Cotton Balls! Get yer Cotton Balls right'cher ladies!
Posted on 07/27/2005 11:22:37 AM PDT by LibWhacker
Men who spend big money wining and dining their dates are not frittering away hard-earned cash. According to a pair of UK researchers, they are merely employing the best strategy for getting the girl without being taken for granted.
Using mathematical modelling, Peter Sozou and Robert Seymour at University College London, UK, found that wooing girls with costly, but essentially worthless gifts – such as theatre tickets or expensive dinners out – is a winning courtship strategy for both sexes.
Females can assess how serious or committed a male plans to be and males can ensure they are not just seducing ‘gold-diggers’ – girls who take valuable presents with no intention of accepting subsequent dates.
Sozou came about the idea after reading about a man in his local newspaper. The man had been paying the rent of a woman he considered was his girlfriend – he was giving her a valuable gift. But she had been heartlessly manipulating him, dating another man on the sly while accepting money from her unwitting sugar daddy.
“It spurred me onto thinking that if he had just been buying her expensive dinners, and not paying her rent, she wouldn’t have strung him along so much,” says Sozou.
Dating and mating
So he and Seymour built a model based on a series of dating decisions. In the model males had to decide what kind of gift to offer females – valuable, extravagant or cheap – based on how attractive he finds her. The females had to either accept or decline the gift and then decide whether to mate with the gift-giver – a decision also weighted on the ‘attractiveness’ of their prospective partner.
When they measured the different outcomes of all the steps, they found the best solution for the males was to give extravagant, but intrinsically value-free gifts the vast majority of the time, while giving gifts of material value very occasionally.
The model showed that if males gave valuable gifts too often, the females would start to exploit them: the males have no clue as to the females’ real intentions in the model. Put simply, the females just take the diamonds and run. But when the gifts are worthless, an uninterested female has little incentive to accept, gaining no return on what could be just turn into the simple waste of an evening. Only girls who are serious would bother to go the distance.
Worthless balls
Sozou and Seymour believe their conclusions about people find support in the actions of animals, such as the dance fly. Males of this species give worthless cotton balls to entice partners into mating – and they work – although other scientists interpret this as male trickery.
Alison Lenton, a social psychologist at the University of Edinburgh, UK, questions some of the model’s assumptions, however. For example, one assumption is that females obtain a negative outcome for accepting an unattractive, though committed, male. Women have been shown to prioritise traits associated with good parental care above physical attractiveness, she says.
The model also fails to take the potential effects of cheating females into account. “Some female birds raise their chicks with a 'nice' male and engage in short-term copulations with an attractive male - there is similar evidence among humans. In this way, females may get the best of both worlds.”
And what is more, says Lenton, psychologists have found that experiential purchases – like theatre tickets – make people more happy in the long run that material purchases. “I do not necessarily agree that theatre tickets are ‘worthless’,” she says.
They had to do research on this...LOL
not again...
Worthless gifts get the girls?
Wish I knew this the other night. I had a date that brought tears to my eyes.
I think it was the pepper spray she kept using.
You could make jokes all day about the highlighted "Worthless Balls" section of this article.
Was this whole load of BS paid for by the Lifetime for Women network?
This reminds me, I need to apply for a grant. I'm going to research how womens' moods are effected when their husbands refuse to do housework.
Cotton Balls! Get yer Cotton Balls right'cher ladies!
*pitter-patter, pitter-patter*
My guess is that he and Seymour don't go on a lot of dates.
Really? Has she checked out Broadway lately?
Ladies, take note. OBIkNOb's balls are worthless.
Ya hear that ladies? No more sparkly carbon crystals for you! What a relief it is to know I don't have to buy any more of them. Theatre tix for our 10th should do nicely I suppose. Sorry honey, those 2's for your ears aren't necessary.
This is always the case.
“Some female birds raise their chicks with a 'nice' male and engage in short-term copulations with an attractive male - there is similar evidence among humans. In this way, females may get the best of both worlds.”
My hubby gives me teddies & vacuum cleaners. I'm not sure how that would fit in with this data.
Probably not a bad question. This is like how the Diamond Council of America successfully made it the conventional wisdom that men should spend at least two months of salary on an engagement ring.
“I do not necessarily agree that theatre tickets are ‘worthless’,” she says.
Nice strawman, lady. The researcher never said that they were "worthless"; he said they were "value-free", i.e. they had no material value once the experience was over.
Does he stare at your teddies??
Ok, that's it - I'm slinking back to my corner...
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