MATING intelligence: the two words don’t seem to belong together. Surely our sexual urges are as instinctive as anything we feel? As for love, who could argue with Shakespeare’s descriptions of it as “a smoke raised with the fumes of sighs”, “a spirit all compact of fire”? Where’s the intelligence in any of that?
Yet “mating intelligence” is the buzz phrase among scientists trying to understand how we conduct our love lives. It makes sense if you consider that beyond the purple prose and blue movies lies a psychological minefield. Poets may wax lyrical, but anyone who has been in love knows that romantic relationships are full of rhetorical spin, misleading half-truths and barefaced lies. This is a game of manipulation, and the stakes are high. Each date is a crucial interview – the ultimate prize nothing less than the chance to form a fruitful lifelong partnership. No wonder we need our wits about us.
So how come love feels so decidedly irrational? Over the past decade psychologists have increasingly realised just how much of our mental lives goes on under the radar of consciousness – and mating behaviour is no exception. What they are finding is both paradoxical and shocking. It seems that, when it comes to love, men and women are designed to misconstrue, misread and misunderstand one another – and themselves. Look more closely at the unconscious workings of the mating mind, however, and you discover that in fact they make good sense. Being a deluded romantic is often the best way to make a good – biologically successful – choice about a potential partner on the basis of limited and imperfect information.
Advertisement
“Men and women are designed to misconstrue, misread and misunderstand one another”
Even before the first date, unconscious biases affect the way we play the mating game. Martie Haselton, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, has explored how these differ between men and women. Her research indicates that men typically overestimate the sexual interest conveyed by a woman’s smile or laughter. When men see someone of the opposite sex smile at them they tend to think “she must be interested”. Women simply see a smile. That’s not all. It turns out that the smarter a guy, the more likely he is to show this “she wants me” bias. Social psychologist Glenn Geher from the State University of New York at New Paltz, asked men how they thought women would respond to adverts in which other men offered no-strings-attached sex. He found that the higher their IQ, the more likely they were to think that women would be interested.
Men’s overestimation of women’s interest is matched by a subconscious bias among women to think that men are keener on casual sex than they actually are. In another study, Haselton asked groups of men and women for their views on how much various types of mating behaviour – such as a man buying expensive jewellery for a woman – signalled potential long-term interest or commitment from the suitor. Women were generally more sceptical than men about the meaning of such extravagant gift-giving. Women, it seems, are inclined to see men as manipulative.
Error management
Clearly, these biases could easily lead to mistakes. Nevertheless, Haselton believes that they have been shaped by aeons of natural selection to guide mating behaviour effectively. She argues, along with David Buss from the University of Texas, Austin, that the biases are error-management strategies that have evolved to reduce the odds of making the worst kinds of mistakes.
Errors of judgement come in two broad types: false positives, when we think we see something that is not there, and false negatives, when we fail to see what is there. “You cannot simultaneously minimise the risk of both of those errors, so it makes sense for systems to be biased toward the less costly error,” says Haselton. Smoke alarms, for example, tend to be oversensitive because a false alarm every now and then is far less damaging than no alarm if there really is a fire. In humans, the facts of our biology suggest that men and women should adopt different approaches.
A man’s “she wants me” bias may lead to an embarrassing moment if it turns out that a woman is not as keen as he thought. That is no fun, but it is not particularly damaging. “Ancestrally, the less costly error would be a false positive,” says Haselton. “A false negative – missing the woman’s true interest – would have resulted in missed reproductive opportunities.” Errors don’t come much more costly than that in the Darwinian economy.
Women’s “men are manipulative” bias reflects the fact that they face a different problem. Because they make a greater investment in reproduction – through gestation, lactation and, often, parenting – they want to be sure that any potential father of their children is truly committed to the relationship. So for women to err on the side of caution means to minimise the chances of a false positive, of getting together with a cad. What’s more, it seems to make no difference whether a woman is looking for a short or long-term relationship: Geher has found that women tend to choose the same sorts of men in both circumstances. He showed some women a selection of personal ads written by men and asked them to choose the most appealing ones. “Women, when they’re looking for someone just for a casual sexual encounter, tend to pick men that look like good long-term mates – not someone who is emphasising sexuality or physical stuff, but someone who says he is wealthy and generous and kind,” says Geher.
That’s not the only difference between men and women. Work by Maureen O’Sullivan, a psychologist at the University of San Francisco, reveals that they also tell different sorts of lies to potential romantic partners. Everyone knows that people lie to one another in the sexual arena, so she got undergraduates to rate how likely they thought men and women were to tell certain sorts of lies. On the whole, their answers matched predictions based on evolutionary theory (see Diagram). Women were thought more likely to lie about things like the use of birth control, their virginity and how impressed they are with their partner’s sexual performance. Men were seen as more likely to lie about their future commitment, whether they are really in love, and about how much money they make.
Self-delusion
Such lies make sense when you consider humans as animals evolved and adapted for reproductive success. Viewed this way, the most desirable female qualities are fertility and fidelity, whereas for males biological fitness is linked to resources and commitment. So a woman who convinces a man of her chaste past will be seen as a better potential wife than someone who likes to sleep around. Likewise, men who give the impression of being wealthier or more interested in a long-term relationship are more attractive suitors. However, Sullivan’s study made an additional and more surprising discovery. While everyone admitted that people lie to potential partners, when individuals were asked about how much they themselves lie, they rated their own honesty as greater than that of other members of their own sex. Women were particularly prone to this flattering self-delusion, which O’Sullivan suspects may play an increasingly important role in mating intelligence in the modern world (see “A culture of romance”).
If the process of finding a partner is rife with misinterpretation, lies and self-deception, perhaps the grandest delusion of all is the feeling of actually being in love. “Falling in love involves a delusion that a given person is the ideal partner for you,” says David Smith, a philosopher at the University of New England in Biddeford, Maine. He quotes a line from George Bernard Shaw to make his point: “Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.” The idea that your sweetheart is your soulmate or one true love is unlikely on statistical grounds alone: out of a planet of billions we meet a few hundred or thousand potential partners at most. So why do we kid ourselves?
“If we were rational beings and were looking for the best possible mate, we’d never stop – there are far too many people for us to assess,” says Smith. “So we have to have some sort of mechanism that puts an end to the search, at least temporarily.” Falling head-over-heels in love is one solution to the problem of mate choice.
Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, points out that while nobody knows exactly what triggers passionate romantic love, we seem to fall in love with people with similar ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds, education and intelligence, religious values and attractiveness. She suspects that from childhood onwards, our experience of the world provides a sort of template for the kind of person we think we are suited to – what Fisher calls a “love map”. “Then when you’re looking around and find someone who fits within your love map, you are primed to fall in love,” she says. That’s when the real delusion sets in. The dopamine pathways in the brain that are stimulated by feelings of romantic love are associated with intense focus. “As a result, although we can list what we don’t like about our sweetheart, we sweep these facts aside and focus on what we adore.” Fisher has also found that the amygdala, the part of the brain associated with fear and anger, is less active in people who are in love.
These changes in the brain might help explain why Faby Gagné from Wellesley College, Massachusetts, found that 95 per cent of people she asked believed that their partner was above average in appearance, intelligence, warmth and sense of humour. Geher, meanwhile has asked people to complete questionnaires about their current and previous partners. “In general people tend to paint their current partner as a ‘winner’ – open-minded, outgoing and confident – and their former partners as losers – closed-minded, emotionally unstable and disagreeable,” says Geher. “These findings have to represent distorted perceptions. It can’t be the case that the 300 people we studied all happened to now be with ideal mating prospects, while all their 300 prior partners were duds.”
“I think,” says Fisher, “we have evidence for what Chaucer said: ‘Love is blind’.”
Lovers may be deluded, but again this love-blindness is not a design defect. Geher has found that people who are most prone to viewing past partners in an unfavourable light also seem to be happiest in their current relationships. And Gagné found that the tendency to eulogise the qualities of our loved ones increases at crunch times in our relationships such as when deciding whether to have children. The course of love never runs smooth, so any sleight of mind that can help keep a couple together is potentially useful. “As kids come along there will be pressure to stay together ‘for the sake of the children’,” says Geher, “so adaptive self-deception can – and perhaps should – kick in.” It seems that the love delusion is evolution’s romantic glue.
Lifting the veil on our subconscious world might seem to rob love of its charm and mystery, but this need not be so. “The basic psychological processes of mating are so deep that there’s not much effect on relationships from understanding mating psychology,” says Geher. “Maybe I’m deceiving myself, but that’s how it feels to me!”
“People need to be aware of how many of their feelings about their situation come from their own construction of it,” says O’Sullivan. “This doesn’t mean I think we should do away with self-delusion completely, because it’s so much fun. You don’t want to see behind the curtain too much.”
Fisher is even more positive. “Those who maintain their self-deceptions about their partner report that they are more happily married,” she says. “In this case, self-deception is one of nature’s gifts.”
“Those who maintain their self-deceptions about their partner are more happily married”
A culture of romance
The rise and rise of romantic love
Romantic love has clear evolutionary roots but our views about what makes an ideal romantic relationship can be swayed by the society we live in. So says psychologist Maureen O’Sullivan from the University of San Francisco. She suggests that humans have always tried to strengthen the pair bond to maximise reproductive success, and that this has become increasingly important over human history. The result is a growing role for romance.
Pair pressure
As we started to live longer, we needed to devise new ways to keep couples together. Many societies throughout history and around the world today have cultivated strong pressures to stay married. In those where ties to family and community are strong, lifelong marriages can be promoted by practices such as the cultural prohibition of divorce and arranged marriages that are seen as a contract between two families, not just two individuals. In modern western societies, however, the focus on the individual and personal autonomy means that people are less concerned about conforming to the dictates of family and culture. In the absence of societal pressures to maintain pair bonds, O’Sullivan suggests that romantic love has increasingly come to be seen as the factor that should determine who we stay with and for how long. “That’s why historically we see an increase in romantic love as a basis for forming long-term relationships,” she says.
Culture goes further than just elevating the role of romantic love, though. According to O’Sullivan it also shapes the sorts of feelings we expect to have, and actually do experience, when in love. Although the negative emotions associated with romantic love – fear of loss, disappointment and jealousy – are fairly consistent across cultures, the positive feelings can vary. “If you ask Japanese students to list the positive attributes they expect in a romantic partner, they rate highly things like loyalty, commitment and devotion,” says O’Sullivan. “If you ask American college women they expect everything under the sun: in addition to being committed, partners have to be amusing, nurturing, funny and a friend. So the positive aspects of romantic love can change.”
O’Sullivan suspects that this goes some way to explain why self-deception is such a crucial element of mating intelligence. We judge a potential partner according to our specific cultural expectations about what romantic love should feel like. As the cultural tides ebb and flow and different notions of an ideal romantic partner wax and wane, self-deception enables us to convince ourselves that our chosen partner fits the bill. If you believe that you have found true romance, and your culture tells you that this is what a long-term relationship should be based on, there is less need to rely on social or family pressures to keep couples together, O’Sullivan argues.
