“Men’s Mate Value Correlates With a Less Restricted Sociosexual Orientation: A Meta-Analysis”, Steven Arnocky, Jessica Desrochers, Amanda Rotella, Graham Albert, Carolyn Hodges-Simeon, Ashley Locke, Jacob Belanger, Danielle Lynch, Benjamin Kelly2021-07-29 (, ; similar)⁠:

Men, relative to women, can benefit their total reproductive success by engaging in short-term pluralistic mating. Yet not all men enact such a mating strategy. It has previously been hypothesized that high mate value men should be most likely to adopt a short-term mating strategy, with this prediction being firmly grounded in some important mid-level evolutionary psychological theories. Yet evidence to support such a link has been mixed.

This paper presents a comprehensive meta-analysis of 33 published and unpublished studies (n = 5,928).

We find that self-reported mate value accounts for roughly 6% of variance in men’s sociosexual orientation.

The meta-analysis provides evidence that men’s self-perceived mate value positively predicts their tendency to engage in short-term mating, but that the total effect-size is small.

[Keywords: mate value, sociosexual orientation, mating strategies, strategic pluralism theory, sexual behavior, meta-analysis]