Self-assessments and mating decisions 1/55 Running head: Self-assessments and mating decisions How self-assessments can guide human mating decisions

How Self-Assessments Can Guide Human Mating Decisions

From puberty onward, mating becomes a major focus of thought: Whom shall I date? Shall I stay with my current partner, or look for someone else? Can I find someone better? Will she like me? Will he leave me for someone else? How popular with the opposite sex am I, compared to my peers? These types of questions, which sometimes persist throughout adulthood, point to the complexity of mating deci...

Self-assessments and mating decisions

REVIEW PAPER Female mating decisions: maximizing fitness?

Sexual selection theory assumes that maximizing fitness is the ultimate goal in every mating decision. Fitness can be maximized directly by increasing the number of offspring (direct benefits) or indirectly by maximizing offspring’s lifetime reproductive success (indirect benefits). Whereas there is considerable evidence in the literature for the influence of mating decisions on direct benefits...

Self-referent phenotype matching and its role in female mate choice in arthropods

A growing body of empirical evidence shows that females of many animal species gain benefits by mating polyandrously, and often prefer to mate with novel males over previous mates. Although a female preference for novel males has been demonstrated for multiple animal taxa, the mechanisms used by females to discriminate between novel and previous mates remain largely unknown. However, recent stu...

Men's Reproductive Investment Decisions

Using questionnaire data completed by 170 men, we examine variation in paternal investment in relation to the trade-off between mating and parenting. We found that as men's self-perceived mate value increases, so does their mating effort, and in turn, as mating effort increases, paternal investment decreases. This study also simultaneously examined the influence on parental investment of men's ...