L
Lee Michaels
Guest
'Worthless' gifts get the good girls
a.. 13:21 27 July 2005
b.. NewScientist.com news service
c.. Anna Gosline
Men who spend big money wining and dining their dates are not frittering
away hard-earned cash. According to a pair of UK researchers, they are
merely employing the best strategy for getting the girl without being taken
for granted.
Using mathematical modelling, Peter Sozou and Robert Seymour at University
College London, UK, found that wooing girls with costly, but essentially
worthless gifts - such as theatre tickets or expensive dinners out - is a
winning courtship strategy for both sexes.
Females can assess how serious or committed a male plans to be and males can
ensure they are not just seducing 'gold-diggers' - girls who take valuable
presents with no intention of accepting subsequent dates.
Sozou came about the idea after reading about a man in his local newspaper.
The man had been paying the rent of a woman he considered was his
girlfriend - he was giving her a valuable gift. But she had been heartlessly
manipulating him, dating another man on the sly while accepting money from
her unwitting sugar daddy.
"It spurred me onto thinking that if he had just been buying her expensive
dinners, and not paying her rent, she wouldn't have strung him along so
much," says Sozou.
Dating and mating
So he and Seymour built a model based on a series of dating decisions. In
the model males had to decide what kind of gift to offer females - valuable,
extravagant or cheap - based on how attractive he finds her. The females had
to either accept or decline the gift and then decide whether to mate with
the gift-giver - a decision also weighted on the 'attractiveness' of their
prospective partner.
When they measured the different outcomes of all the steps, they found the
best solution for the males was to give extravagant, but intrinsically
value-free gifts the vast majority of the time, while giving gifts of
material value very occasionally.
The model showed that if males gave valuable gifts too often, the females
would start to exploit them: the males have no clue as to the females' real
intentions in the model. Put simply, the females just take the diamonds and
run. But when the gifts are worthless, an uninterested female has little
incentive to accept, gaining no return on what could be just turn into the
simple waste of an evening. Only girls who are serious would bother to go
the distance.
Worthless balls
Sozou and Seymour believe their conclusions about people find support in the
actions of animals, such as the dance fly. Males of this species give
worthless cotton balls to entice partners into mating - and they work -
although other scientists interpret this as male trickery.
Alison Lenton, a social psychologist at the University of Edinburgh, UK,
questions some of the model's assumptions, however. For example, one
assumption is that females obtain a negative outcome for accepting an
unattractive, though committed, male. Women have been shown to prioritise
traits associated with good parental care above physical attractiveness, she
says.
The model also fails to take the potential effects of cheating females into
account. "Some female birds raise their chicks with a 'nice' male and engage
in short-term copulations with an attractive male - there is similar
evidence among humans. In this way, females may get the best of both
worlds."
And what is more, says Lenton, psychologists have found that experiential
purchases - like theatre tickets - make people more happy in the long run
that material purchases. "I do not necessarily agree that theatre tickets
are 'worthless'," she says.
Journal reference: Proceedings of the Royal Society B (DOI:
10.1098/rspb.2005.3152)
a.. 13:21 27 July 2005
b.. NewScientist.com news service
c.. Anna Gosline
Men who spend big money wining and dining their dates are not frittering
away hard-earned cash. According to a pair of UK researchers, they are
merely employing the best strategy for getting the girl without being taken
for granted.
Using mathematical modelling, Peter Sozou and Robert Seymour at University
College London, UK, found that wooing girls with costly, but essentially
worthless gifts - such as theatre tickets or expensive dinners out - is a
winning courtship strategy for both sexes.
Females can assess how serious or committed a male plans to be and males can
ensure they are not just seducing 'gold-diggers' - girls who take valuable
presents with no intention of accepting subsequent dates.
Sozou came about the idea after reading about a man in his local newspaper.
The man had been paying the rent of a woman he considered was his
girlfriend - he was giving her a valuable gift. But she had been heartlessly
manipulating him, dating another man on the sly while accepting money from
her unwitting sugar daddy.
"It spurred me onto thinking that if he had just been buying her expensive
dinners, and not paying her rent, she wouldn't have strung him along so
much," says Sozou.
Dating and mating
So he and Seymour built a model based on a series of dating decisions. In
the model males had to decide what kind of gift to offer females - valuable,
extravagant or cheap - based on how attractive he finds her. The females had
to either accept or decline the gift and then decide whether to mate with
the gift-giver - a decision also weighted on the 'attractiveness' of their
prospective partner.
When they measured the different outcomes of all the steps, they found the
best solution for the males was to give extravagant, but intrinsically
value-free gifts the vast majority of the time, while giving gifts of
material value very occasionally.
The model showed that if males gave valuable gifts too often, the females
would start to exploit them: the males have no clue as to the females' real
intentions in the model. Put simply, the females just take the diamonds and
run. But when the gifts are worthless, an uninterested female has little
incentive to accept, gaining no return on what could be just turn into the
simple waste of an evening. Only girls who are serious would bother to go
the distance.
Worthless balls
Sozou and Seymour believe their conclusions about people find support in the
actions of animals, such as the dance fly. Males of this species give
worthless cotton balls to entice partners into mating - and they work -
although other scientists interpret this as male trickery.
Alison Lenton, a social psychologist at the University of Edinburgh, UK,
questions some of the model's assumptions, however. For example, one
assumption is that females obtain a negative outcome for accepting an
unattractive, though committed, male. Women have been shown to prioritise
traits associated with good parental care above physical attractiveness, she
says.
The model also fails to take the potential effects of cheating females into
account. "Some female birds raise their chicks with a 'nice' male and engage
in short-term copulations with an attractive male - there is similar
evidence among humans. In this way, females may get the best of both
worlds."
And what is more, says Lenton, psychologists have found that experiential
purchases - like theatre tickets - make people more happy in the long run
that material purchases. "I do not necessarily agree that theatre tickets
are 'worthless'," she says.
Journal reference: Proceedings of the Royal Society B (DOI:
10.1098/rspb.2005.3152)