In mate allocation research where individuals design their own profiles using a budget, men allocate more budget toward increasing their wealth and status relative to women, whereas women allocate more toward increasing their physical attractiveness relative to men.
"He also did a study where he had people allocate for themselves if I'm not mistaken. And it it mirrored the uh it mirrored that that same pattern where it's like when men were kind of RPG style building their own character... basically men tried to make themselves richer relative to women and women tried to make themselves prettier relative to men." (said at 1:21:49)
The mate budget allocation paradigm developed by Norman Li and colleagues investigates how individuals prioritize traits under constrained budgets when designing ideal romantic partners, rather than self-profiles. In these experiments, when allocating limited "mate dollars," men consistently allocate more budget toward a prospective partner's physical attractiveness, treating it as an economic necessity, whereas women allocate more budget toward a partner's social status and resources (PMID: 12051582, PMID: 31494937). While the speaker characterizes this sex-differentiated allocation pattern as individuals designing their own "RPG style" characters or self-profiles, the published mate-budget experiments demonstrate this trade-off in the selection and construction of prospective mates.
- context: The necessities and luxuries of mate preferences: testing the tradeoffs. (Journal of personality and social psychology 2002)
"In Studies 1 and 2, participants designed ideal long-term mates, purchasing various characteristics with 3 different budgets. Study 3 used a mate-screening paradigm and showed that people inquire 1st about hypothesized necessities. Physical attractiveness was a necessity to men, status and resources were necessities to women, and kindness and intelligence were necessities to both." (abstract, results, passage verified)
pubmed - context: Mate preference priorities in the East and West: A cross-cultural test of the mate prefere… (Journal of personality 2020)
"In the largest test of the mate preference priority model to date, we asked an international sample of participants (N = 2,477) to design an ideal long-term partner by allocating mate dollars to eight traits using three budgets." (abstract, results)
pubmedfull study (doi)