Kindness may be the key to dating success

Women prefer generous men for long-term relationships - or even for just one date. This is the finding of a study published today, 11th February 2010 in the British Journal of Psychology.

Dr Pat Barclay at McMaster University, Canada, investigated whether highlighting kind qualities affected people’s mate choice, to further investigate evolutionary theories of the persistence of human altruism.

One hundred and fifty women were asked to read short profiles accompanying photographs of men, then asked how willing they would be to have short-term or long-term relationships with them, and to rate their physical and sexual attractiveness. 155 men did the same for photos of women.

Dr Barclay said: "In some of the profiles we gave hints to indicate kind, altruistic interests such as ‘I enjoy helping people’ and ‘I volunteer at the food bank’, we also altered whether the profiles sought short-term or long-term relationships. We then compared the responses to these ‘altruistic profiles’ to ‘neutral’ versions of the same profiles which didn’t contain the altruistic clues."

The study found that both men and women were significantly more willing to have long-term relationships with the altruistic profiles than the neutral profiles. Women showed a stronger preference for altruistic profiles than for neutral profiles for both dates and long-term relationships. However, men actually seemed to show a slight aversion for altruistic women when looking for short-term relationships like one-night-stands.

"We found that women showed a strong preference for relationships with altruistic men in this study, even though the clues to altruistic traits were fairly subtle. This suggests that women are attuned to generosity, and that altruism serves a purpose in mate selection.

"Altruism is a costly behaviour that seems to bring no obvious or immediate benefit to the altruist. However, as we have seen in this study, it seems to serve an important purpose in mate choice. If a man is kind and generous towards others - even strangers - then there’s a good chance that he’d make a good and generous parent."

The altruistic profiles were not judged to be more physically or sexually attractive than neutral profiles by either men or women.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION, or for a copy of the paper, please contact The Media Centre, British Psychological Society. Tel: 0116 2529500, email mediacentre@bps.org.uk

Notes to editor: Dr Pat Barclay is now at the University of Guelph, Canada.