Men exhibit greater intergroup bias than do women, but in dating, women more strongly prefer to date men of their own racial group. Manipulating women via nationality to control for racial stereotypes, ameliorating or exacerbating the perceived threat, prevents intergroup bias.

An evolutionary perspective on intergroup dating bias. Samantha Brindley, Melissa M. McDonald, Lisa L. M. Welling & Virgil Zeigler-Hill. Comprehensive Results in Social Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1080/23743603.2018.1436939

ABSTRACT: Across a diversity of contexts, men tend to exhibit greater intergroup bias than do women. However, in the domain of dating, this trend is reversed, such that women more strongly prefer to date men of their own racial group. Researchers employing an evolutionary perspective suggest that this sex difference can be explained by an evolutionary history in which men and women faced distinct adaptive challenges in their interactions with outgroup men. For women, outgroup men posed a recurrent threat of sexual coercion. Given the importance of reproductive choice in female mating strategies, this may have exerted selection pressure for psychological mechanisms that promote avoidance of outgroup men. Here we pre-registered a two-study design to examine whether women’s intergroup dating bias, manipulated via nationality to control for racial stereotypes, could be altered by manipulating the formidability of outgroup dating targets, thereby ameliorating or exacerbating their perceived threat. The design did not produce the predicted pattern of intergroup bias, suggesting that the manipulation of group status may need to be stronger. Implications and future directions are discussed.

KEYWORDS: Intergroup bias, mate choice, dating, threat-management, female preferences

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Psychological research has documented a tendency for women, relative to men, to exhibit greater intergroup bias in the context of dating (Hitsch, Hortaçsu, & Ariely, 2010; Hwang, 2013). Furthermore, this bias may not be offset by other person characteristics, such as income, that are typically evaluated positively in male romantic partners (Hitsch, Hortascsu, & Ariely, 2006). This finding may be surprising given that much of the research on intergroup bias suggests that men tend to express greater intergroup bias than women in a variety of other contexts (reviewed in McDonald, Navarrete, & Van Vugt, 2012). Previous research attempting to explain this discrepancy has suggested that women’s greater intergroup bias in romantic and intimate contexts might be the result of an evolutionary history in which women were often the victims of sexual coercion, committed by outgroup men during intergroup conflict (McDonald, Donnellan, Cesario, & Navarrete, 2015). From this perspective, women’s intergroup bias in dating contexts may function to protect women’s reproductive choice by avoiding men more prone to reliance on the use of sexually coercive mating tactics.