New research provides evidence that one’s perceived dating popularity can affect attitudes towards wealth redistribution. The findings have been published in the journal Human Nature.
“I’ve always been interested in better understanding individual differences in socio-political orientation and their origins, as these differences are often the cause of serious societal conflicts,” explained study author Francesca Luberti, a PhD candidate at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.
“Research that investigates why individuals adopt certain socio-political attitudes from an evolutionary perspective is still relatively scarce, so I wanted to contribute to filling the gap in this literature. I believe that an evolutionary approach to the study of socio-political orientation, combined with knowledge from more traditional social science disciplines, can shed new light into the ultimate causes of an individual’s politics. In turn, this knowledge can provide valuable insights into how to curtail societal conflicts.”
In the study, the researchers had 1,108 single U.S. adults create a dating profile purportedly to test a new dating website. As part of this process, the participants provided information about themselves and their ideal dating partner.
They were then told that an algorithm had calculated the number of people who matched their “ideal partner” description along with the percentage of “ideal partners” who would be willing to date them. In reality, however, there was no algorithm at work. The researchers randomly matched different participants with different numbers.
The researchers found that sex, age, and income appeared to play a significant role in participants’ socio-political attitudes. Unexpectedly, the participants’ purported dating popularity did not appear to influence most of these attitudes, including benevolent sexism, sexual nonconformity and attitudes towards casual sexual relationships.
This could indicate that socio-political attitudes are “more straightforward than previously hypothesized and that short-term perceptions of mating market circumstances may be less important than individual demographics,” Luberti and her colleagues said. Alternatively, it is possible that the experiment “did not adequately mirror the effects that mating popularity and mating market size may have in real life.”
But the researchers did find evidence that the mating market influenced one socio-political attitude: both male and female participants who were told they were popular with hundreds of their ideal partners tended to be more supportive of wealth redistribution compared to participants who were told they were popular with thousands or with dozens of their ideal partners.
In particular, those led to believe they were popular with hundreds of their ideal partners were more likely to agree with statements such as “The minimum wage should be raised” and “The government should adopt a policy to guarantee health care to all workers and their families.”
“Participants manipulated to believe they were popular with hundreds of people may have reported higher support for wealth redistribution than others because they may have been less concerned with accumulating resources to compete in the mating market than others,” the researchers explained in their study.
“On the contrary, participants manipulated to believe they were successful with dozens (not hundreds) of their ideal partners may have believed they needed to accumulate resources to be more competitive in the mating market,” and were thus “opposed to sharing the resources they need.”
“Finally, participants manipulated to believe they were successful with thousands of their ideal partners may have believed that the status quo supports them well and should not be changed, which may explain why they were more opposed to wealth redistribution,” the researchers said.
Luberti hopes the research highlights that “an individual’s socio-political attitudes often reflect the individual’s self-interest, and that mating and reproductive interests can drive individual differences in socio-political attitudes.”
“If an individual is into monogamy rather than casual sex, for example, they are likely to support socio-political norms that promote monogamy and discourage casual sex (e.g., they’re likely to support traditional family values). The experiment, moreover, shows that socio-political attitudes might shift based on romantic feedback in an online dating website. Specifically, my collaborators and I found that dating popularity among potential partners and the number of available partners in an online dating website might affect attitudes towards wealth redistribution. This result provides some support for the notion that everyday life romantic events can affect socio-political attitudes,” she told PsyPost.
“To the best of my knowledge, this was the first experiment to test how success in an online dating website affects socio-political attitudes, so these results will need to be replicated in future work. Other experiments will need to further investigate the relationship between online dating and socio-political attitudes,” Luberti added.
“In my research, I combine insights from evolutionary biology, social psychology, and economics. I believe that approaches that combine knowledge and methods from biological and social sciences will be very successful at better understanding the causes of certain human behaviours and attitudes, including socio-political attitudes.”
The study, “The Effects of the Mating Market, Sex, Age, and Income on Sociopolitical Orientation: Insights from Evolutionary Theory and Sexual Economics Theory“, was authored by Francesca R. Luberti, Khandis R. Blake, and Robert C. Brooks.
