Competition Piques Men’s Interest in Sex
Men are desperate to out-compete each other in the attractiveness stakes. But what effect does competition itself have on their behaviour?
Gregory Gorelik and David Bjorklund of Florida Atlantic University decided to test what happens to men’s sexual interest when they win or lose a contest with another man.
The researchers had 113 men visit their lab. The volunteers were told that they were about to take part in a computerised reaction time test, and that their job was to out-compete another male volunteer who was at that moment seated in the next room at a computer of his own. A countdown appeared on the monitor and when the word GO! appeared, the volunteer had to tap a button as fast as he possibly could.
I think I’d be quite good at that task. When I was kid I had a copy of Daley Thompson’s Decathlon for the ZX Spectrum +2. If I remember correctly, each of the ten events — whether it was 100 metres, long jump, or shot putt — involved repeatedly whamming the Z and X keys as quickly as possible. Ahhh. The golden age of gaming…
Anyway, after Gorelik and Bjorklund’s volunteers finished each round of competition, they were given onscreen feedback to indicate whether they had beaten their opponent. However, unlike in Daley Thompson’s Decathlon, the speed at which the players hit the keys had no bearing on their success. As those of you who are familiar with the level of deception common in psychology experiments might have guessed, the opponent was fictional. And because the opponent didn’t exist, the volunteers never really won or lost. It was all random. One third of the volunteers were pre-selected to be winners, another third to be losers, and the rest of the participants acted as a control group: they played the game, but were never told that they had an opponent. They tapped the buttons thinking they were competing only against themselves.
In the second phase of the experiment, the men saw a series of photographs of female faces. The female faces varied in attractiveness, but all were smiling. The volunteers were told that this part of the experiment had nothing to do with the first, and was about reading facial expressions. They answered a long list of questions about the women, including how attractive they were. The men rated how likely they would be to ask each woman out on a date, how interested they would be in having sex with them, and so on, each time making their choices using an 8 point scale. These questions were hidden among questions unrelated to sex, such as “how artistic is this woman?” and “how motivated is this woman?” These ‘filler’ questions were meant to conceal the true purpose of the experiment from the volunteers so that they would respond more honestly.
As we would expect, all men reported more interest in the physically attractive women than the unattractive women. But was there an effect of winning, losing, or competition in general on men’s attraction to women?
In men with partners, the answer was no. There was no difference between partnered men in the winning, losing, or control groups.
But for men who were single, there were differences. Not when the women were low in attractiveness: then all of the men tended to give interest ratings of about 1.5 on the 8 point scale. When the single men rated their sexual interest in attractive women, the scores did vary according to the men’s groups. Losing men gave scores of about 3.5. They were quite interested. Men in the control group (men who were not told they were competing with another man) gave scores of around 4. Slightly more interested than the losers. Winning men gave scores of around 5: they were most interested of all.
Remember that none of these men really were winners or losers: they only thought they were. This means the effect is down to how men feel about themselves rather than their actual performance.
It’s worth pointing out that men who already had a partner reported that they were interested in the attractive women at a level of about 4 or 4.5, which is similar to the results of the control group of single men. What this suggests is that single men are more sensitive to winning or losing than partnered men are. A single man wins and his interest in attractive women increases; he loses and his interest drops. Partnered men are more resistant to change in their attitudes after competition. This could be because they don’t have to worry too much about the effects of male-male antagonism on their love life. As Gorelik and Bjorklund put it:
For men who are already mated, the reproductive benefits of increases in sexual interest as a result of winning might not be worth the associated costs.
In other words, partnered men were probably still going home with their girlfriend, regardless of whether they won or lost at Daley Thompson’s Decathlon.
Gorelik, G., & Bjorklund, D. F. (in press). The effect of competition on men’s self-reported sexual interest. Evolutionary Psychological Science. Read summary
The content of this post first appeared in the 2 June 2015 episode of The Psychology of Attractiveness Podcast.
