New research reveals ovulation may cause women to think attractive but unreliable men will make good fathers and life partners.
Published in the the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 33 female participants, at both the high and low points of their fertility cycle, were randomly assigned to view pictures or biological profiles of either a “sexy man” or a “reliable man.”
Researchers asked these women to imagine how much each man would contribute to parenting responsibilities.
The results concluded ovulating women viewed the sexy man as a better future father.
The women then interacted with male actors who played the role of the “sexy man” or the “reliable man” and rated which man would be a good provider for their children and for someone else’s children.
Researchers found ovulating women thought the sexy man would be a good provider for their children but not for someone else’s children.
The last part of the study involved two men falsely identified as identical twins taking on the role of the sexy or reliable man.
Once more, ovulating women said the sexy man would be a better dad.
The study ultimately concludes female biology convinces women that attractive but unreliable men are more likely to commit in order to increase their chances of producing offspring with their genetic benefits.
This article originally appeared at DatingAdvice.com
Photo by Daily Sunny.
There really isn’t anything new about this research. As much as men and women deny natural attraction instincts in hopes that they won’t be judged by society as shallow, it’s how we’re programmed.
“Researchers found ovulating women thought the sexy man would be a good provider for their children but not for someone else’s children.”
I just can’t help giggling a little at this. Of course they did. 😉
O.K., this article helps me to be a better man how?
I was going to comment, “so women can now use their hormones as another get-out-of-jail-free card for perving at hunky guys, while continuing to blast men for perving at sexy women”. But judging by the other comments here maybe that’s a bit uncharitable.
It isn’t a huge problem one way or another as long as you brush up on your game.
I Agree with Daniel.
How is this “news”? Haven’t we heard this quite a lot of times already?
We have, but since this site is read by a lot of people that view all attraction mechanisms as entirely socially constructed. They need to read stuff like this.
Here you can read a lot of full research papers on related quesitions that taken as a whole paint a fuller picture and also demonstrates that there is far more complexity in how evolotionary psychologists view these things. Though not a kind of complexity that would help a blank slate view:
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/comm/haselton/papers/
How do researchers decide what is empirically “sexy” or even “reliable”? This study sounds like a waste of time.
tThis information is old news. Call me sexist or whatever but its been proven hundreds times that women seek stronger men and such when ovulating. This particular study proving it is admittedly poop, but there are far better ones that prove the same result. Im done.. look into evo – psychology
Ha! ovulation certainly makes me horny. Duno about this father test. But i tend to sleep with guys quickly during it.
Enough with this. 33 women is a TINY pool, not enough people to conclude anything, let alone that women are at the mercy of hormones, and can’t be trusted to use logic or reason. Enough.
Agreed, I want a p-value, effect size and some kind of test of normality.
Hear hear! Publications pick up on these studies because they make sexy headlines, but that’s why media pros are media pros and not scientists – they don’t understand scientific method or rigor. Or maybe they do, and intentionally disregard it for that sexy headline.
There have been done countless studies on related matters with larger sample sizes adding up to a huge total. The fact that womens mate choice varies widely between “sexier” high testosterone dominant alpha males arround ovulation times and lower testosterone, safer, less dominant, sensitive, supportive, beta provider males the less fertile times of the month. This specific study only looked at the rationalization that the men they felt sexual desire for where better dads and so the small sample size only touches on this rationalization not the variance between ovulation times and the lover/provider, alpha/beta, high T/low T which, as… Read more »