Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id JAA13696 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Thu, 1 Mar 2001 09:02:03 GMT Message-ID: <2D1C159B783DD211808A006008062D3101745CBC@inchna.stir.ac.uk> From: Vincent Campbell <v.p.campbell@stir.ac.uk> To: "'memetics@mmu.ac.uk'" <memetics@mmu.ac.uk> Subject: RE: new book- anyone seen it? Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2001 09:00:09 -0000 X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2650.21) Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Cheers Paul,
I remember seeing this article come to think of it, I'll dig it out of my
back copies of N.Scientist.
Vincent
> ----------
> From: Paul Marsden
> Reply To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
> Sent: Wednesday, February 28, 2001 5:32 pm
> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
> Subject: new book- anyone seen it?
>
> If anyone has seen/sees this, please let us know what it's like.
>
>
> Vincent
>
>
>
> Haven't seen it - but here is the New Scientist piece December 2000 on it
>
>
>
> Move over Casanova
>
> When you're single no one wants to know. Yet the minute you get a partner,
> the others come running. Ever wondered why, asks Jonathan Knight
>
> BEFORE I got married a few weeks ago, friends told me that flashing a
> wedding ring was a sure way to attract female attention. Some said it was
> because women consider married men to be safe. Others said a wedding band
> is
> a quick way for women to identify a quality mate, one that's been
> pre-filtered by someone else.
> So in the interests of science, I have been spending more time in bars
> lately. As I sip my pint of California microbrew, I keep my left hand
> clearly visible and wait. And wait. So far, I would call the results
> inconclusive.
> It's really not all that far-fetched an idea, though. Females of other
> species copy the preferences of their peers all the time. Female quail,
> for
> example, prefer a male they have just seen copulating. And female guppies
> go
> for the more popular male, even if he is a bit of a wimp. Now researchers
> at
> the University of Louisville, Kentucky, have compelling evidence that
> people--particularly women--engage in mate copying too. Just hearing that
> other women want to date a man piques their interest.
> The effects of peer attention could factor into a variety of social
> phenomena: why a bushy beard and tangled locks were sexy in the seventies
> but today's hair can't be short enough, or why teens pierce parts of their
> bodies adults rarely even think about. They could help explain the
> unexpected sex appeal of Mick Jagger or Jack Nicholson, and may be at work
> in celebrity of all kinds. Everyone wants to be unique, but when it comes
> to
> mating, imitation appears to have some powerful evolutionary advantages.
> Until recently, all the evidence of mate copying has come from fish and
> birds. That's partly because it's easier to spot in these animals than in
> humans. Male grouse, for example, gather at special sites called leks
> where
> all the action takes place. Leks are the grouse equivalent of a singles
> bar.
> Here they strut around displaying their feathers in the hope of pulling a
> bird. Females wander through the lek, choose a male, mate on the
> spot--here
> the singles bar analogy breaks down a bit--and then head off into the
> undergrowth to nest. Some males on the lek have all the luck. The most
> successful may win up to 80 per cent of the passing females.
> So what do the females see in these Casanovas? Some researchers suspected
> that mate copying was initiating a snowball effect: once a few females
> chose
> the same guy, the rest would come running. In 1994, behavioural biologists
> tested this idea by placing several stuffed female dummies on a black
> grouse
> lek near randomly chosen males. The eager cocks courted and mounted the
> dummies, sometimes for up to half an hour, which gave passing females lots
> of time to notice. Sure enough, the lucky males ended up mating with more
> real females on that day than either the day before or the day after.
> Other experiments in the lab showed a similar effect in fish known as
> river
> bullheads. Unlike male grouse, who play no part in raising their
> offspring,
> bullhead males are attentive fathers. They guard the eggs and stay with
> hatchlings until they are old enough to survive on their own. And female
> bullheads will always try to spawn with males that already have nests
> containing eggs. It looked as though both grouse and fish females were
> copying others as a shortcut to finding a good mate.
> True, there are other explanations for these behaviours. In the case of
> the
> grouse, the females might simply have been stimulated by the sight of the
> males' prolonged encounters with the dummies--normal grouse copulations
> are
> almost instantaneous. Similarly, bullhead females might have other reasons
> for their preference. For example, by laying their eggs in nests that are
> already occupied, they decrease the chances of them being eaten by
> predators.
> But such objections to mate copying have been sidelined in recent years,
> in
> part because of the work at Louisville by biologist Lee Dugatkin. In 1996,
> Dugatkin got female guppies to change their mind about which male they
> liked
> best solely on account of the preferences of other females. Normally,
> female
> guppies like orange. Given a choice, a female will go with the brightest
> orange male she can find. This may be because the most vividly coloured
> males tend to be the boldest, and will confront approaching predators.
> (The
> researchers added weight to this idea with an experiment in which they
> trapped a drab male in a glass cylinder and held him right up close to a
> large fish. Females that saw this happening subsequently preferred this
> drab
> male to a more orange one held further away.)
> Dugatkin and his colleagues wanted to see if they could override the
> fish's
> genetically based preference for orange. They built a fish tank with two
> smaller tanks attached, one containing an orange male and the other
> holding
> a drab one. A female plopped in the middle tank would court the orange
> male
> through the glass. The same female was liable to change her mind, however,
> if she was first held in the middle by a clear cylinder while a second
> female was trapped by a Plexiglas divider so that she could only swim
> close
> to the drab male. For want of anything better, she courted the drab male.
> When she was removed, along with the dividers, the original female would
> start courting the drab male rather than the orange one.
> Several other cases of mate copying have been reported since then. Last
> year
> David White and Bennett Galef of McMaster University in Ontario reported
> findings from a similar experiment with Japanese quail using cages instead
> of tanks. In this case, the males were equally "attractive" but one was
> allowed to mate with a female for ten minutes, while the other was by
> himself. When the cages were lifted, the female most often courted the
> male
> that had just mated. Similar studies have also turned up mate copying in
> Japanese madaka fish, sailfin mollies and swordtails.
> The prevalence of copying suggests it must give the copier some edge in
> evolution, though exactly what this is remains unclear. One good reason
> for
> copying might be that it saves time choosing a mate--time that could be
> spent doing other things, such as eating or looking out for predators. Or
> it
> may be simply that choosing a quality mate is tricky, and by watching what
> others do, you get more information on which to base this tough choice.
> This
> strategy fails, of course, if the individual you copy knows less than you
> do. But the fact that young guppies tend to copy old ones rather than the
> other way around suggests that here, at least, copying may be a way of
> passing down accumulated wisdom.
> Birds and fish aren't renowned for their intelligence, though. So perhaps
> they rely on imitation because they tend not to do much thinking on their
> own. They follow the flock. They go with the flow. Would
> independent-minded
> human beings, with the power of reason and free choice, care about the
> choices other people make?
> To find out, Dugatkin teamed up with psychologist Michael Cunningham, also
> at Louisville. They presented 166 female undergraduates with a report
> ostensibly written by five of their peers after a 20-minute interview with
> a
> man named Chris. In fact, the five women and Chris were all fictitious.
> The
> reports ranked Chris's physical attractiveness on a scale of 1 to 10, and
> indicated how many of the women were interested in dating him.
> The reports rated Chris as either a 3 or a 10 in attractiveness. In
> addition, four, one or none of the women said she was interested in dating
> him. Once they had read the reports, the women undergraduates were asked
> how
> interested they might be, on a scale of 0 to 6, in dating Chris. A high
> attractiveness rating raised the women's interest by just over a point on
> average compared with a low rating. But peer attention had a stronger
> effect, raising the average dating interest by one-and-a-half points. "The
> underlying assumption is that he must have something going for him," says
> Cunningham. "If other people are attracted to him, he must have something
> they want."
> Men are influenced by their peers too, but not nearly as much as women.
> Running the same experiment on a similar number of men with all the sexes
> reversed--but keeping the androgynous name, Chris--Dugatkin and Cunningham
> found that while men responded similarly to the attractiveness ratings,
> they
> relied less on other men to decide whether they were interested in Chris.
> High peer attention boosted their mean interest by less than a point in
> most
> of the experiments.
> The difference between men and women was even more pronounced when they
> were
> asked to rank their interest in marrying Chris. In this case, high peer
> attention raised the rating given by the men by barely half a point on
> average, whereas the women's interest jumped by two to three times as
> much.
> This is exactly what evolutionary theory might predict about mate copying.
> In most species females tend to be more picky than males. That's because
> they usually invest much more time and energy than males in raising their
> offspring, so choosing the best mate pays big dividends. Males, on the
> other
> hand, can afford to be a bit more cavalier. "So males tend to use a
> smaller
> subset of information to determine what they are interested in," says
> Dugatkin.
> What exactly are women looking for in a mate? Dugatkin and Cunningham
> found
> that women (and men) were strongly influenced by the peer attention rating
> when forming opinions about Chris's various attributes. Regardless of the
> beauty rating, if four peers were attracted they said Chris must have a
> good
> sense of humour and good social skills, and, they said, Chris must be
> wealthy. These qualities are attractive because they suggest that Chris
> will
> be a good parent and provider.
> Studies suggest that wealth may be particularly important to women. Over a
> decade ago, David Buss, an evolutionary psychologist from the University
> of
> Texas at Austin, surveyed the mate preferences of some 10,000 people
> across
> 37 cultures. He found that women universally placed greater importance
> than
> men on good financial prospects as well as related factors such as status
> and ambition. More recent studies show that these factors weigh much less
> heavily with women in highly paid, high-status jobs, suggesting that the
> importance women place on wealth is linked to their own socioeconomic
> status.
> To see just how powerful an influence wealth could have on Chris's
> attractiveness, Cunningham and Dugatkin did another experiment in which
> they
> added a description of Chris as a humanities major with the potential to
> earn only about $20,000 a year. For half of the subjects, they added that
> Chris's parents had won $10 million in a sweepstake and set up a trust
> fund
> for Chris that would pay him $500,000 a year.
> Personal wealth
> When all other variables were the same, wealthy Chris sparked slightly
> more
> interest among both females and males than poor academic Chris. But the
> impact was much smaller than Dugatkin had expected, possibly because the
> money said nothing about Chris's abilities. "One reason people would care
> about wealth is as an indicator of ambitiousness and personality overall,"
> says Dugatkin.
> In some sense, then, being a rich person might be like being an orange
> guppy. Peer attention overrides orange colour in guppies, unless, Dugatkin
> has found, the guppy is very orange indeed. Then peer attention no longer
> gets the female to switch. In humans, what counts may be the ability to
> generate money rather than simply having lots of it. So the question is,
> if
> Chris had an earning potential of $500,000 a year, would that override the
> peer attention effect? It's certainly possible, Dugatkin says, but the
> experiment has still to be done.
> What does any of this have to do with everyday life? "The phenomenon of
> groupies is relevant," says Buss. "You get fairly geeky-looking guys
> generating a sort of mass hysteria which might be a mate copying
> phenomenon." Chances are that few teenage girls swooned over John Lennon
> before the Beatles were famous.
> That sort of celebrity then leads directly to another kind of imitation.
> By
> the mid-1960s most young men were trying to look like the Beatles, then
> later Led Zeppelin and Depeche Mode. Today it's Eminem or David Beckham.
> "Mate copying does help us explain why there is a great deal of variation
> across societies and across time in what we find attractive about the
> opposite sex," says Dugatkin. Trends in clothing, hairstyle, even body
> piercing, are so volatile because of peer attention's snowball effect.
> As for the wedding ring effect, the hunt goes on. A few years ago,
> Cunningham and his colleagues tried an experiment in which women sat alone
> at a bar with a wedding ring clearly visible. But the results were
> inconclusive. "Choosing females may have been a tactical error,"
> Cunningham
> says. "If she is an attractive enough female, whether she has a wedding
> ring
> or not, there is a high base rate of being approached."
> He has not yet tried the reverse experiment, with men waiting at the bar,
> in
> part because the base rate of women approaching men is quite low. Many
> more
> hours of observation would be required to detect an effect--as I can
> personally attest. "The way the ballet usually works is that the female
> makes eye contact and smiles," says Cunningham. "But it's still the guy
> who
> has to get up off his stool and move."
> So I'm getting off the stool and heading home. I am, after all, happily
> married.
> The Imitation Factor by Lee Alan Dugatkin is published in January 2001 by
> The Free Press
>
>
>
> Dr Paul Marsden
> tel: +44 (0) 777 95 77 248
> email: paul@viralculture.com
>
> ===============================================================
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For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
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