( lonely hearts dating ) Human mating, sexual strategies, mate preferences, sex differences, evolutionary psychology
The aim of this exercise is for you to develop a way to test one hypotheses of your choice related to ‘mate
choice’ theories in sexual selection.
You will be testing this in humans using the data provided, which are a series of 100 anonymised dating
profiles posted by men and women on a popular dating website in 2018/19. The data have been edited for
compliance with GDPR and contain the following information:
Age [from 18-65]
Gender [roughly equal ratio men: women]
Type of relationship they want (e.g. casual, serious)
Whether they want children or not (not all adverts have this)
What age bracket they are looking for in a partner
What qualities they want in a partner (not all adverts have this)
For simplicity, ALL ADVERTS ARE BY PEOPLE SEEKING HETEROSEXUAL RELATIONSHIPS
You will need to refine a hypothesis that you can test with the data – so you need to look at the data carefully to
determine what they can be used to test.
Sample Solution