Family-oriented women rely more on social cues when judging potential partners

Women who follow slower, more family-oriented life strategies tend to rely more on others’ opinions when judging potential partners, according to new research published in Evolutionary Psychological Science.

Mate choice copying, that is, deciding a partner seems more or less desirable based on what others say about him, is a well-documented phenomenon in psychology and evolutionary biology. It offers a shortcut, such that, instead of evaluating every trait directly, people can use others’ experiences as social evidence.

Prior work has shown that women copy others’ mate choices more strongly in long-term romantic contexts, especially when positive or negative details about a man’s past relationship are involved. However, less is known about which women are most likely to lean on social information in the first place.

Alireza Nikakhtar and colleagues set out to investigate whether a woman’s underlying life history traits predict how strongly she copies others’ mate choices. Life history theory proposes that people vary along a continuum from “fast” to “slow” strategies. Some individuals prioritize short-term opportunities and mating effort, while others invest more in parenting effort and long-term planning.

The authors reasoned that women who adopt slower strategies, and thus place greater weight on long-term partnerships and parenting, may be especially motivated to avoid costly mistakes when choosing a partner, making social information particularly valuable.

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This study involved 214 Iranian women aged 18-45. Participants completed the questionnaire in Persian. Before reaching the central experimental task, they answered demographic questions (age, education, marital status, sexual orientation, number of children) and a brief set of life history-related items.

Participants then completed several psychological measures capturing early life stress (e.g., “My mother was always there when I needed her”), their broader life history strategy using the Mini-K scale (e.g., “I often make plans in advance”), and their levels of mating effort (e.g., “wearing flashy, expensive clothes”) and parenting effort (e.g., “good at taking care of children”). They also answered a single item about their age at menarche. Taken together, these measures provided an overview of each participant’s developmental background, reproductive strategy, and general orientation toward short-term mating versus long-term parenting.

Participants next moved to a vignette-based task. First, they rated 10 male faces, selected and standardized from the Iranian Face Database, paired with neutral descriptions for long-term attractiveness. After a 2 minute distraction task about seabird parenting, the same faces reappeared, now with positive or negative descriptions provided by former partners.

Participants rated attractiveness again. A similar procedure followed for short-term contexts using four new faces, each paired with neutral-plus-positive or neutral-plus-negative descriptions. The difference in ratings from the neutral to the positive or negative information conditions served as the measure of mate choice copying.

Nikakhtar and colleagues found that participants clearly responded to the social information. Positive former-partner descriptions increased attractiveness ratings, while negative ones reduced them, in both long-term and short-term contexts. These shifts were larger in long-term evaluations, consistent with a broader pattern found in past research that social information matters more for decisions involving commitment and unobservable qualities like reliability or generosity.

The researchers also observed that negative information tended to lead to slightly stronger shifts than positive information, though this difference did not reach statistical significance. This pattern aligns with well-known psychological tendencies where people place greater weight on potentially harmful cues than beneficial ones.

Importantly, several life-history-related traits predicted how strongly participants copied negative social information. Women who scored higher in parenting effort, and those who scored lower in mating effort, showed greater decreases in attractiveness ratings when a man was described negatively.

These effects were most pronounced in short-term negative scenarios, where both parenting effort and overall life history strategy scores predicted stronger avoidance of negatively described partners. Age at menarche, a developmental milestone sometimes linked to reproductive strategy, showed no association with mate choice copying.

The authors note that the sample was culturally and demographically specific, involving primarily well-educated Iranian women, which may limit the generalizability of findings.

The study, “Do Human Life History Traits Predict Mate Choice Copying in Women?” was authored by Alireza Nikakhtar, Abbas Zabihzadeh, Arash Monajem, and Mostafa Saadati.