Sexes differ in evolved mate preferences.

• Position: Human Reproduction

Men's and women's ideas of the perfect mate differ significantly due to evolutionary pressures, according to a cross-cultural study on multiple mate preferences by psychologists at the University of Texas, Austin. The study of men and women in 33 countries and 37 cultures--published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin--shows that sex differences in mate preferences are much larger than previously appreciated and stable across cultures.

"Many want to believe that women and men are identical in their underlying psychology, but the genders differ strikingly in their evolved mate preferences in some domains," says study coauthor David Buss, professor of psychology. 'The same holds true in highly sexually egalitarian cultures such as Sweden and Norway as in less egalitarian cultures such as Iran."

Mating is multidimensional and requires matching a pattern of mate preferences to a pattern of potential mate features. The researchers suggest that these patterns of mate preferences are far more linked to gender than any individual mate preference examined separately would suggest. Researchers found that they could predict a person's sex with 92.2% accuracy if they knew his or her mate preferences.

"The large overall difference between men's...