From the original article on November 17, 2011. Author: Chateau Heartiste.
A reader (a Ph.D. scientist, for those of you who yearn to believe only d-bags read about and practice game) writes:
...it is a delight to understand what motivates women and how to make sense of various factors and my previous dating life. Your continuing incisive reporting has helped my understanding tremendously.
He attached a link to a study confirming YET ANOTHER essential game concept — that men’s attractiveness to women, at least in the early rounds of meeting, is based as much on, and perhaps more on (if you expand the criteria list to include all modifiable male attractiveness traits), their attitude and sociosexual-related personality dimensions (i.e., their game) as on their looks. Taking the usual caveats about speed dating studies into consideration (which the authors discuss), you really should read the entire paper, because there is so much in there that confirms just about every Chateau maxim in the whole.
men’s sociosexuality was attractive to women and showed incremental validity over and above men’s physical attractiveness (see Table 3)...
Interestingly, there is evidence that all these [male attractiveness attributes] can be accurately judged in short periods of time...
However, only sociosexuality added incremental predictive power over and above physical attributes in the current study. Unexpected was that sociosexuality emerged as a relative powerful predictor of men’s popularity to women, particularly because women largely expressed a long-term mating interest. A possible explanation is that male sociosexuality indicates a history of successful mating experience or mating skills that are attractive to women.
Sociosexuality is basically a psychological term that, in this context, defines the personality and temperamental characteristics of a man who has game, and encompasses such time-tested game concepts as preselection, confidence, assertiveness, cockiness and, well, pretty much everything listed in the 16 Commandments of Poon at the top of this blog.
Game is notoriously difficult to measure scientifically in the field, so sociosexuality serves as a comparable substitute for measuring the traits that are common in men who are good with women. Think of sociosexuality as more of an indrect indicator of overall game proficiency, rather than as a measurement of familiarity with specific game tactics.
The takeaway lesson of this study is a powerful one: women, sluts and saints alike, are really attracted to men with high sociosexuality, otherwise known as game/charisma/chemistry.
This is about as close to scientific proof of the effectiveness of overarching game proficiency to mating success as I’ve yet seen in the literature. To be sure, there are plenty of studies confirming the efficacy of specific and narrowly-defined game tactics, but not many that have found a positive correlation between men who embody game as a personality trait and their success with women. This is why I think the study’s authors were a bit surprised by their results pointing to sociosexuality as a major player in male attractiveness.
What other stone cold but soft on the inside Heartiste truths are buttressed by this study?
– Older men have higher sexual market value, while older women have lower SMV. This is reflected in their choosiness. Older men are like aged single malt scotch; they command a higher price. Older women are like milk; they hit their expiration fast and no one wants them:
As Figure 1 shows, men’s choosiness increased and women’s choosiness decreased with increasing age. [...] The higher choosiness of women that is ubiquitous in studies of young adults decreased and even tended to reverse for older women.
– The 463 bullet point checklist that women carry in their heads when they meet a man is true and relevant:
[...] females based their choices on more criteria than men did...
– Women had best be hot or they aren’t getting much attention from men with choices:
[F]or women only facial attractiveness [increased the frequency of matches]...
– The higher your sexual market value, the choosier you are (and this goes for men as well as women, although, surprisingly, it seems to be more true for men at the very right tail of the SMV curve, possibly because very high mate value males are rarer than very high mate value females):
As expected, many of the attributes that made individuals attractive were negatively related to the frequency of choices (see Table 3), and thus positively related to choosiness (Hypothesis 2a).
– Being a niceguy is a tingle killer (or, at best, a non-tingle generator), as is having nerdy or beta traits like shyness and conscientiousness. (In contrast, shyness in women is not a bad thing for them.):
The expected negative effect of shyness was also confirmed but reached significance only for men. As expected by Hypothesis 1a, agreeableness had no effect on being chosen by either sex.
– Women are the choosier sex, but men exercise choice as well:
On average, male participants were chosen by 3.6 females (32% of their 11.2 dating partners), female participants were chosen by 4.1 males (37% of their dating partners).
– Men are more interested in short term mating opportunities than are women:
Confirming hypothesis H4b, the sex by interest interaction was due to the fact that men reported more short-term interest than women... and this effect was due to a higher variance of short-term interest in men than in women.
– The icy hell of LJBF banishment is real, beta orbiting and sycophancy will not get you sex, pushing for sex sooner rather than later is a better pickup strategy, and acting like a beta provider who wants a relationship will have no effect on women’s interest in you for either sex or LTRs:
As Table 4 indicates, Hypothesis 4d was fully confirmed. Women had a preference for having sex with men who pursued more a short-term mating tactics but did not tend to develop a romantic relationship with them, whereas the long-term interest of men did not influence women’s mating or relating.
– Game, and other attraction triggers, work on all kinds of women, even women who are very dissimilar to you:
Together, these findings suggest that similarity effects are weak in studies of brief real dating interactions.
– Men really do prefer to invest more in women who aren’t slutty:
Conversely, men had a preference for relating with women who pursued more a long-term mating tactics but did not tend to have sex with them...
Ignoramuses (paging Amanda Marcotte) who think evolutionary psychology doesn’t tell us anything useful about male-female mating and relationship dynamics will blow an aortic valve if they stumble across this post.
Our analyses were based on numerous evolutionarily informed hypotheses. Most of these hypotheses were confirmed and were consistent with earlier dating studies, lending further support to evolutionary accounts of human dating, mating and relating.
I can just hear the wailing and see the rending of garments of all the anti-game haters and feminists reading this study. May your suffering burden you this holiday season with the cursed tidings of a full-blown mental breakdown!
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