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Men date for looks, women date for money.
For decades social scientists and dating experts have concurred on this shallow assessment of how we choose valentines.
But a new U.S. study suggests there is no difference in how men and women regard wealth and good looks.
During a study that took nearly three years to conduct and publish, two psychologists at Northwestern University in Illinois found that men and women value attractiveness equally. Both place it slightly ahead of wealth when it comes to ranking potential mates.
Paul Eastwick and Eli Finkel took a novel approach to studying dating preferences. Like many researchers before them, they interviewed people about their dating desires.
Unlike previous studies, they ran subjects through a speed-dating marathon to observe whether their interview responses held true in the real world. During early interviews, the 163 college undergrads involved in the study came up with stereotypical explanations of what they looked for in a partner.
"True to form, the men all said they wanted someone who was physically attractive and the women said they cared about earning prospects," said Dr. Eastwick, the lead researcher.
The researchers then crammed the students into a campus art gallery where they went on several dates of four minutes each. Between each instant courtship, the subjects had two minutes to write down their impressions.
For a month afterward, the researchers tracked every intimate detail of the students' dating lives.
Their results, published this month in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, reveal that good looks play a far greater role in attraction for women than previously believed and, contrary to popular belief, that men do prefer a well-off women.
The researchers had started out with opposing hypotheses. Dr. Finkel had long agreed with the roughly 150 social science studies that say that beauty attracts men and money attracts women. His former student, Dr. Eastwick, believed that both sexes valued money and beauty equally.
The student was right.
"I didn't expect to support his hypothesis at all," Dr. Finkel said. "But once we introduced people to a series of living, breathing human beings, their stated sex preferences completely disappeared. I was shocked."
The results could be a warning to those who rely on impersonal modes of tracking down mates, such as online dating sites or newspaper ads.
"It makes us very skeptical of the shopping list approach to dating," said Dr. Eastwick, whose future studies will focus on the differences between meeting online and meeting in person. "You get a very different read on someone when you meet them face to face."
The discrepancy between what people said and did fits with previous research showing that people generally do a poor job of explaining why they do things.
"It looks like people don't really know what they want in a partner," Dr. Finkel said. "At least they can't articulate it."
