ArticleScientific reports2018
Human mate-choice copying is domain-general social learning.
Article in Scientific reports, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Financial Status of Model, Target, and Observer Modulates Mate Choice Copying and the Mediating Effect of Personality.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Investigating the effects of social information on spite in an online game.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Agent-based models of the cultural evolution of occupational gender roles.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- The experimental evolution of human culture: flexibility, fidelity and environmental instability.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Limited evidence of hierarchical encoding in the cheerleader effect.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Commentary: The neural basis of human female mate copying: An empathy-based social learning process.Frontiers in psychology · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Women appear to copy other women's preferences for men's faces. This 'mate-choice copying' is often taken as evidence of psychological adaptations for processing social information related to mate choice, for which facial information is assumed to be particularly salient. No experiment, however, has directly investigated whether women preferentially copy each other's face preferences more than other preferences. Further, because prior experimental studies used artificial social information, the effect of real social information on attractiveness preferences is unknown. We collected attractiveness ratings of pictures of men's faces, men's hands, and abstract art given by heterosexual women, before and after they saw genuine social information gathered in real time from their peers. Ratings of faces were influenced by social information, but no more or less than were images of hands and abstract art. Our results suggest that evidence for domain-specific social learning mechanisms in humans is weaker than previously suggested.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.