Good-looking, kind, intelligent, funny, wants to have children, has a bulging bank account…and the list goes on. Most people want a partner who embodies at least some of these traits, but some of us are choosier than others. The problem with being choosy is that the most attractive partners are a scarce commodity: only one man in a hundred on Tinder is “liked” by more than 80 percent of women. How, then, do we go about securing a relationship with someone who is a perfect 10 across the board?
Charles Farmer and Steven Arnocky of Nipissing University in Canada, and Adam Davis of nearby Canadore College, wondered if people who are choosier in matters of love tend to be higher in intrasexual competitiveness: that is, competitiveness with others of the same gender. Their rationale is that there is little point in a person being choosy if they are unwilling to vie for access to the most attractive partners with what may be a veritable army of love-rivals.
The psychologists recruited two groups of research participants: 163 undergraduate students and a further 462 crowd-workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform.
The participants were presented with a list of 18 traits (e.g., good cook and housekeeper, pleasing disposition, sociability, good financial prospects, good looks, similar religious background, emotional maturity) and asked to rate on a four-point scale how important each trait was to them in a partner. Scores were averaged to give an overall measure of choosiness.
Next, participants completed the 12-item Intrasexual Competition Scale, a questionnaire that measures a person’s competitiveness with others of the same gender. Examples of items include “I tend to look for negative characteristics in attractive men/women,” and “I don’t like seeing other men/women with a nicer house or a nicer car than mine.” Participants indicated the extent to which each statement applied to them.
The psychologists found, in both groups of participants, that those who held more discerning mate preferences also tended to be more intrasexually competitive, thereby confirming their primary hypothesis.
But that wasn’t all. They had also had their participants complete two more surveys: the Mate Value Scale, which measures a person’s self-perceived attractiveness to others; and the Sociosexual Orientation Index, which measures a person’s interest in and propensity to seek casual sex. When the psychologists re-analysed the responses from both groups, they found a three-way interaction between choosiness, mate value, and sociosexuality: participants who were most choosy, most attractive, and most drawn to casual sex tended to be the most intrasexually competitive. This is interesting because it suggests that attempting to outcompete rivals is a strategy that is more often pursued by people with high standards, who believe that they possess traits that make them competitive, and who desire to be successful in love. Those who sense that they are less competitive and who care less about whether they win or lose prefer not to get involved in the battle for supremacy.
Farmer, Arnocky, and Davis observe that their results constitute “some of the first direct evidence in humans that the link between mate preference standards and intrasexual rivalry varies according to a person’s desirability on the mating market and their inclinations toward short-term mating.”
They also note that intrasexual competitiveness is likely to be associated with more variables than the small number they examined. They suggest that future research might look at the importance of, for example, the fear of being single, given that other psychologists have found that those who fear being left on the shelf are less choosy in speed-dating situations and are content to settle for less attractive partners.