Chapter 6 Flashcards
(26 cards)
The reproductive benefits for men who successfully implemented a short-term mating strategy would have been:
an increase in the number of offspring produced.
Short-term sexual strategies, however, carry potential costs for men. Over evolutionary time, men risked:
(1) contracting sexually transmitted diseases
(2) acquiring a social reputation as a “womanizer”
(3) lowering the chances that their children would survive due to lack of paternal investment and protection
(4) suffering violence at the hands of jealous husbands or boyfriends if the women were married or mated
(5) suffering violence at the hands of the father or brothers of the women
(6) risking retaliatory afairs by their wives and the potential for a costly divorce
Men seeking short-term mates are predicted to:
avoid women who might demand serious commitments or investments before consenting to sex
One psychological solution to the problem of securing sexual access to a variety of partners is _____
lust
In every culture in every region of the world:
A substantially larger percentage of men than women desire more than one sex partner over the next month.
men’s inclination to:
let little time elapse before seeking sexual intercourse offers a partial solution to the adaptive problem of gaining sexual access to a variety of partners.
College men accept an age range roughly __________ than do women for a sexual hookup.
4 years wider
Evolutionary psychologists have also hypothesized that men seeking short-term sex would:
prioritize women’s bodies, since a body cues provide possibly the most powerful cues to her fertility
Compared to the long-term mating context in which men prioritized__________, men considering casual sex shifted signifcantly in the direction of prioritizing __________
facial information; body information
The most striking feature of [male fantasy] is:
that sex is sheer lust and physical gratification, devoid of encumbering relationships, emotional elaboration, complicated plot lines, firtation, courtship, and extended foreplay
_______ percent of the women but only __________ percent of the men report that they focus most heavily on the personal and emotional characteristics of the fantasized partner.
Forty-one; sixteen
_______ were more likely to have regretted acts of sexual commission—wishing that they had not had sex with someone that they did have sex with
Women
Two independent groups of researchers have documented that men more than women regret _______________
missed sexual opportunities
Sexual regret, in short, has the hallmarks of:
an evolved feature in men designed to facilitate acting on future
sexual opportunities and avoid entangling commitments.
The Kinsey study, for example, estimated that 50 percent of men had ____________, whereas only 26 percent of women had them
extramarital affairs
Kinsey found that:
69 percent of American men had solicited a prostitute, and for 15 percent, prostitution was a regular sexual outlet.
Men more than women report that their “ideal outcome” of hooking up is ”______”
“further hook-ups.”
genetic benefits to short term mating in women
enhanced fertility, superior genes, different genes
Mate Switching Hypotheses
A third class of benefits pertains to mate switching. Sometimes, a woman’s husband stops bringing in resources, starts abusing her, or otherwise declines in his value to her as a mate. Ancestral women might have benefitted from short-term mating to cope with this adaptive problem.
Short-Term for Long-Term Goals Hypotheses
women use short-term mating as a means to assess and evaluate
prospective long-term mates
Mate Manipulation Hypotheses
By having an affair, a woman might be able to gain revenge on her husband for his infidelity, possibly deterring him from future infidelities
Costs to Women of Short-Term Mating
Women risk impairing their desirability as a long-term mate if they develop reputations for promiscuousness, because men prize fidelity in potential wives. Women known to be promiscuous suffer reputational damage even in relatively promiscuous cultures, such as among the Swedes and the Ache Indians.
Several researchers have discovered that women who engaged in short-term mating:
place a premium on the man’s physical attractiveness, a finding consistent with the good genes and the sexy son hypotheses
Hypotheses Supported: Mate Switching, Mate Expulsion, and Resources
Women reported that engaging in an extra-pair mating made it easier for a woman to break up with her current partner (sixth most likely benefit to receive) and more likely that a woman would find a partner who she felt was more desirable than her current partner (fourth most likely benefit to receive).
