Background
Dating and Mating
In some cultures it was common
for parents to arrange their children's marriages. Mate selection is one of the
most fascinating aspects of human behavior. Both men and women spend a great deal
of time and energy advertising themselves as potential mates and evaluating the
desirability of other people as mates. This is especially true during adolescence
and early adulthood,when the pressures -- from both parents and peers -- to attract
a suitable mate is most intense. In fact, in almost every culture, more than 90
percent of the people marry at least once in their lives or at least have some
sort of romantic experience.
In the animal world, most
species have a set of fairly rigid courtship behaviors. Animals that deviate
from the courtship behaviors rarely attract a mate, so their genes are not passed
on to the next generation. Humans are more flexible and creative about mating,
but even so, every human culture has an elaborate set of courtship rituals.
What are some of the courtship rituals on your campus?
Why Do We People Fall in Love?
In some cultures it was common for parents to arrange their children's marriages. Although some agricultural societies still follow this custom, it is rarely practiced in industrialized countries. Most North Americans and Europeans are opposed to arranged marriages, preferring to believe that people are better off freely choosing their mate on the basis of compatibility and "love." Romantic attraction was once considered too difficult to study -- after all, "falling in love" is a very private, personal experience -- but today's researchers have devised various techniques to measure these private feelings. After studying the factors that influence romantic attraction, social psychologists have concluded that three of them are especially important.
Proximity. Although we are sometimes "swept off our feet" by a stranger, we usually select mates from the group of people with whom we are familiar -- the people we associate with at school, on the job, or in our community.
Similarity. The proverb "opposites attract" rarely holds true; people generally choose mates who are similar to them on a variety of dimensions, including height, weight, and race, as well as education, intelligence, religion, and political attitudes.
Physical Attractiveness. Good-looking people (as defined within each society) have an advantage, at least in the early stages of a relationship. In one study, Elaine Hatfield and her colleagues (Walster [Hatfield], Aronson, Abrahams, & Rottman, 1966) matched college students with attractive or unattractive "blind dates"; both men and women paired with attractive dates reported liking their dates more than those paired with unattractive dates. But although we may prefer to date someone who is very attractive, in the end we generally choose mates who are similar to us in physical attractiveness.