Does the Quality of Mating Competitors Affect Socio-Political Attitudes? An Experimental Test
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Does the Quality of Mating Competitors Affect Socio-Political Attitudes? An Experimental Test Francesca R. Luberti, et al. [full author details at the end of the article] Received: 4 June 2020 / Revised: 17 September 2020 / Accepted: 18 September 2020 # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract Objectives Individual differences in socio-political attitudes can reflect mating interests, and attitudes can also shift in response to mating market cues, including mating competitor quality. In four experiments, we tested whether competitors’ attractiveness (Experiments 1F&1M) and income (Experiments 2F&2M) would influence sociopolitical attitudes (participants’ self-reported attitudes towards promiscuity and sexual liberalism, traditional gender roles, and the minimum wage and healthcare). Methods We collected data from American participants online through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (total N = 787). In all experiments, each participant was randomly assigned to one of four experimental treatments in a between-subjects design (three levels of mating competitor quality and a control group), and to one of five stimuli within each treatment. Results Overall, the experimental treatments largely did not predict participants’ sociopolitical attitudes. The fifteen unique experimental stimuli, however, did significantly affect participants’ perception of their competitors’ quality. That perception, in turn, affected some socio-political attitudes. Namely, individuals who perceived their competitors to be of high mate-value were more supportive of traditional gender roles and, only for men in Experiment 2M, more opposed to promiscuity and sexual liberalism than individuals who perceived competitors to be of low mate-value. These results only applied to sexually unrestricted, but not restricted, women. Perceived mating competition did not affect attitudes towards the minimum wage and healthcare. Conclusions Experimental cues of mating competition shifted participants’ perceptions of their competitors’ mating quality and these perceptions in turn shifted some sociopolitical attitudes. We interpret these results considering broader arguments about plasticity in socio-political attitudes. Keywords Mating competition . Mating market . Sociosexuality . Socio-political
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Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s40750-02000151-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology
Introduction Current political conflicts seem to be defined by sharp individual differences in sociopolitical attitudes, but why do these differences emerge? Evolutionary-based research suggests that socio-political attitudes, at least in part, serve mating interests (e.g., Kurzban et al. 2010; Petersen 2017; Weeden et al. 2008). Individuals possess evolved psychological mechanisms and mental biases that influence them to adopt the sociopolitical attitudes that best serve their mating strategies, although often unconsciously (e.g., We
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