Mate poaching, American style.

• Author: Puterbaugh, Dolores T.
• Position: Human behavior - PARTING THOUGHTS

BIRDS DO IT; bees do it. Scadett O'Hara was an Olympian, and so was Zeus. Hamlet's Uncle Claudius was a mere amateur. Mate poaching is the current sociological term for stealing someone else's romantic partner. In the ongoing effort to understand and analyze human behavior, researchers are defining and studying narrow, nuanced slivers of predatory behavior. It is important to build our understanding of the human experience. Scientific knowledge is compiled slowly and carefully. Life experience is more of a speeding locomotive. Thus, people outside a particular field with any common sense may be perplexed by summaries of studies. So much grant money, so many pages of dissertations, trying to deduce one correlation about two narrowly defined variables within the cavalcading chaos of the typical human psyche.

David P. Schmitt, professor of psychology at Bradley University in Illinois, published substantial research in 2004 indicating that mate poaching is a worldwide phenomenon. Other researchers have found evidence supporting what your parents told you: people who behave this way are not nice; they are self-absorbed, selfish, and narcissistic. The results may seem obvious, but the research has value. As we learn more about how specific personality traits correlate to behavior, we may find ways to help people overcome weaknesses and pathologies. On the other hand, we simply may be more effective at helping unselfish people read the early warning signs so they can run like the devil and save themselves some heartache.

Recent research on mate poaching published by Profs. Jessica Parker and Melissa Burkley of the Oklahoma State University Department of Psychology indicates that a stunning majority of the single women in their survey were more interested in men described as already in a committed relationship than available men. Men and attached women did not exhibit this particular tendency. Social scientists are compelled to be cool and detached in describing possible explanations for such results. Their placidity flies in the face of most people's experience. It is profoundly generous to suggest that the study participants simply may be responding to deep, evolutionary, biological drives to seek the best possible genes for future bundles of joy. It is almost as kind when researchers suggest that the participants merely may consider these men to have been conveniently prescreened as good mating material, as if the current partners comprise a...