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Abstract Mate choice requires navigating an exploration-exploitation trade-off. Successful mate choice requires choosing partners who have preferred qualities; but time spent determining one partner’s qualities could have been spent exploring for potentially superior alternatives. Here I argue that this dilemma can be modeled in a reinforcement learning framework as a multi-armed bandit problem. Moreover, using agent-based models and a sample of k = 522 real-world romantic dyads, I show that a reciprocity-weighted Thompson sampling algorithm performs well both in guiding mate search in noisy search environments and in reproducing the mate choices of real-world participants. These results provide a formal model of the understudied psychology of human mate search. They additionally offer implications for our understanding of person perception and mate choice.
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Couple Simulation: A Novel Approach for Evaluating Models of Human Mate Choice
Choosing a mate is perhaps the most important decision a sexually reproducing organism makes in its lifetime. And yet, psychologists lack a precise description of human mate choice, despite sustained attention from several theoretical perspectives. Here, I argue this limited progress owes to the complexity of mate choice and describe a new modeling approach, called “couple simulation,” designed to compare models of mate choice by challenging them to reproduce real couples within simulated mating markets. I present proof-of-concept simulations that demonstrate couple simulation can identify a population’s true model of mate choice. Furthermore, I apply couple simulation to two samples of real couples and find that the method (a) successfully reconstructs real-world couples, (b) discriminates between models of mate choice, and (c) predicts a wide range of dimensions of relationship quality. Collectively, these results provide evidence that couple simulation offers a framework useful for evaluating theories of human mate choice.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1845586
- PAR ID:
- 10209819
- Publisher / Repository:
- SAGE Publications
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Personality and Social Psychology Review
- Volume:
- 25
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 1088-8683
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: p. 191-228
- Size(s):
- p. 191-228
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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