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Human mate-choice copying is domain-general social learning

Street, Sally E.; Morgan, Thomas J.H.; Thornton, Alex; Brown, Gillian R.; Laland, Kevin N.; Cross, Catharine P.

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Authors

Thomas J.H. Morgan

Alex Thornton

Gillian R. Brown

Kevin N. Laland

Catharine P. Cross



Abstract

Women appear to copy other women’s preferences for men’s faces. This ‘mate-choice copying’ is often taken as evidence of psychological adaptations for processing social information related to mate choice, for which facial information is assumed to be particularly salient. No experiment, however, has directly investigated whether women preferentially copy each other’s face preferences more than other preferences. Further, because prior experimental studies used artificial social information, the effect of real social information on attractiveness preferences is unknown. We collected attractiveness ratings of pictures of men’s faces, men’s hands, and abstract art given by heterosexual women, before and after they saw genuine social information gathered in real time from their peers. Ratings of faces were influenced by social information, but no more or less than were images of hands and abstract art. Our results suggest that evidence for domain-specific social learning mechanisms in humans is weaker than previously suggested.

Citation

Street, S. E., Morgan, T. J., Thornton, A., Brown, G. R., Laland, K. N., & Cross, C. P. (2018). Human mate-choice copying is domain-general social learning. Scientific Reports, 8(1), Article 1715. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-19770-8

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Jan 9, 2018
Online Publication Date Jan 29, 2018
Publication Date Jan 29, 2018
Deposit Date Jan 29, 2018
Publicly Available Date Jan 30, 2018
Journal Scientific Reports
Publisher Nature Research
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 8
Issue 1
Article Number 1715
DOI https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-19770-8

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http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.





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