The laws of attraction

The laws of attraction in the modern world are quite simple on the surface. If you like someone and they like you back, you eventually get together and then try to figure out if you’re a good match long-term. If it works, you stay together – if it doesn’t, you get to meet other people and have as much fun as you want until you find someone. But what if it’s not as simple as that? Some scientists around the world are analyzing the minutiae of relationships in terms of attraction and they’re finding some really interesting and surprising things. For example, did you know that men who have a super hot son are markedly more appealing to women than those with ugly ones? Somewhere out there, Brad and Leo’s dads are having an awesome time. Check out the rest of the findings below and follow the link for the rest of the story.
Your Hips Could Play a Role in How Many People You Sleep With
A professor at the University of Leeds has come up with a potentially controversial hypothesis in women’s studies: that ladies with wider hips have more sexual partners that those who do not. The educator came to this finding after measuring a group of Leeds womens’ hip width — the distance between the upper edges of the iliac crest bones of the pelvis — as well as their hip circumference at the widest point, and combined that information with their sexual histories. He found that those who were less-curvy tended to only have sex when they were in relationships, as opposed to their wider-hipped friends, who also had more overall partners. In the following excerpt from the article, we explain how this phenomenon might have come to be:
Some anthropologists theorize that as humans learned to stand upright, they developed smaller hips to make walking easier, while female hips became just wide enough for childbirth. Narrow-hipped mothers-to-be run a higher risk of gynecological injury and death.
Men with Hot Sons Score More
A biologist at Trnava University in Slovakia authored a recent study that found men with handsome sons tend to appear more attractive to women. How come? It turns out that the way we perceive the attractiveness of a mate, even after the birth of a child, can influence everything from whether we stay together, have an affair, or even how many future children we produce with that partner. The study asked 260 female volunteers to rate the attractiveness of a series of men that were placed alongside photos of boys’ faces and were told the pair depicted was a real-life father and son, or a stepfather and son; in reality, none of the men and boys pictured were related. We explain what happened next, in this excerpt from the article:
On average, when a man was placed next to what participants believed was his handsome son, his own perceived attractiveness tended to rise, an effect even more pronounced among the unattractive men. The effect, however, disappeared when the man was identified as the stepfather of the boy, suggesting that the women may have been subconsciously adjusting their assessments based on a perceived genetic connection between the two individuals.
Women Love Men Who Are Kind to Their Sister’s Babies
It turns out that women also like guys who are good with kids, according to a 2014 study in the Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment. Nicolas Guéguen, a professor of social and cognitive psychology at the University of South Brittany, conducted his study by creating a situation where a male volunteer acted like a kind and devoted brother to a woman with a baby. Guéguen found that on average, women were three times more likely to give out their numbers when the male volunteer acted affectionately toward the baby. But there may be a limitation to how much women will appreciate baby lovers, as noted in the following excerpt from the article.
The study also doesn’t reflect the real-life trade-offs between financial stability and paternal qualities, said David Geary, a professor of psychology at the University of Missouri. For example, Guéguen could have determined how dressing the male volunteer in a suit affected the women’s ratings. “Women like nice paternal guys, but there comes a point where he needs to make a certain amount of money,” he said.
Women Are More Direct at Flirting
Science says both women and men are terrible at flirting, with a recent study finding that only 18 percent of women knew a man was flirting with them in a one-on-one situation and men only knowing a woman was flirting with them 36 percent of the time. That is low! So how is everyone getting together in the first place? Jeffrey Hall, the lead researcher and associate professor of communications at Kansas University, says that it might be because women are more transparent when it comes to showing interest in everyday situations.