Conroy-Beam Daniel
University of California, Santa Barbara, USA.
Pers Soc Psychol Rev. 2021 Aug;25(3):191-228. doi: 10.1177/1088868320971258. Epub 2021 Jan 7.
Choosing a mate is perhaps the most important decision a sexually reproducing organism makes in its lifetime. And yet, psychologists lack a precise description of human mate choice, despite sustained attention from several theoretical perspectives. Here, I argue this limited progress owes to the complexity of mate choice and describe a new modeling approach, called "couple simulation," designed to compare models of mate choice by challenging them to reproduce real couples within simulated mating markets. I present proof-of-concept simulations that demonstrate couple simulation can identify a population's true model of mate choice. Furthermore, I apply couple simulation to two samples of real couples and find that the method (a) successfully reconstructs real-world couples, (b) discriminates between models of mate choice, and (c) predicts a wide range of dimensions of relationship quality. Collectively, these results provide evidence that couple simulation offers a framework useful for evaluating theories of human mate choice.
选择伴侣或许是有性生殖生物一生中做出的最重要决定。然而，尽管有多个理论视角持续关注，心理学家仍缺乏对人类伴侣选择的精确描述。在此，我认为这一有限进展归因于伴侣选择的复杂性，并描述了一种新的建模方法，称为“伴侣模拟”，旨在通过挑战模型在模拟交配市场中重现真实伴侣来比较伴侣选择模型。我展示了概念验证模拟，证明伴侣模拟能够识别出一个群体真正的伴侣选择模型。此外，我将伴侣模拟应用于两组真实伴侣样本，发现该方法（a）成功重构了现实世界中的伴侣关系，（b）区分了伴侣选择模型，并且（c）预测了关系质量的广泛维度。总体而言，这些结果提供了证据，表明伴侣模拟提供了一个有助于评估人类伴侣选择理论的框架。
