March 12, 2007 — Exposure to attractive, flirtatious women may cause men to hold their current mates in lower esteem after such encounters, suggest the results of a provocative new study.
The paper, which has been accepted for publication in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, is the first to show that one woman's behavior can affect how a man views other women, including his own partner.
The researchers believe the findings may explain why men who are chronically exposed to attractive, young women at work — such as male high school teachers and college professors — have an unusually high incidence of divorce.
Prior studies suggest a woman may downgrade her current mate after being exposed to an attractive man who possesses greater wealth or status than her present partner.
Lead author Sandeep Mishra told Discovery News that biology could explain all of these tendencies.
"High male reproductive success, or biological fitness, is contingent on finding and mating with a large number of females," he said. "Females, on the other hand, benefit most from being choosy and looking for quality, as mating with a number of partners at any given time will still only produce one offspring (over the course of nine months)."
For the study, Mishra and McMaster University colleagues Andrew Clark and Martin Daly conducted two primary experiments.
The first involved showing photographs of opposite sex underwear models, which the 87 male and 66 female study participants pre-determined to be attractive. The researchers also showed the participants photographs of abstract art.
Following the photograph presentations, the test subjects rated their current partners on 17 attributes that included things like physical attractiveness, intelligence, warmth and desirability. If single, the participants were asked to rate images of strangers.
Mathematical computer analysis of the results found that men who viewed the model images nearly always rated their mates lower than men who viewed the abstract art.
Single male test subjects likewise tended to rate other women lower after they had seen the sexy images. The women participants, however, remained unaffected by the photos.
The second experiment was comparable, only this time test subjects watched a video of members of the opposite sex being interviewed and asked non-sexual questions, such as "Why do you think it is important to vote?"
