Transitive Mate Preferences

Rational mate choices are central to individual happiness and collective social goods. Yet, few studies assess mate choice rationality from the decision-theoretic perspective. Here we present an experimental test of rationality in human mate preferences through the lens of transitivity, a fundamental hallmark of rational decision-making. In the experiment, participants made repeated binary choices between pairs of potential romantic partners in both short-term and long-term mating contexts. We tested the transitivity of mate preferences by systematically comparing four prominent transitive models with four models that allow for intransitive preferences on the choice data. Overall, all transitive models provided better accounts than the intransitive models in Bayesian model selection and strong stochastic transitivity (SST), the most restrictive transitive model, outperformed other transitive models. On the individual level, participants rarely displayed intransitive cycles and most of them were best described by transitive models in Bayesian model selection. Our paper presents a systematic evaluation of transitivity in mate preferences and sheds new light on our understanding of human mating behavior.