NancyLebovitz comments on Open Thread, September 1-15, 2012 - Less Wrong
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I'm pretty sure greater gender equality in a society translates into women who are less likely to say they look for status in mates. To a certain extent it seems plausible that it influences behaviour, I'm very sceptical of the implied argument that "high status in men" ceases to be a key sexy trait if you just have the right culture though.
Did they put "is well liked by other women" or "someone who my friends consider cool" on that list?
I don't know, but that last would just reflect the consensus, no matter what it was.
It might be worthwhile to ask men from the various countries what women seemed to be looking for.
I'm not sure this would produce good results. That we have the phrase "he got lucky" indicates men may be clueless about what women want. A better result would be gained data mining online behaviour in response to flirting on say Facebook.
Computational sociology ftw.
"Might be useful" is a weak claim. I was thinking that if men say "women want men with money" in the gender disparity countries and they say "women want good-looking men" in the gender equal countries, it would be confirmatory evidence. Likewise, it might be of interest if men of different ages in the same country have different views of what women want.
There are certainly plenty of men who are convinced they know what women want on the average, if not in particular cases. I wonder how much they're subject to availability bias.