Despite the size and scope of our study, it still had several limitations. First, we focused only on two predictors of romantic interest even though our data have several more. We did so because of the exponentially increasing complexity afforded by including more variables, and instead of focusing on describing who gets more IOI, we focused on theory-testing of microscopic issues. Of all the variables we have, we felt that resource-acquisition ability was the timeliest (e.g., the rise of the topic of sapiosexuality), the most useful for considering mate choice in relation to two theoretical paradigms, and one that has applied implications for mate searching and child mortality (Egebark et al., 2021; Hopcroft, 2021). The magnitude of these data is simply too much to conscientiously allow for exploratory tests when everything is likely to be “significant” but unlikely to be meaningful. Subsequent studies will examine the effects of height, marital status, number of children, and more. We presented here the first of a series of studies relying on “real” and “really big” data to understand cross-cultural patterns in mate choice using those seeking mates and people’s bone fide interest in them, not some hypothetical interest.
Second, resource-acquisition ability, as a factor influencing mate choice, is likely to have several related indicators, such as ambition, social status/level, and earning capacity (Buss, 1989; Li et al., 2002). We were only able to examine two of them—treated as a single index—given the limitations of what was collected. Although the two may not fully represent the larger construct of competence or resource-acquisition ability as we envision them, we think the results are more than defensible given their alignment with theory and having, themselves, been used as indicators of research in the past (Egebark et al., 2021; Hopcroft, 2021; Jonason & March, 2021). Indeed, the moderate correlation between the two may be reflective of the fact that we have only two indicators on a much larger mate-choice determinant (along with potential error in that data).
Third, despite the cross-national nature of this data, our sample was still WEIRD. (Henrich et al., 2010). Although countries such as Chile and Mexico might not traditionally be considered “Western,” they are educated, industrialized, and rich enough to have online dating services and Internet access. This may have created some range restriction and limit our results to just the countries where the dating service operates. It remains to be seen whether these patterns would hold up in African, South American, and Asian nations. Nevertheless, if we take an evolutionary perspective, differences in countries are a matter of degree for local calibration; Homo sapiens are humans everywhere (Buss, 1989; Thomas et al., 2020).
A final limitation involves our ability to account for country-level variance. Members in our dataset came from 24 countries, which allowed us to develop an understanding of how consistently resource-acquisition ability affects dating profile attention and how much this varies from country to country. However, even with two dozen nations, this aspect of our analysis was underpowered. Thus, we took a conservative approach when adding them to the base model. In contrast, other studies on the idea of “evoked culture” tend to examine country-level effects while controlling for variables such as longitude and latitude (Gangestad et al., 2006), though arguably, even then, such analyses are underpowered. Including more countries, particularly from non-WEIRD nations, would help us draw firmer conclusions.
In conclusion, we have provided the most definitive answers yet to the questions of the role of resource-acquisition ability in mate choice, whether there are sex differences in that role, and what nation-level factors might account for national patterns overall and in the sexes. We showed that greater resource-acquisition ability leads to more dating profile interest in data from more than 1.8 million people living in 24 nations who use the services of an international, online dating company. While both sexes received a boost in interest when they had more resource-acquisition ability, the increase was almost 2.5 times stronger in men than in women. And last, resource-acquisition ability tended to be slightly less important in richer countries with more women of reproductive age than men, and slightly more important in cultures with greater gender equality. Higher levels of unemployment also seemed to make resource-acquisition ability more important, but this effect was restricted to the amount of attention women’s profiles received. The relative primacy and robustness of sex differences suggest evolutionary models of mate choice may be more powerful than sociocultural ones when it comes to resource-acquisition ability.
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