Swipe right! A group of European researchers have found that personality is a major driver in mate selection these days.
New Study: Women Rate Men with This Trait as the Most Attractive
Published on Oct. 10, 2024
History and sociological research have shown that in decades past, many couples partnered up understanding that the man would provide financial security, while the woman would take care of the home and manage the emotional components of raising a family.
A new study is showing that our collective movement toward a more equitable approach to partnership is finally rooting down. Published last month in Sage Journals: Evolutionary Psychology, the study, which was led by a team of Polish and Italian researchers, analyzed reported dynamics between 148 heterosexual couples. Data showed kindness, anger, and intelligence all played a pivotal role in attraction, and also had an effect on relationship satisfaction after people coupled up.
In particular, kindness was determined to be the most important trait in a potential partner. “People have various preferences in who they would like to pair-up with romantically. However, both men and women most value compassion in their partners. Specifically, they prefer partners who are kind and understanding,” the study authors wrote.
Though both men and women ranked kindness as a top priority in their potential mates, the researchers also found that women had a more nuanced reason to consider kindness so desirable. The study explains that women value intelligence in their male romantic partners more than men value intelligence in female romantic partners, and that women were also more likely to view kind men as intelligent. Conversely, “women perceived angrier men as less intelligent, which impacted relationship satisfaction of both partners,” the study adds.
Their findings seemed to reframe the researchers’ initial hypothesis: Prior to the study, they believed that there might be a “tension” between kindness and intelligence. “Theoretically, mating might be considered as a process of bargaining between two higher-order attributes: compassion and competence,” they’d anticipated.
Instead, this study seems to confirm that these two desirable traits can often go hand-in-hand—as the researchers report: “Competence and compassion might be regarded as an internally balanced construct of partners’ value.”
Though more research is needed, a 2019 study published in the journal Intelligence suggested that most studies on the topic have found a positive association between prosocial (empathetic) behavior and innate cognitive abilities. In other words, being in-tune with others is a sign of intelligence.
So, based on recent research, women might be encouraged that they don’t have to choose between kindness and intelligence in a partner. And, there’s an equally important message for men: emphasizing kindness could make an even bigger and better impression on your dates than trying to display over-confidence or a cool exterior.
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