Girls, Beware the Best-looking Guys
Posted by Mr. Thoughtful on April 10, 2008
I’ve been reading two interesting posts on the Psychology Today website from the evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa. There is a lot of material there. For now, I’ll just focus on a few of the research findings he discusses:
[H]andsome men on average make bad husbands. Men can maximize their reproductive success by pursuing one of two different strategies: Seek a long-term mate, stay with her, and invest in their joint offspring (the “dad” strategy); or seek a large number of short-term mates without investing in any of the resulting offspring (the “cad” strategy).
All men may want to pursue the cad strategy; however, their choice of the mating strategy is constrained by female choice. Men do not get to decide with whom to have sex; women do. And women disproportionately seek out handsome men for their short-term mates for their good genes…
Thus, handsome men get a disproportionate number of opportunities for short-term mating and are therefore able to engage in the cad strategy. Ugly men have no choice. Since women do not choose them as short-term mates, their only option for achieving any reproductive success is to find one long-term mate and invest heavily in their children — the dad strategy.
Consistent with this logic, studies show that more attractive men have a larger number of extra-pair sex partners (sex partners other than their long-term mates). Interestingly, more attractive men have more short-term mates than long-term mates, whereas more attractive women have more long-term mates than short-term mates. Most importantly for our current purposes, handsome men invest less in their exclusive relationships than ugly men do. They are less honest with and less attentive to their partners. McNulty’s new study of newlyweds confirms this. Their data show that the more physically attractive the husbands are, the less supportive they are of their wives in their interactions.
One of my friends came up with this theory, although it was supported only by anecdotal evidence rather than the presumably more rigorous methods used in the studies on which these conclusions are based. His theory was that a great many women are attracted to the very best-looking guys and would sleep with them. Those guys (the cads) would rarely want to settle down with any of these women, because they were in high demand and could sleep with lots of different women.
The women, most of whom wanted relationships with these guys, were disappointed and wondered why guys were interested only in sex (cads). It wasn’t that all guys were this way; but almost all the guys they were interested in were this way.
A lot of you readers have undoubtedly observed the very same phenomenon.
It occurs to me that a lot of heartache could be eliminated by better selection.
