Alpha Dominance

Happy New Year Alpha-Acolytes.  After an extended Holiday break I am back in the saddle in Seattle.  I trust you all had as wild and exciting new year as I spent with family in the frozen midwest city of Minneapolis, aka little Somalia.  Traveler’s tip: There is a treasure trove of exotic girls of East African descent there ripe for the game.  If you ever touchdown in flyover country don’t miss this gem.

As a student of ev psych and of the game this article on the increased value of beauty in population centers caught my attention.  While the findings should come as a surprise to few of us it’s always interesting to add mortar to the foundation of the worldview fostered by studying pickup.  I am convinced the tenets of this worldview are well substantiated as I have attempted to show here on AD.  The findings state that particularly in population centers happiness and psychological well-being are correlated with attractiveness or desirability for women.  This is correctly stated to be because of increased social and reproductive opportunity and emphasizes that in larger groups of people individuals will engage in greater socioeconomic segregation by degree of desirability.  Kudos to the authors for recognizing what is one of the prime tenets of game.  On the other hand they fall short in giving the salutary nod to the PC mythos in stating that were a study to be performed of men we would likely see the same outcome.  This is of course myopic in that male attractiveness while relevant, ranks far down the scale of priorities from the degree of attractiveness of his wallet.  Size matters gents, but it’s the bulge in the back pocket of your jeans that wins the day since women seek a provider of equal or better yet greater income to that she herself possesses.  Since both incomes and the range of the 1-10 scale are wider in large populations, we should expect to see couples matching up therein according to these rankings and anecdotally I would suggest that we do (just look at Jim Carey’s first and second wives alongside one another).  Here is the article as found on Livescience:

Melissa Mahony
Special to LiveScience
LiveScience.com Melissa Mahony
special To Livescience
livescience.com – Fri Jan 8, 10:50 am ET

For women, looks may matter more if they live in the city than in rural areas, a new study finds.

The results, which are based on body shape rather than overall beauty, showed that in cities the most attractive gals had higher social and psychological well-being. That same link wasn’t found for country residents.

 The researchers suggest with higher population densities, cities offer more potential friends and sexual partners, allowing city folks to be choosier and so theoretically able to select the cream of the crop to associate with.

Though the study is based on women, the researchers suspect similar results would hold for men, with their physical appeal also impacting their personal lives more so in cities where a more “free market” of relationships exists.

What’s going on

In rural areas, people don’t tend to handpick their pals.

“Rural areas have more embedded networks for relationships, more densely overlapping relationships where you see the same people and are friends with the same people across time,” said study researcher Victoria Plaut, a cultural and social psychologist at the University of Georgia. “If there is more security, then attractiveness is less likely to matter for forming friendships.”

Plaut and her colleagues analyzed survey data from women ages 26 to 75 within city and rural communities across the United States. The scientists used waist-to-hip ratios as a proxy for a woman’s physical desirability, comparing that with personal assessments of well-being, such as life satisfaction, self-acceptance, feelings of control, and interaction with and support from friends.

“We don’t know how [waist-to-hip ratio] represents ‘overall’ attractiveness, only that studies have found it to be related to judgments of female attractiveness,” Plaut told LiveScience.

In fact, past research has shown that women with a waist-to-hip ratio of 0.7 – indicating a waist significantly narrower than the hips – are most desirable to men.

Overall, the women who lived in cities were just as happy as their rural counterparts. But the researchers found a stronger correlation between level of desirability and contentment with themselves and their social lives for urbanites than those living in the country. City dwellers who were aesthetically just a smidgen below average experienced less robust social ties as well as more diminished psychological well-beings.

Different social scenes

The data also pointed to differences in the structures of the social scenes. Urban residents tended to enjoy more frequent contact with individual friends while rural residents felt a greater sense of belonging within their larger community.

In addition to attractiveness, Plaut said other traits such as intelligence and personality might also cement more social connections.

“I think anything that is typically used to sort people as more desirable or less desirable relationship partners would be increased in settings like that, where relationships are constructed as a matter of choice,” she said.

The findings suggest the importance of being attractive to your happiness is not universal, and that its significance is more a matter of culture than human nature. Still, Plaut cautions against people switching zip codes in the hopes of bolstering their emotional support network.

“If you’re a city girl who moves to the country, you are also taking your social habits with you,” she said. “You’re not necessarily going to change your entire outlook on relationships.”

The research is published in the December 2009 issue of the journal Personal Relationships.

As you can see they touch on many of the reproductive capital variables that we address in ev psych.  These principles are slowly pervading popular culture and eroding the PC stranglehold on reason that continues to convince men and women to behave in stupid and ineffective ways in an attempt to achieve their desired outcomes.  A number of my past posts address the topics covered herein and in the linked article on attraction in more detail and may be a resource for those interested in the game theory of reproductive segregation.  A look at why women are more cooperative in larger populations and with men of higher status is here.  An examination of the correlation between physical attractiveness and intelligence can be found here.  A look at the biological value of fidelity can be found here.  The value of the waist to hip ratio as a proxy for sexual value can be found here.  The third part in my series on human pheromones with backlinks to the others in the series is available here.  Sex appeal aka reproductive capital is addressed here.  Beauty as a proxy for genetic robustness and quality is found here.

These along with many others to be found in my archives collectively flesh out the game/ev psych oriented worldview of what biological and social factors contribute to success in dating and mating, which as we can see above if it wasn’t self evident are primary components in life satisfaction and happiness.  In the world of urban dating it is clearly sink or swim (as gentlemen as the initiators of hook-ups can readily contest).  If you can’t keep your head above water you have two options: increase your value or head for parts unknown in the country where you might pull off being a big fish in a little pond.  Or if not, at least your happiness may not hang in the balance.  Good luck in the field gents.  Go for that hottie that seems out of your league.  Not only are most men afraid to game her but she’ll be happier and less likely to be a headcase.