Research Of The Influences Of Social Status On Male's Mate Criteria

Social rank is the common characteristic of all societies. The resources that an individual possessed are closely related to his social status. In order to cope with a series of adaptive problems in the long evolutionary history, human has evolved a corresponding mental mechanism-status striving module.Social status influences men's reproducing success significantly. It means, promoting social status can increase a male's opportunities of mating access greatly, or vice versa. Mate selection is an important step of reproducing success. We assume: For the sake of mating success, males have evolved a mental mechanism-adjusting mate-selection criteria to their own social status.We research the influences of social status on male's mate criteria, so as to demonstrate the existence of the fore mentioned mechanism, using both methods of experimentation and investigation.First, we make an open survey and interview before the formal research, in order to clarify the key concepts and collect materials for the experimentation and investigation. We extract three predicting indexes of social status from the results of open survey and interview, and use them as the research's main variables.Experimentation tests the corresponding relation of social status and male's mate-selection criteria, in the view of social cognition. Investigation explores the similarities and differences of men's (with different social status) mate-selection criteria, using Male's Mating Preferences Inventory that we revised.Our findings as follows:First, in the view of social cognition, a male's mate-selection criteria are corresponding to his social status, though this corresponding relation is not so exact. People's cognition of correspondence of a male's mate-selection criteria to his social status is not reversible, and people's cognitive reasoning of social status according to mate-selection criteria is better than that of mate-selection criteria according to social status.Second, males have evolved a mental mechanism which adjusts mate-selection criteria to their own social status: the higher a male's social status, the stronger his preferences for the scarce and precious reproducing resources, such as a female's appearance and self-cultivation, and vice versa. Males with different social status prefer to the plentiful and important reproducing resources strongly, such as a female's personality and virtues. Males hardly prefer to the less important reproducing resources, such as a female's social status, and there is no significant difference between different men.