Marriage Markets (and Muscularity) On the "Institutionalized" Podcast
My recent discussion with Aaron Sibarium and Charles Fain Lehman
I recently appeared on the new “Institutionalized” Podcast hosted by Aaron Sibarium and Charles Fain Lehman.
In our wide-ranging conversation, I mentioned a study indicating that compared with men who have bachelor’s degrees, men with master’s degrees get about twice as many “likes” on Tinder.
Aaron (bright dude who I attended undergrad with) joked that he’d rather get jacked in the gym than pursue a “midwit” master’s degree. I replied that getting jacked would indeed be a better strategy to improve romantic prospects.
Muscularity is the strongest predictor of mating success for men.
A study on males aged 18 to 59 found that muscularity is significantly positively associated with the number of total sexual partners and partners in the last year.
Handgrip strength is correlated with self-assessed happiness, health, social confidence, overall physical attractiveness, and overall number of sexual partners.
Researchers recorded short videos of 157 different men. Next, they had a group of male viewers watch videos of the men and asked, “How likely is it that this man would win a physical fight with another man?” Then the researchers had a group of female viewers watch the same videos and asked, “How sexually attractive is this man?” Eighteen months later, the men in the videos completed a questionnaire asking about their sexual history of the previous 18 months. How tough a guy looked to men was a much stronger predictor of mating success than how attractive he looked to women.
In this study, researchers asked two different groups of women to look at photos of different men and rate how strong the men looked. Results showed that the rated strength of a male body accounts for 70 percent of the variance in attractiveness (this is a massive effect size). From the paper: “None of the women produced a preference for weaker men…in both samples, the strongest men were the most attractive, the weakest men were the least attractive.”
Fun conversation. Check it out here:
Off to the gym then!
Hi Rob, this is very interesting information from the standpoint of learning how people, in this case young women, make decisions in a way that is apparently not obvious to them.
However, some of the terminology that you and the researchers use is troubling to me. "Mating success" is probably valid in terms of the viewpoints of the participants in the study. However, I think it would be better to use terminology that reflects what our society should value as success. To me, that would be something like: success is the formation of stable, healthy families that have healthy, treasured children.
The study found an interesting fact - young women in the dating scene prefer more dangerous appearing men. OK, but these dangerous appearing men are (now and again) dangerous to those very young women. And the fact that these individuals are having sex is not the cause of great rejoicing to the community at large. If these individuals started making the choices that lead to their long term happiness, and the long term success of their society - that would be mating success. In my humble opinion.