Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Johannesen-Schmidt, Mary Claire

Titel

Social role theory and sex differences in preferred mate characteristics: Correlational and experimental approaches

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

Erscheinungsjahr

2003

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Three studies test the social role prediction that sex differences in preferred mate characteristics (e.g., Buss, 1989) reflect sex differences in marital role expectations. Participants were sampled from students at two universities in the Midwest. Hostile sexism and benevolent sexism (Glick and Fiske, 1996) assessed antipathy for the nontraditional female role and support for the traditional female role, respectively. Study 1 correlated expected future roles for self and spouse, romantic fantasy, and endorsement of traditional roles for women with preferred mate characteristics. Results indicated that men's and women's preferred mate characteristics were related to their support of the traditional female role and reproduced previous findings by Johannesen-Schmidt and Eagly (2002). Results also indicated the additional power of romantic fantasy and female workforce expectations to predict preferred mate characteristics. The second study used a priming technique to manipulate the accessibility of traditional versus nontraditional female gender roles before obtaining participants' preferred mate qualities. Although the priming technique did not produce the predicted interactions with participant sex, results again indicated that men's and women's preferred mate characteristics, romantic fantasy, and female workforce expectations predicted preferred mate characteristics. The third study explicitly manipulated expected future roles by asking participants to role play that they sought to be either the primary breadwinner in a family or the primary domestic caregiver in a family. As predicted, individuals assigned to the breadwinner role placed greater emphasis on finding a younger mate with good domestic skills than did individuals assigned to the breadwinner role. Individuals assigned to the domestic role placed greater emphasis on finding an older mate with good provider skills than did individuals assigned to the breadwinner role. Although sex differences in mate preferences were not eliminated by variation in assigned role, these assigned roles had similar impact on male and female participants. As a whole, the studies provide evidence in support of the predictions of social role theory that expected marital roles are related to preferred mate characteristics. These studies were not designed as tests of the predictions of evolutionary psychology, but interpretations of the results from this perspective are included where possible.