Open AccessJournal Article
Blatant Benevolence and Conspicuous Consumption: When Romantic Motives Elicit Strategic Costly Signals
TLDR
In this article, the authors examined the possibility that conspicuous displays of consumption and benevolence might serve as ''costly signals'' of desirable mate qualities, and found that romantic motives seem to produce highly strategic and sex-specific self-presentations best understood within a costly signaling framework.Abstract:
Conspicuous displays of consumption and benevolence might serve as \"costly signals\" of desirable mate qualities. If so, they should vary strategically with manipulations of mating-related motives. The authors examined this possibility in 4 experiments. Inducing mating goals in men increased their willingness to spend on conspicuous luxuries but not on basic necessities. In women, mating goals boosted public--but not private--helping. Although mating motivation did not generally inspire helping in men, it did induce more helpfulness in contexts in which they could display heroism or dominance. Conversely, although mating motivation did not lead women to conspicuously consume, it did lead women to spend more publicly on helpful causes. Overall, romantic motives seem to produce highly strategic and sex-specific self-presentations best understood within a costly signaling framework.read more
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Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder but rarely because of the beer
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examined beliefs and real-world responses pertaining to whether bar patrons' self-rated attractiveness would be higher later in the night, regardless of the amount of alcohol consumed.
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Mating and marketing
David M. Buss,Peter Robert Foley +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, a four-quadrant matrix is proposed for more gender-specific and mating strategy-specific marketing, including mate choice copying, error management, sexual over-perception bias, cues to sexual exploitation, good-dad mate preferences, temporal discounting, and the psychology of opportunity costs.
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Evolution and Consumer Psychology
TL;DR: The consumer realm offers a window into the authors' evolved human nature that provides consumer researchers important benefits including the ability to identify novel research questions, and greater interdisciplinarity, methodological pluralism, theoretical parsimony, and consilience.
Bling Bling, ∗ Human Capital, and Poverty †
Omer Moav,Zvika Neeman +1 more
TL;DR: This paper proposed a trade-off between conspicuous consumption and human capital as signals for unobserved income, under the assumption that individuals care about their status, which can explain the persistence of poverty.
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Does Mate Scarcity Affect Marital Choice and Family Formation? The Evidence for New and Classic Formulations of Sex Ratio Theory
TL;DR: Guttentag and Secord pioneered research on the social consequences of imbalances in the numbers of men and women as mentioned in this paper, and since then, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and even bi...
References
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Book
Belief, Attitude, Intention and Behavior: An Introduction to Theory and Research
Martin Fishbein,Icek Ajzen +1 more
Journal ArticleDOI
The Genetical Evolution of Social Behaviour. I
TL;DR: A genetical mathematical model is described which allows for interactions between relatives on one another's fitness and a quantity is found which incorporates the maximizing property of Darwinian fitness, named “inclusive fitness”.
Book
Handbook of social psychology
TL;DR: In this paper, Neuberg and Heine discuss the notion of belonging, acceptance, belonging, and belonging in the social world, and discuss the relationship between friendship, membership, status, power, and subordination.
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The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism
TL;DR: In this paper, a model is presented to account for the natural selection of what is termed reciprocally altruistic behavior, and the model shows how selection can operate against the cheater (non-reciprocator) in the system.