Atomic Nerds

To pluck another string in an ongoing theme of harping, here’s someone studying sex and dating psychology that is actually asking the sorts of questions that should be asked: Study Questions “Selectiveness” Gender Gap.

Much has been made in psychological and evolutionary psychological circles about how women are much more selective than men when it comes to choosing a date or a overnight mate; usually some lip service is paid to the massive cultural reinforcements in this direction just about every man and woman receives from birth before treating the conclusion as though it were simply a biological truism, like “men taller on average than women”. Very, very rarely is anything built into the study to check to see if any other reinforcements besides the Calling of the Chromosomes are working.

These researchers picked a setting that people working in this field love because it makes their job really simple and gives more credible results than self-reporting: speed dating. Neither the participants nor the researchers have to burn much time, it relies almost totally on gut impressions rather than post-hoc rationalization, and it forces the participants into snap judgments, so that you can supposedly study basic inclinations rather than someone’s idea of a checklist. (Unless, of course, that person’s checklist is prioritized as “must be above a six on the hotness scale”.) In order to check the validity of their model, they did what every good investigator should do- shake down the model and question which assumptions are active and whether they should be.

In the case of this particular study, they questioned a speed-dating standard: who sits and is approached versus who approaches someone new every time the clock runs out. Almost universally in such settings, the women sit and the men rotate, which both ensures that everyone meets everyone eventually and matches traditional gender norms. The only variable in the study under discussion was just that: who is approached versus who approaches.

The gap didn’t vanish or reverse under this design, but both groups were significantly impacted by the one small change- women were still more selective than men, but men being approached became more selective, and women doing the approaching became less selective. It’s hardly a nonintutive result; we usually value more that which we expended effort to go find rather than that which was dropped into our lap, and if we anticipate having wide choice for no effort, we tend to place much more importance on the choice. Think of it as the free-pizza coefficient- you’ll have a lot more people eating the same kind of pizza without complaint if you bring one in with whatever toppings you decided to put on it than if you ask everyone what kind of toppings they want before you order it.

At the end of the day it doesn’t validate or invalidate the normal assumption, but it’s the kind of question that really needs to be asked, much more often than it is. If it took until 2009 to get an answer to a question that should be a matter of universal basic psychology in any situation other than one as loaded with cultural gender norming as mate selection, then there’s a lot more work along the same vein to be done.

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