Dating Instincts

I thought the presentation during Wednesday’s class on mate copying was very interesting as a whole. There were a couple of aspects of the presentation that stuck out to me though. One aspect that I found to be particularly surprising was how consistent the results were across all demographics and cultures. Before Sklyer revealed the different results for when people in different countries were used for the research, the class was split on what kind of effect it would have on the data. Some members of the class thought that there would be a large effect while others thought there would be only a small effect. To the surprise of almost everyone however, the results were almost exactly the same (Sklyer actually mentioned his supervisor thought the Chinese may have tampered with the data because the results were so similar). I think most people thought the culture and language differences would have an affect on how well people predicted if someone was interested in their date. This was not the case at all though. No matter what nationality was tested, they were equally as good or bad at predicting the interest of the people on a date and showed the same mate copying behavior. The same similarities were found when people of different age groups were tested; the age of the people in the dating video and the age of the people being tested had no effect at all on the results.

The fact that all the results were so similar shows that mate copying and predicting the outcome of a date are very much a product of human instinct. The lack of differences between age groups and cultures makes it clear that many of the judgments made by people regarding dating and attraction are consistent throughout the entire population. It is also interesting to note that humans exhibit almost the exact same behavior as animals when it comes to mate copying. All this makes me think that much of what happens in the dating world is animalistic in nature. As much as some people like to think that they can read people’s interest very well, nature presides over the process more than most people would like to admit. For example, someone might deny mate copying when in reality it is almost impossible to avoid because it is human instinct.