evaluation explanation for partner preference

• Evolutionary explanations of partner preferences ignore social and cultural influences that have significantly changed in Western societies over the past 100 years, making women less dependent on men for resources and more focused on other qualities in a mate.
• Kasser and Sharma (1999) found in their analysis of 37 cultures that females mostly valued a mate with resources in societies where women’s access to education and workplace was severely limited, suggesting that evolutionary explanations are limited as they only explain human mates’ choice in terms of evolutionary adaptiveness, ignoring other important factors, such as culture and social norms.
• Most of the studies into females’ choice of mates were carried out on undergraduate students, whose preference for high-status men may stem from similar interests and prospects, rather than be a search for a resourceful mate.
• Research into evolutionary explanations may suffer from a problem of validity, as it measures expressed partner preferences rather than real-life ones.
• Evolutionary explanations are a retrospective approach, largely based on speculations about what may or may not have been evolutionarily adaptive for our ancestors.
• Penton-Voak et al. (1999) suggest that females’ mate preferences change across the menstrual cycle, preferring a partner with strongly expressed masculine features during their fertile period, but showing more preference for a partner with slightly feminised features as a long-term mate.
• Evolutionary explanations of relationships suffer from evolutionary reductionism, arguing that strategies for choosing a mate are the result of genetic inheritance and a striving for reproductive success.
• Evolutionary explanations of relationships also suffer from determinism, as they seem to claim that choice strategies are determined by a person’s gender, and that humans are attracted to people who will have, provide and/or care for offspring.
• Evolutionary explanations of mate preference emphasise the differences in what males and females look for in a potential partner, known as an alpha bias, and the differences between males and females may be overstated.