What is it about?
We ran an experiment where we put participants in different virtual towns with different economic circumstances. In some of these virtual towns, they were rich, in others they were poor, and in others they were somewhere in the middle. In some towns, women made a lot more money, and in others, men made a lot more money. We wanted to see how the economics changed what they wanted in a partner, and we found that when people are poorer, and when gender economic inequality was stacked against them, they wanted richer partners.
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Why is it important?
It's a new way of getting at a really old question. For 36 years, people have debated whether and to what degree gender economic inequality impacts what people want in romantic partners, usually using cross-sectional data. By using an experiment, we can get at the causal relationships between these variables.
Perspectives
I hope this article encourages others to consider mate preferences (what people want in romantic partners) as strategic responses to their environment.
Macken Murphy
University of Melbourne
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Partner preferences for resources adapt to income and gender economic inequality, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, March 2026, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2527295123.
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