2015

The Validity Of Sex-Differentiated Mate Preferences: Reconciling The Seemingly Conflicting Evidence, Norman P. Li, Andrea L. Meltzer

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Across decades and cultures, researchers have found that men prefer physical attractiveness in their romantic partners more than women do, whereas women prefer social status and resources in their partners more than men do. From an evolutionary perspective, these sex differences are important as they reflect hypothesized psychological mechanisms that evolved in response to different adaptive challenges faced by ancestral men and women. Social psychologists, however, have recently challenged the validity of mate preferences and thus, this evolutionary perspective. Indeed, recent speed-dating studies (e.g., Eastwick and Finkel, 2008) and a meta-analysis (Eastwick, Luchies, Finkel, and Hunt, 2014) demonstrate that the …