After Parker J and Burkley M: “Who is chasing whom? The impact of gender and relationship status on mate poaching”, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, May 2009)
Single women often complain that ‘all good men are taken’. Now, recent experimental evidence suggests that the logic seems to go the other way: single women think that ‘taken’ means ‘good’. When single women were asked to evaluate their likelihood to pursue a certain man, based on a brief description of him, the same description was evaluated as ‘more pursuable’ when it included the information that the man was attached. In the symmetric experiment, men did not find attached women more pursuable. Also, women in committed relationships did not react positively to the information that the man was attached.
Oups. Single women like to poach attached men? Ladies, what happened. A variety of reasons may be behind the above finding. One, ‘taken’ signals ‘good’, as in, another sista evaluated him already and he passed. The authors of this comment seem to think so. Two, the single ladies in the study were not really ready to commit (that is why they are single) and therefore unconsciously looked for someone unavailable too. It is quite possible that the ladies in the study were indeed special and not very representative, because the overall sample did not pass 150 – this is extremely low; a no-go for empirical economists usually.
Dr de Bergerac actually favors the second reason. A number one rule of dating is therefore: examine yourself if you are truly ready. Ready for dating, ready for commitment, ready to face approval, and ready to face rejection. If you are not truly ready for any of these, maybe because of past hurts that need healing, then don’t date yet.
Dear Dr de Bergerac,
I respectfully disagree with your interpretation of the study. I concede that this study is indeed strange – I think they may have have been trying to evaluate theoretical desirability and not the willingness of women to actively poach.
Desirability of men rises when they have the following attributes (in my opinion):
– willingness to commit
– ability to feed a family (old-fashioned attitude, yes, but very common thought)
– ability to maintain a relationship
All of these qualities are ‘signaled’ by a man being in an existing relationship which implies that these qualities were tested by another woman.
Therefore, in my humble opinion reason 1 you cite is more likely to be the correct interpretation of the study.
Yours,
Bettina