
Are Women More Selective at Dating? - fogus
http://www.livescience.com/culture/090929-women-dating.html
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cousin_it
This was covered at LessWrong and the headline turned out to be false.

[http://lesswrong.com/lw/127/an_interesting_speed_dating_stud...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/127/an_interesting_speed_dating_study/)

See this comment from ciphergoth:

 _It doesn't result in a reversal of the normal results, exactly. Male sitters
appear to be about as selective as female sitters, but male rotaters are much
less selective than female rotaters._

And this comment from me in response:

 _Wow, this stuff is pretty awful. I just read the paper to verify your claim,
and the paper turned out to be not any better than the NYT article: mostly
composed of PC fluff about "social construction" and how "Western
civilization" is this and that. The only informative part is the figure on the
last page of the PDF (buried after the references, no less!) which confirms
your conclusion completely, but the text doesn't even hint at it anywhere._

PDF link to the study: [http://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/eli-
finkel/documents/Ro...](http://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/eli-
finkel/documents/RotationMS_FINAL.pdf) .

------
nopassrecover
Intuitively the cost to a guy in pre-societal times of getting a girl pregnant
was negligible compared to the cost of a girl getting pregnant and as such
women should be more selective.

The effect that societal influence may have had on this (the guy gets a bad
reputation hurting his future chances at offspring) is something to consider
but I'd doubt it's anywhere close.

Having said all that, the article does try to dispell all this by reasoning
that the partner "being approached" is more selective, and that societal
conditioning has led to this being the woman.

I would counter that when someone approaches in a dating scene (as in the
study) they are immediately demonstrating lower value ("I have come to prove
myself"). The person sitting has also established this little space as their
domain, and gets to assess the value of the person coming to them. This allows
for the results of the study, but also explains, in conjunction with the first
theory above, why on average, even during the study, women are more selective.

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yannis
Well ... I was never ...rotated at a speed dating event, but yes women are
more selective. This has roots in evolution. When I choose the wrong girl my
mistake might cause me losing some time. When a woman chooses the wrong man,
she might be left holding the baby for years.

~~~
tpyo
That contradicts this evidence. Men sitting were as selective as woman
sitting.

