Men, women and Darwin gives a quick intro to evolutionary psychology:
Three years ago, Robert Kurzban spotted an advertisement for a service called HurryDate, offering an evening of three-minute meetings with 25 potential dates.Kurzban was intrigued — but not because he was looking for romance. As an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, he thought speed dating could afford him a rare chance to study how people behave in real dating situations.
With the agreement of the company, Kurzban and a colleague surveyed the HurryDaters about a range of topics including religious background and their desire for children. Their fundamental questions: Did participants select the people most like themselves? Or did most of them prize similar traits — such as appearance or high income — and try to get the best deal they could in the mating market?
What the researchers discovered was that men and women chose their dates on the basis of ‘generally agreed upon mate values,’ the mating market hypothesis. Another finding: Both sexes relied mainly on physical attractiveness, largely disregarding factors such as income and social status.
‘HurryDate participants are given three minutes in which to make their judgments,’ the psychologists wrote in a paper published in the May issue of the science journal Evolution and Human Behavior, ‘but they mostly could be made in three seconds.’