Human mate-choice copying is domain-general social learning

Abstract Women appear to copy other women’s preferences for men’s faces. This ‘mate-choice copying’ is often taken as evidence of psychological adaptations for processing social information related to mate choice, for which facial information is assumed to be particularly salient. No experiment, how...

Descripción completa

Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Sally E. Street, Thomas J. H. Morgan, Alex Thornton, Gillian R. Brown, Kevin N. Laland, Catharine P. Cross
Formato: article
Lenguaje:EN
Publicado: Nature Portfolio 2018
Materias:
R
Q
Acceso en línea:https://doaj.org/article/46aeca619b7e44e7896d5236d964f3aa
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
Descripción
Sumario:Abstract Women appear to copy other women’s preferences for men’s faces. This ‘mate-choice copying’ is often taken as evidence of psychological adaptations for processing social information related to mate choice, for which facial information is assumed to be particularly salient. No experiment, however, has directly investigated whether women preferentially copy each other’s face preferences more than other preferences. Further, because prior experimental studies used artificial social information, the effect of real social information on attractiveness preferences is unknown. We collected attractiveness ratings of pictures of men’s faces, men’s hands, and abstract art given by heterosexual women, before and after they saw genuine social information gathered in real time from their peers. Ratings of faces were influenced by social information, but no more or less than were images of hands and abstract art. Our results suggest that evidence for domain-specific social learning mechanisms in humans is weaker than previously suggested.