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Male Psychological Adaptations
Human males have developed psychological adaptations, which make them attractive to the opposite sex in order to increase their reproductive success. Evolutionarily, it pays for a male to be polygynous - to have a number of female partners at once - because it means they can create more offspring at once, as they don’t have to invest any time in carrying a baby. Examples of some of these other adaptations include strategies to entice females, strategies to retain a partner and the desire for short-term relationships.
According to Greengross et al (2014), humour is sexually selected and acts as a fitness indicator. The production of humour increases mate value in men, and so women seek males with a good sense of humour. In turn, males have developed an adaptation in which they produce humour to attract women.
Human males have developed an adaptation in which they find women more attractive if they show cues of fertility, such as a good hip-to-waist ratio. Women with a hip-to-ratio of 0.7 are considered more attractive to males than those with a ratio of 0.8, who are considered to have a more masculine figure (Singh, 1993). This is because they are perceived to be able to have children more and to be more fertile and healthy.
Males have developed behaviours that help them to retain a mate, in order to enhance reproductive success in long-term relationships. Examples are intersexual manipulations are manipulating his partner in the way she views their current relationship and to repulse them from other relationships (Starratt & Alesia, 2014). He could do this by enhancing his own value or decreasing the value of other males. In extreme cases, some men have developed intersexual adaptations that restrict their partner from interacting with other males, including the use of violence. By doing this, women are less likely to stray from her current relationship, even if it is due to fear (Starratt & Alesia, 2014). On the other hand, intrasexual manipulations are used to reduce any other options for the females, which could include decreasing their partner’s value or make it clear to other males that the female is ‘their’s’ by using possessive techniques such as holding her hand in public (Buss, 1988).
With regards to parental investment, males are much more wary when investing in offspring as they cannot guarantee that the child is their’s (Trivers, 1972). Therefore, as an adaption, males tend to only invest in offspring if there are high levels of commitment and if they were produced in a long-term relationship as opposed to short-term relationships.
Human males have also developed an adaptation in which they have a desire for short-term relationships more than females do (Buss & Schmitt,1993). This is because men hardly have any investment obligation, whereas a female has to carry a child for nine months if she was to fall pregnant after the sexual encounter. Evolutionarily, it is thought that males have a desire to reproduce as much as they can, and short-term relationships are a good way to inseminate many women with his sperm in order for his genes to continue through generations. There is much evidence for how this short-term mating has evolved psychologically for males, beginning with the desire for a variety of sex partners. According to Schmitt et al (2003), a larger percentage of men, in every culture of the world, desire more than one sex partner in one month compared to women. Furthermore, men are more likely than women to have sexual intercourse with someone having known them for only one hour, one day, one week or one month (Buss & Schmitt, 1993).
However, there are some adaptive problems in short-term mating that men must solve. One of these problems is avoiding commitment and women who might not have sex with the male until they have a signal of commitment or investment. This would reduce the number of partners a male could pursue and succeed with (Jonason & Buss, 2012).