'Worthless' gifts get the good girls
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'Worthless' gifts get the good girls
13:21 27 July 2005
NewScientist.com news service
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 than 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)
One in 25 men might be raising another’s child
high rate of infidelity fueling rise in paternal discrepancy, researchers say.
updated: 7:32 p.m. et aug. 10, 2005
london - one in 25 fathers could unknowingly be raising another man’s child, british scientists said on thursday.
researchers at liverpool’s john moores university examined the findings of dozens of studies, published over the past 54 years, on cases of paternal discrepancy — where a man is proved not to be the biological father of his child.
the studies, most of them peer reviewed, came from countries as varied as the united states, finland, new zealand, south africa and mexico.
the findings of the studies varied dramatically — some concluded that only one man in 100 is not the father of his child while others put the figure as high as 30 percent.
the liverpool researchers calculated the median figure at around 4 percent, suggesting that as many as one in 25 men worldwide is not the biological father of a child he believes to be his.
“the importance lies not so much in the figure itself but in the implications, given that as a society we are increasingly making our decisions on the basis of genetics,” said one of the researchers, professor mark bellis.
“if, for example, someone knows that their father had a history of hereditary heart disease, they might be tempted to alter their own diet,” he told reuters.
“obviously they need to be making that decision on the basis of accurate information about who their father really is.”
bellis said that while mix-ups of semen during artificial insemination accounted for some cases of paternal discrepancy, the majority were due to a woman having sexual relationships outside marriage.
he said in britain, 20 percent of women in marriages or long-term relationships have had affairs, adding that the figures for other developed countries was similar.
around a third of pregnancies in britain are unplanned, increasing the risk of paternal discrepancy.
writing in the british medical association’s journal of epidemiology and community health, the scientists called for further research in the area.
“(we) cannot simply ignore this difficult issue,” they said.
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