Hypothesis
De Vries, Swanson, and Walsh (2008), hypothesized that when on a dating website people would select a mate based on attractiveness of their photo and their self descriptions based on the Parental Investment Theory, who would be a good long term partner to successfully raise a child with. They thought that men and women with the most attractive photographs would be selected more often to go on dates than those with non-attractive photographs, and men would select potential dates based on an attractive photographs alone. Whereas women would be more likely to select dates based on the men’s self description; kindness, understanding, and intelligence.
Method
De Vries, Swanson, and Walsh (2008) studied 589 heterosexual Caucasian individuals, 307 women and 282 males in the Los Angeles area. The men and women were divided into two subcategories, ‘Wish for Children’ or ‘No wish for Children.’ In the ‘Wish for Children’ category the average age for women was 34.1 years of age, with a sample group of 104 women, and men were 36.1 years of age, sample group of 154 men. In the ‘No wish for Children’ …show more content…
In the sample group 1,588 were male and 1,757 were female with a mean age of 48 years of age. In order to measure self esteem, involvement in relationships, sociability, and the use of Internet dating services a DDB Needham Life Style survey was used. Participants were asked to rate themselves in each category, and responses were measured on a 1 (definitely disagree) and 6 (highly agree) scale. Using a median split in how individuals rated themselves in self-esteem and sociability they were divided into categories of high self-esteem or low self-esteem. In the use of Internet dating services they wanted to measure how much they used online dating within the past year, this was measured a 7 point scale ranging from “Never in the past year” to “52+ times this