Mate Availability and Sexual Disgust

Abstract

Objective: One of the factors that sexual disgust should be calibrated to is the size of the mating pool. This study tested this hypothesis by examining whether perceptions of mate availability explain variance in levels of sexual disgust towards potential mates.

Methods: Participants (N = 853; 373 women) rated how sexually disgusting they found 60 potential mates that have previously been rated on attractiveness by a separate group of raters. We also measured participants' perceptions of mate availability in their local environment, self-perceived attractiveness and mate value, and relevant control variables.

Results: Multilevel models revealed a negative association between sexual disgust towards potential mates and perceived mate availability-the opposite of what we predicted. We found support for our prediction that women had higher levels of sexual disgust than men, but only after addressing the confounding sex difference in target attractiveness. We also found the predicted negative association between target attractiveness and sexual disgust. Finally, as predicted, sexual disgust levels were more strongly related to potential mates' attractiveness in individuals who perceived there to be many available mates in their local environment.

Conclusions: These findings generally bolster functional accounts of sexual disgust while highlighting the need for more evidence to ascertain the role of mate availability in the calibration of sexual disgust. Specifically, future research should examine the extent to which disgust levels may truncate mental representations of the mating pool instead of being calibrated by them.

Keywords: Attractiveness; Evolution; Mate availability; Mating; Sexual disgust.

Fig. 1

Plot of power curves, depicting the power to detect each effect of interest at various sample sizes, given the other constant parameters in the model. The power analyses indicated that we needed 90% power to detect the smallest of our hypothesized associations (i.e., the interaction between mate availability perceptions and target attractiveness) with 900 raters

Fig. 2

Results of preregistered analyses in the final sample of 853 raters and 120 targets. Panel a depicts a small, significant interaction between raters’ self-perceptions of mate availability (SPMA), the association between targets’ third-party rated attractiveness, and raters’ sexual disgust. Panel b depicts a small, significant negative association between raters’ SPMA and sexual disgust. Panel c depicts a moderate, significant negative association between raters’ sexual disgust and third-party ratings of targets’ attractiveness

Fig. 3

Coefficient plot depicting the point estimates and 95% confidence intervals for associations between sexual disgust ratings and different predictors to compare the results from the preregistered analysis (dark black color) to the exploratory analysis removing target attractiveness (lighter grey color), and comparing results using the preregistered exclusion criteria (filled circles and solid lines) and without exclusion criteria (empty squares and dotted lines). All associations reflect standardized associations except for the ethnicity variables which are dummy coded. The sample size under the pre-registered exclusion criteria is N = 853 (373 women); without exclusion criteria N = 1,757 (828 women)