Research by Skylar Place, Peter Todd, Lars Penke, and Jens Asendorpf finds that humans show mate copying when selecting their mates. This means a human is more likely to be attracted to a mate that they perceive is gaining the interest of another person. In terms of dating, this means I would be more interested in a woman if I perceived that another man was also interested in her.
When one first thinks of the reason this may occur, several possibilities come to mind. We may subconsciously seek the approval of others in our mate choices. We may perceive another's interest in our "target" (what we'll call our potential mate of interest) as some kind of signal that they are suitable. It may be a subconscious effort to save the time required to find out more about that person. Possibly this mate copying is a result of some competitive instinct.
The research of Skylar Place, et al, does not give us a definite answer to that question. However, by studying subjects' reactions to recordings of speed dating, they seemed to have eliminated the competitive instinct theory. In effect, doing the study this way removed a lot of outside factors that may have been encountered in "the wild," or a bar or party. By studying the subjects individually the existence of peer influence is basically impossible. The people being studied were making decisions on their own and not even in the same room, or at the same time, as the daters they were watching.
Results showed that a subject's rating of how interested they were in a target increased if they believed that the target's date was interested in them. This was clear proof that mate copying exists among humans. At first glance these results may not seem that obvious because we have so much else in mind when we think about what we're attracted to. But the way this study was done eliminated a lot of those factors and shows that our perception of another's interest in a target significantly impacts our level of interest in them.
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