Page 57 - Demo

Multimodal mate choice553Despite the plethora of studies on attractiveness and partner choice, the question of how the different modalities of attractiveness relate to one another remains equivocal. From an adaptive point of view, the different modalities can either convey the same information (back-up cue hypothesis), or convey different information (multiple message hypothesis) about an individual (Candolin, 2003). Thus, according to the back-up cue hypothesis, multimodal cues might all reflect the same underlying mate quality, which would result in a more accurate assessment of mate quality. Alternatively, the multiple message hypothesisassumes that multimodal cues might each reflect different aspects of mate quality. Taken together, these cues reflect overall mate quality; however, each multimodal cue reflects a different component of this quality (Candolin, 2003; Johnstone, 1997). For humans, multiple studies have suggested that different modalities covary in signaling underlying mate quality. For example, both vocal and facial characteristics correlate in women (Collins & Missing, 2003), and may be used to assess hormonal status (Feinberg, 2008), and ratings of facial attractiveness and olfactory attractiveness concord in both men and women (Cornwell et al., 2004). This suggests that the different modalities might indeed reflect the same qualities in humans.Traditionally, studies have investigated the role of scent, sight and sound by means of isolated experiments in which participants rated multiple static samples for attractiveness and long-term partner suitability. Consecutively, these ratings are often linked to traits of the sampled individual, such as masculinity and femininity (Collins & Missing, 2003; Cornwell et al., 2004; Little, Connely, et al., 2011). However, it has not yet been established how these individual ratings relate to real-life partner choice. In our study, we combined these widely-used multimodal attractiveness ratings of static stimuli with a speed-date paradigm. Speed-dates are a useful tool to study social decision making, as they allow for experimental control, while at the same time offering high ecological validity (Finkel et al., 2007). Thus, by combining pre-date multimodal rating tasks with consecutive speed-date outcomes, the current study explores whether pre-date attractiveness ratings of the different modalities correlate with willingness to meet again after a speed-date. Our study especially explores three main topics, namely (i) how do pre-date attractiveness ratings of different modalities relate to each other, (ii) is attraction indeed multimodal, and (iii) do men and women differ when it comes to the importance of the different modalities?Tom Roth.indd 55 08-01-2024 10:41