Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
While stereotypes suggest men tend to be “players,” looking to “hook up” with as many women as possible while avoiding serious commitment, new research indicates that the opposite tends to be true when there are fewer potential mates around.
The study, which was funded in part by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and published in the journal Royal Society Open Science on Wednesday, looked at the Makushi people of Guyana and found that males tend to pursue long-term relationships when women are scarce.
“Commitment to a relationship is influenced by the availability of partners,” University of Utah anthropologist, postdoctoral student and first author Ryan Schacht said in a statement. “So we can think of the number of men and women in a population as a potential mating market where the principles of supply and demand hold sway.”
“When you belong to the sex that is abundant, you must cater to the preferences of the rare sex,” he added. “So the expectations are that men will be interested in short-term relationships when more women are available. But when women are difficult to find, they become valued resources, so men will attempt to attract and maintain a single partner because it is costly to lose a partner when partners are rare.”
The findings run counter to the conventional view that there tend to be more fights between males and increased rates of sexually transmitted disease when men outnumber women, Schacht said. While he said that the study only looks at one population, and that the findings may not apply to all peoples, he did expect to see some of the general observations to be universal.
In developed countries, “women are attracted to urban areas versus rural areas where construction, logging, farming and mining draw men,” Schacht said. The complex nature of industrialized societies challenging because they are more complex in nature, he added, but findings from small-scale societies can be used to infer things about western populations.
“Women in rural places may find it easier to find a partner ready to settle down and commit,” he said. Females in urban environments may find it “challenging” to find “a single, committed partner. In urban environments where there are more women, men are surrounded by many potential partners and in this way can pursue multiple short-term, uncommitted relationships.”
“But if they’re in boonies, men may be more likely to settle down. When women are hard to find, the best strategy is to find one and stick with her,” Schacht said. The bottom line, he noted, is that “it’s time to move away from stereotyped assumptions of men having certain behaviors and women having others in terms of relationships. Sex is one of many things that matter. Partner availability matters, socioeconomic status matters, the quality of available mates matters.”
As part of the study, Schacht and his wife, Jacque, interviewed 300 Makushi men and women between the ages of 18 and 45 in eight rural communities in 2010 and 2011. The sex ratios in these areas ranged from to 140 men for every 100 women.
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