Footnote step 1 Most professionals was in fact heterosexual (85%) Footnote 2 and you may half of (50%) have been during the a committed dating

Approach

Just how do anyone create behavior throughout the which so you can partners having when he is exposed to ugly mating candidates? Within study, i look at the just how – when actual destination is absent – participant’s sex and you will dealbreaker/dealmaker recommendations influence the latest desirability studies off a lot of time-term and brief-identity friends. I anticipate (H1) boys (than the female) to get even unsightly targets more appealing from the short-identity framework (particularly when combined with specific advantmany yearsous information) and you can (H2) female in order to maintain low levels interesting to your unattractive needs regardless of out of mating framework otherwise pointers considering. We also assume one (H3), total, people might be less interested than males during the possible friends which is below average in actual elegance. As well, we predict one to (H4) reading undesirable factual statements about unappealing purpose should make aim reduced fashionable than just reading advantageous pointers (Jonason et al. 2015, 2020a, b).

Participants and functions

Participants were 186 undergraduate students (48 men) aged 18 to 59 (M = , SD = 7.26) from a public university in Australia who received course credit for completing an online survey on “individual differences in relationship ple size (N_one?tailed ? 150) to detect the effect size of change in interest (our focal variable) in response to learning “dealbreakers” and “dealmakers” (Cohen’s d ? 0.40; Jonason et al. 2020a, b). Footnote 3 On behalf of all authors, the corresponding author states that there is no conflict of interest.

Participants were informed of the details of the study and provided tick-box consent. They were randomly assigned to either a dealbreaker (n = 95; e.g., “This person gets angry easily.”, “This person has a sexually transmitted infection.”) or dealmaker (n = 91; e.g., “This person is successful at work.”, “This person is kind to strangers.”) condition where characteristics for both classes of information (for the full list see Jonason et al. 2020b, Appendix A) were presented in randomized fashion in an ultra-brief vignette fashion (i.e., a single sentence) and paired with eight pictures (randomized for order and pairing so that a different characteristic from the assigned condition was randomly paired with one of each of the eight pictures presented) of men or women (matched for sexual orientation) from the Chicago Face Database (Ma et al. 2015). Participants were given instructions (i.e., “You will now be presented with pictures of different people. Below each picture, you will see a statement describing the person in the picture. Please note that the statement below each picture applies to the person in the picture.”) and then shown one picture of a target paired with one characteristic at a time. Participants were asked to rate the desirability (1 = not at all; 5 = extremely) of the targets for a “long-term (romantic)” and “short-term (casual sex)” relationship, as well as how physically attractive (1 = far below average; 7 = far above average) the target was as a check on our stimuli and selection process. Footnote 4 The pictures we used were of men (M_age = , SD_age = 5.89, Range_age = to ) and women (M_age = , SD_age = 5.02, Range_age = to ) who appeared to have Caucasian ethnicity (to control for self- vs. other-race effects; Rhodes et al. 2005; van den Berghe and Frost 1986), who had a neutral facial expression (to control for effects of affect; Mehu et al. 2008; Morrison et al. 2013; Penton-Voak and Chang 2008), and who were pre-rated for attractiveness (1 = not at all; 7 = extremely) by independent judges from the database to be between 3 and 4 (M = 3.32, SD = 0.20, Range = 3.03 to 3.69; any lower was considered unrealistically unattractive). We found considerable agreement among our participants across the eight photos (Cronbach’s ? = 0.92) and confirmed that these targets were rated on average (M = 2.65, SD = 1.05) below the scale’s midpoint (t = -, p