From Universal Mechanisms to Cultural Diversity
What Trophy Wives Tell Us About the Emergence of Human Society
Although age preferences in desired mates seem at first blush
to be a rather mundane and simple topic, a closer examination raises profound
issues about the relationship between psychological mechanisms and the emergence
of societal norms. Cross-culturally, women of all ages tend to choose relatively
older males as mates, whereas only older men show a strong preference for
females below their own age. Yet there are noteworthy exceptions to this
pattern for individual couples, and for at least one whole society, in which
young men marry substantially older women. Closer examination of the exceptions
suggests that the variations are not random, but themselves linked to fundamental
human preferences in interaction with societal norms. Cultural variations
in other social norms may also reflect interactions between fundamental motivations
and factors in the local physical and social ecology. Newer dynamical systems
approaches to group behavior can help understand how regularized social
norms arise out of individual psychological mechanisms.