Human mate-choice copying is domain-general social learning

摘要

Women appear to copy other women’s preferences for men’s faces. This ‘mate-choice copying’ is often taken as evidence of psychological adaptations for processing social information related to mate choice, for which facial information is assumed to be particularly salient. No controlled experiment, however, has directly investigated whether women preferentially copy face preferences compared with other kinds of decision. Further, because prior experimental studies used artificial social information, the effect of real social information on attractiveness preferences is unknown. We collected attractiveness ratings of pictures of men’s faces, men’s hands, and abstract art given by heterosexual women, before and after participants saw genuine social information gathered in real time from their peers. Ratings of faces were influenced by social information, but no more or less so than were images of hands and abstract art. Our results suggest that evidence for domain-specific social learning mechanisms in humans is weaker than previously assumed.