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Rational mate choice decisions vary with female age and multidimensional male signals in swordtails

L. Reding,M. Cummings

Published 2018 in Ethology

ABSTRACT

In 1954, Kenneth May performed a simple but powerful experiment with a classroom of college students (May, 1954). He presented his students with three hypothetical marriage partners that varied in wealth, attractiveness, and intelligence. He created all three possible pairs of these hypothetical partners, which he called x, y, and z: x with y, y with z, and x with z. He then independently presented each student with each pair of hypothetical partners and asked which of the two potential partners in each pair the student preferred. When May tallied up the students’ responses, he found that some of the students showed intransitive, rockpaperscissorslike preferences: for these students, there was no most attractive partner. Rather, the attractiveness of a given partner depended on the other partner she was paired with (her “choice set” or “choice environment”). Intransitive preferences like those that May described in humans are of interest to both biologists and economists because they imply irrationality: the idea that options cannot be ranked consistently on a univariate scale (Kacelnik, 2006; Kirkpatrick, Rand, & Ryan, 2006; Luce, 1959). Irrationality implies that choosers are not independently evaluating the available options but are instead comparing among options. Although there are other consequences of rationality, perhaps the most fundamental hallmark of rational behavior is transitivity—the ability of a chooser to form an internally consistent ranking of her options (Bateson & Healy, 2005; Luce, Received: 2 March 2018 | Revised: 14 April 2018 | Accepted: 25 May 2018 DOI: 10.1111/eth.12769

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