Researchers examined 37 different cultures and found that heterosexual men and women have very different preferences when it comes to sexual partners. Daniel Conroy-Beam from the University of Texas at Austin, along with his colleagues, discovered that if they knew someone's preference regarding sexual partners, they could guess the person's sex with 92 percent accuracy, according to PsyPost.
"Our new appraisal of sex differences in terms of the overall pattern of mate preferences shows that this important domain of life is dramatically different for the sexes - much more than researchers have thus far appreciated," the researchers wrote in their study.
Evolution played a large role in how men and women pick a mate. It basically comes down to: Women get pregnant and men do not.
"Consequently, in long-term mating, women more severely faced the adaptive problem of acquiring resources to produce and support offspring. Women are therefore predicted to greater prefer long-term, committed mates who possess resources and qualities linked to resource acquisition such as status, ambition, and slightly older age," the researchers wrote.
The process is slightly more complex, though, as humans evaluate others on a host of traits. According to study authors: "For example, men, more than women, prefer their partners to be physically attractive, but they must also be kind, educated, and share their political values; women, more than men, desire partners with good financial prospects, but they must also be ambitious, emotionally stable, and share their religious views. Importantly, mates do not come a la carte but prix fixe: Each potential mate has a set of features that must be accepted or rejected wholesale."
"A large body of research demonstrates that mate preferences are universally sex differentiated along individual dimensions, but our multivariate analyses show that these individual dimensions contribute to a much larger (and underappreciated) sexual dimorphism in the overall pattern of preferences. This pattern-wise sex difference is large, cross-culturally robust, and driven primarily by those dimensions predicted to be sex differentiated by prior evolutionary hypotheses," Conroy-Beam and his colleagues concluded.
