psychology' Ourfirst

This column provides an insight into the views of the people behind the books and the
interview is with Robin Dunbar, one of the most respected of current evolutionary psychologists.

Evolutionary reasons for

choosing a mate
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obin Dunbar is Professor of Psychology
at the University of Liverpool. He is
currently involved in a variety of different
research projects, including the Lucy-to-
Language project which is investigating
how the early human brain evolved. A-level
students will know Robin best for his
research using lonely hearts advertisements
to investigate what tralts men and women
advertise and seek in prospective partners.
Many students base their coursework on
this research and, as Robin ruefully
comments, 'lf I charged a fee for it, I would
be incredibly rich!'
ln a nutshell, what do the lonely hearts
ads studies show?
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RD Lonely hearts ads provide us with
vignette of what their advertisers are
looking for in a prospective mate. ln effect,
they are the opening bid in the complex
game of poker that we usually call the
'mating game'. lt is the bid that we make
when we have a general idea of what the
punters out there might be expecting from
us and have in their turn to offer us, but
when we do not yet know the specifics of
the individuals.
Courtship has been described as
with several decision
process of negotiation
points, where we pause and ask ourselves
whether we want to allow the relationship
to develop to the next level of intimacy. ln
a effect, lonely hearts ads give us the indi-
vidual advertiser's opening bid before they
have been forced to compromise on their
ideals, after finding out who really is out
there in the market.
Why do you think this research appeals
so much to students?
RD Relationships are the beginning and the
end of social life: they are what makes the
world go round - or at least the social
world which is really where we spend most
a of our time. I think we just have a deep
fascination with trying to figure out what
the rules of the game are. We are intrigued
by what makes other people tick. That is
why three-quarters of all the books sold

mS Ao-A A) PsychologY Review


each year are fiction - stories largely about
relationships between people - and most
ofthe other quarter are biographies - just
the real-life equivalent.
What would you identify as the major
limitation of this research?
RD The limitations arisefromthe questions
you want to ask. We cannot, for example,
say anything about success rates for
different kinds of ads because we do not
see the replies - never mind the happy
outcomes! Nor do they tell us about the
compromises that we all inevitably make as
we work through the long process of finally
choosing a partner. They are fine for what
they are: a glimpse of our ideals at the start
of the courtship Process.
Some people have suggested that these
kinds of ads are confou nded by the fact that
what people say about themselves is mostly
purpose they do want to find a partner.
- men they want to meet. You have to see
This is not to say that they do not twist the
truth a little to make their case better than
it is, but part of the problem here lies with
people reading into ads what they would
like to see in them. Our analyses suggest
that, in general, people know what works,
and the risk of being shown up keeps us
more or less in line - or at least as in line as
we would normally be in face-to-face
contexts.
, Some more recent research, again using
lonely hearts ads, has found that men now
advertise'caringness' rather than resources.
How can you explain this in evolutionary
terms?
RD The mating game is very dynamic;
changes constantly in response to
current social and economic environment' lf
you look at ads in less economically devel-
tend to emphasise wealth and status in the
that in the context of family wealth (mainly
earned by men) having a huge impact on
children's survival. ln modern Europe, that
burden of child rearing has been lifted by a
combination of the facts that we are all
much more wealthy as individuals and that
better healthcare has reduced infant
mortality.
With those worries removed, you would
expect women to shift their concerns to
other areas like the purely social aspects of
the family (men's ability to help build the
relationship and their willingness to help
with childcare and socialisation), since these
it are now the areas that will have greatest
the impact on their ability to rear offspring
successfully. And that is basically what we
see.

untrue. But in fact the evidence suggests oped countries, or ads from Victorian :. i As our social world changes, are there
that, so long as you read the signals right, England (yes, they were going in great- other selection traits that might be
grandma's time too!), you find that women predicted by evolutionarY theorY?
most advertisers are there for the same
RD lt is important to understand that the
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6', into pubs, clubs anol cosY cvcnings in sccks Malc evolutionary perspective is not a different
caring, rclationship. @ stsszo. kind of psychological theory from those that
for honcst
already exist. Rather, it is a meta-theory that
i. stuart profcssional guy,30, n/s, Iikcs sport, socialising and cinema NLTM sliu,
'; trrractvc allows us to bring all the other existing
femalc for fun, fricndship and uaybc morc' @ 7t+tto' approaches underthe same roof. lt is not an
50, hsol+, casY-going' cdring' no fics' sccks
',, hoool'looking, tall, Professional aalc, alternative. What it does is identify the
:aftrdctivc,happy,aolvcnfurousfcaalc30-lStosharclifc'sbiga^{venturc.@zgc+s'l' criteria that underpin our decisions in the
fun ualc, long run. From an evolutionary point of
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r view, that can only ever be one thing:

2s-3s, for rclationship. (O 167ss3.
leaving as many copies of your genes in
future generations as You can.
The opening bid in the mating game

September 2005 R?

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From an evolutionary point of view, this
is not as straightforward as we might
suppose. There is a well established
phenomenon (originally based on studies of
birds) called Lack's LaW which states that
you do not maximise the number of grand-
children you have if you spread yourself too
thinly by pumping out as many babies as
you can. Having fewer babies may be evolu-
tionarily more profitable. The reason this is
important here is that it reminds us that
evolution (and indeed, everything in
biology) is context dependent. What is the
best thing to do depends on the balance of
costs and benefits of a given situation, and
the situation changes constantly. There is
no 'best thlng'in evolution, only the best of
a bad job. Like Alice in Wonderland, we are
constantly running just to stay in the game.
Equally, there is no such thing as
progress in evolution: chance and circum-
stance play an important role. So it becomes
impossible to predict where evolution
might take us until we are right on the spot
itself. We can look back and see how we
came to be where we are (what philoso-
phers have called 'postdiction'as opposed
to 'prediction'), but we can never say for
sure where things will go in the future.
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Evolutionary explanations have been
criticised for being gender-biased (as an
explanation that exaggerates the differ-
ences between men and women). Do you
think this is a fair criticism?
RD Criticisms of this kind are invariably
made by people who do not really under-
stand evolutionary theory and its applica-
tion. ln reality, core theory in biology hands
the principal control of life to the females
(which in mammals like ourselves, happens
to be the sex that has the XX sex chromo-
somes - though in some groups, like birds,
the females are the ones with the XY chro-
mosomes). That is why biologists some-
times speak of the'redundant males'.
Such explanations are also criticised for
being determinist. Are they?
Rm This is a common misunderstanding.
The evolutionary approach is not about the
genetic determination of behaviour - not
least because nothing in real life is geneti-
cally determined in this simple minded way.
Rather, the evolutionary approach is about
strategic decision-making - the extent to
which issues of maximising fitness (how
many copies of our genes we leave behind
us when we die) guide our choices in life.
But that said, one of the big innovations in
animal evolution was the development of a
large brain, because big brains allowyou to
respond more flexibly to circumstances and
so remain in the game of Iife for longer. Our
large brains give us the option of bailing out
of the evolutionary game if we choose to do
and you can choose what to do. You cannot
duck the evolutionary consequences ofyour
behaviour, but you can choose to ignore
them.
Finally, if you were going to advertise
yoursell what would you write to guar-
antee success?
RP Women make much more complex
decisions about choosing partners than
men do, so in some ways men are lucky.
That means we have more dimensions to
play with. Wealth and status (two sides of
the same coin, really) still carry a surprising
amount of weight; social skills are certainly
increasingly important (that is what the
term CSOH - good sense of humour -
tries to signal); but, surprisingly, so are
things like being tall. I would like to go for
the last, but I am not sure that I would
compete with the younger generation, who
have been growing taller by the decade. And
I am not rich or a pop star. So it is going to
have to be a sense of humour, lthink.
Cara Flanagan has written many books for
A-level students, including Nelson Thornes'
Psychology Complete Compa nicn series for
AO_A (A) AS and 42 exams with Mike Cardwell.
Her series of books on research methods for
Ao_A (A), Edexcel and oCR werepublished by
NelsonThornes in May, July and September
2005.
One-line theorler
AS
le,2a,3c,4d,5b
A2
tc, 2d, 3f , 4e, 5b, 6a, 7 h, 8g
lUame that face
I Sigmund Freud
2 pnrnpZimbardo
3 Stantey Milgfam (r,icK,oillstanreyMirsian)
d lvan Pavlov
$ Anna Freud
$ Atan Baddeley (AranBadderey)