Buss et al. (1990) – International preferences in selecting mates.

A study of 37
Cultures
The story of David Buss' famous study is almost as interesting as the results it produced. Buss
was inspired by reading Donald Symons famous book 'The Evolution of Human Sexuality, and
decided to carry out a comprehensive cross-cultural study to test the claims made by the book.
He termed this the 'International Mate Selection Project', and aimed to see if there were certain
universal traits which influenced mate selection worldwide (if a trait is evolved, then we would
expect it to be universal - to be present to some degree in all human populations. Culture may
have some effect, but the basic trait should still be present regardless).
Buss managed to persuade his collaborators across the world to travel to some of the most remote
and politically unstable parts of the globe, carrying with them translated versions of his
questionnaires on mate selection. Lions, hostile tribes and communist governments were just
some of the perils that were faced (the questionnaires had to be smuggled out of China in code
so as not to alert the authorities). In the end, 37 cultures, from 33 countries contributed to a total
sample size of nearly 10000 people, an extremely large number for a study of this kind.
Procedure:
Participants were 9,474 individuals from 37 cross-cultural samples (33 countries and five islands
on six continents; mean age 23.15). The data was collected through two questionnaires developed
in the USA and translated.
Results:
• Respondents in nearly all cultures rated “mutual attraction and love” as the most
important in a relationship. This shows that the desire for mutual love in a relationship is
not merely a Western phenomenon.
• “Chastity” showed the largest effect for culture (37% of the variance). Chastity was valued
in China, India, Taiwan, Palestinian Israel, and Iran. Respondents in the Netherlands and
the Scandinavian countries did not care about chastity.
• “Good financial prospects”, “good earning capacity”, ambition, and social status are
consistently valued more in a partner by women than men cross-culturally.
• "Youth” is valued more by men than women. Men prefer wives that are younger but how
much younger depends on the culture. In cultures that allow many wives, there may be
large age differences.
• “Physical attractiveness” in a partner is valued more by men than women. Cross-cultural
norms of physical attractiveness are, for example, clear and supple skin, regular features,
full lips
Evaluation of Buss et al's findings
• The study suffered from problems of
• As has already been mentioned, translation-back-translation, because they
the study had a large sample had to translate it the first time to get
size, which should make the participants to understand, and then they had to
findings more reliable and translate the responses, so that could decrease
generalisable. the validity of the results.
• Similarly, the fact that a large • Since this relies on self-reported data, it
range of cultures were used cannot be completely reliable.
makes the sample more • The samples for each country were not totally
representative of the human representative of the country as a whole so it is
race as a whole. still impossible to generalize the findings.to all
cultures and countries.