Hot Toys November 2009
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Recently released research suggests that guys indeed want to use a nice-guy-strategy when looking for a date. While nice guys tend to be out-performed by “jerks” when competing over one female, the nice guy seems to have a definite advantage within a group of females, researchers at Binghamton University and the University of Arizona found. But before you adjust your dating strategy, be warned that there is a catch and this research result may have a rather limited value.
That catch refers to the target group in this research project, which were not humans, but water striders, an insect that is a common model system. We have no idea how the “sexual conflict” behavior of water striders is related to humans, but at least the researchers believe that there is enough common ground to draw general conclusions that also apply to humans.
Research group leader Omar Tonsi Eldakar Eldakar said that he perceives sexual conflict as an example of the “tragedy of the commons,” a situation in which the most exploitive strategy benefits the individual at the expense of the group. Few researchers have framed sexual conflict in these terms; however, Eldakar sees a parallel between that shared pasture and the availability of females.
“When you pit exploitation against prudence in direct competition over a shared resource, you’re putting them into a scenario that favors the short-term, exploitative strategy, making it difficult to observe the advantage of prudence,” he said. “This does not accurately reflect what occurs in natural populations. But given a choice, females look for a way to get away from persistent males. If you allow individuals to self-organize, females find these nice guys and group around them, changing the landscape of competition.”
Eldakar noted that a “more gentlemanly approach to mating” will prevail in groups while “jerks generally outperform the nice guys when they have to compete one-on-one.”
Within his research Eldakar describes the insects as “gentlemen” vs. “psychopaths.”
“The presence of psychopaths dramatically reduced the productivity of the population,” co-author David Wilson said. “When all the males were gentlemen, the females laid about three times more eggs than they did when all the males were psychopaths. And yet within each group the psychopaths were doing better than the gentlemen. How do the gentlemen persist if they’re disadvantaged within the group?”
Once the females could move between groups, the researchers had their answer. “When they opened the doors, the females would leave whenever a psychopath came around,” Wilson said. “The whole thing resulted in a heterogeneity in which the females were clustered with the gentlemen. It’s the movement of individuals that creates these differences between groups that favor nonaggressive males.”
