Are You a Copycat?

Source: Free-Photos/Pixabay

“It is one of life’s greatest secrets: women don’t look for handsome men, they look for men with beautiful women” —Milan Kundera

If you have ever wondered about whether or not you should do something or buy something, you have probably sought the advice of others, or at least been aware that doing so is probably a smart thing to do. But if you were to seek out advice, it would probably be a much better idea to seek out the advice of someone that has some degree of familiarity with the product or activity in question. If for example you were wanting to buy a loaf of bread you would likely be better off consulting a baker than a mechanic. The basic reason for this is that, while you may be wrong, you assume that the baker is generally going to more knowledgeable about bread than the mechanic. The baker has likely had more to do with bread over the years than the mechanic has. This decision will be made intuitively without too much conscious consideration as to the relative knowledge bases of the two. In the same way, if your car needs a service, there’s a fairly good chance that you won’t spend too much time weighing up the pros and cons of taking it in to a bakery.

Okay great, but what does this have to do with the price of fish in Brunei? Well, one of the most important decisions you will make as a person again and again is who to romantically partner with. The overwhelming majority of us will be faced with at least one decision in our lives about who to partner, and the bulk of those will make such a decision over and over again. When you’re making an important decision you want as much (relevant) information as possible, and you ideally want to get it from people that are familiar with the ‘product’ in question—the product in this case being a prospective romantic partner. Of course, it makes sense to take into account the costs associated with obtaining this information and the benefits that it actually provides. So if this process is thought of in terms of a cost/benefit analysis, whenever the costs are zero, or sufficiently close to nil, regardless of the benefits, the behaviour should go ahead. So the problem is finding behaviours that have a really low (possibly negligible) cost, and provide at least some benefit. Enter: mate copying. In very broad terms mate copying is a strategy for assessing a prospective romantic partner that involves gaining information about a romantic prospect, from knowing about their romantic past. Better still, this information is coming from someone who has a fair amount of relevant knowledge about the person in question (their ex or current partner). Readers familiar with this blog will be aware that this is a topic that is of particular interest to me.

More specifically, knowing something about another person’s relationship history, or who they have romantically associated with previously or currently, can tell you something non-trivial about them. If for example, I am a heterosexual woman considering dating a heterosexual man, and I know that he has never been in a relationship previously, I can infer some things about him (maybe there’s something wrong with him). If on the other hand I’m aware that his last two relationships were both with drop-dead-gorgeous supermodels, I can infer something else about him (these women probably have a lot of sexual options but they’ve chosen to be in a relationship with him; there must be something about him, and whatever it is may carry over into a new relationship).

So this information can be obtained cheaply (e.g., from social reputation, direct observation, etc.) but needn’t come directly from the individual themselves, and may even seem a bit disingenuous if it does. For example, have you ever met someone at a bar who just boasts about themselves and tells you about all of their accomplishments? That’s usually not as attractive as they think it is. Mate copying has been well documented in non-humans, and in the last 15 or so years, inquiry into the phenomenon among humans has started to gain momentum. My colleagues Linda Taimre, Olivia Paisley, and I conducted a series of experiments to investigate the idea of mate copying among heterosexual women (published in the journal Current Psychology). In our first study we presented women with a series of photographs of a man pictured alongside his former partner, and then asked participants a simple question “How much did you think about the female in the photo, Sarah, when deciding your rating for James?” on a scale of 0 (not at all) to 5 (a great deal). While many women gave answers at the higher end of the scale, nearly all were above 0 and the average was around 2 (a moderate amount). While this finding wasn’t too surprising, there has been an unspoken assumption in the literature surrounding romantic desire that thought processes like these are unconscious, and on an intuitive level beyond awareness. Unfortunately, research is an imperfect process and hindsight is 20/20. What we probably should have done is looked at the behavior of men too and compared their conscious awareness of who a woman is pictured with.

Given an awareness for what they are attending too, the next study we conducted looked at the specific information women are getting in this process. We essentially did the same thing, but this time when we presented men alongside women we didn’t explicitly say they used to be in a relationship. Afterwards, we asked women (concerning the man they viewed) “To what extent they agree with the statement below,” statements such as “He is caring,” He is intelligent,” “He is good-looking,” etc. While responses varied, we found that it didn’t matter whether the man was presented alone or alongside a reasonably attractive woman. This was true of both observable characteristics e.g. attractiveness, masculinity, etc.) and unobservable characteristics (e.g., trustworthiness, ambitiousness, etc.).

We did, however, find a small effect of age where older women rated the men higher on their physical attractiveness than younger women did. The interpretation of this remains unclear given the lack of prior research into this phenomenon, but we thought it might have something to do with the short- and long-term orientation of the women. Potentially younger women are more interested in finding men that are good father-material (caring, intelligent, financially-stable) and set themselves up for the long-term—whereas older women may have already found their father-material mates, so this isn’t as important for them. This was a new finding, though, and hasn’t yet been replicated—so watch this space for future investigations into this.

So it seems that women (and possibly men—this investigation only tested women) pay at least a moderate amount of attention to who a man is with (romantically) or who he used to be with. What information they are getting from this is unclear, but this line of inquiry seems to be promising in gaining further into insight how and why people enter into romantic relationships.

This post was co-authored with Linda Taimre, based on research co-conducted by Linda Taimre, myself, and Olivia Paisley.