According to Wikipedia, "Speed Dating" was introduced in 1998, and by 2000 had gained national recognition, partially thanks to an episode of Sex in the City wherein a successful lawyer pretends to be an airline stewardess to stop scaring away potential dates. The repetitive format of speed-dating made it a natural choice for the study of mating ( Read more... )

Much of evolutionary psychology appears to hinge on the idea that men were hunters and women were gatherers, and that gendered traits evolved in response to the different needs of these goals. Hunter-Gatherer economies are thought to be the only mode of subsistence for humans for 2 million years, ending somewhere between 5,000-10,000 years ago.

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Roy F. Baumeister's talk "Is There Anything Good About Men?" (given to the American Psychological Association on August 17th, according to John Tierney of the NYT) begins by asking gender warriors to go home. The full transcript is probably more than most people are willing to read, weighing in at over 9,000 words, but I highly recommend actually ( Read more... )

Steve Connor (UK Independent) is only one of dozens of reporters this week misreporting the results of Hurlbert and Ling's (2007) study on sex differences in color preferences. The authors state in the abstract that "there is no conclusive evidence for the existence of sex differences in color preference." While they did find that more male ( Read more... )

Julie Steenhuysen (Reuters, 2007) reported on new research Monday into heterosexual women's selection preferences. The article focuses on UCLA's David Frederick, who made news as a graduate student by suggesting that women did not make long-term partners of the sexiest males (HeathInformation.com, 2005). His presentation as a grad student focused ( Read more... )

Evolutionary psychology suggests that men and women value different characteristics in a mate. Wade and Fowler (2006) attempted to test this model to see how the features of the partner in infidelity affected the level of upset in men and women. Their results suggest that only women may rate the competitor in their mate's terms. While ( Read more... )

David Schmitt (2003) claims to have found a universal sex difference: the desire for sexual variety. Schmitt's data from the International Sexuality Description Project (ISDP), a project for which he is the Founding Director, collected surveys from over 16,000 people in 52 nations (largely college students). Schmitt concludes that men in all ( Read more... )

Byrne and Corp (2004) found that neocortex size predicted deception rates among primates; that is - the bigger the neocortex, the more capable the monkeys were of deceiving other monkeys. Pakkenberg and Gundersen (1997) found that (on average), men in their Danish sample had 16% more neocortical neurons than women. Abe et al (2007) found in a PET ( Read more... )

Fairfield and Fletcher's 2002 review of vitamin benefits and risks states that vitamin A is critical for night vision, but in doses as small as 3x the RDA, can cause birth defects. Katz et al (1995) found that night blindness was prevalent among lactating and pregnant Nepalese women, which they attributed to vitamin A deficiency, although Wedner ( Read more... )

Gender roles in heterosexual dating have been extensively studied. For example, Karl Grammer (1990) suggests that males use body language to signal dominance, whereas women's body language indicates both submission and "bodily self-presentation." Grammer (2000) points out ten years later that women seem to be in control of opposite-sex ( Read more... )