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The Strategies Of Finding A Mate

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Lauren Soentgen Approach: 1, Source: Buss, 1994

In his article, The Strategies of Finding a Mate, David M. Buss discusses the act of finding a mate and the characteristics that people are drawn to in a mate. He begins the article with a brief look at the history of mating and the theories that have previously been proposed. In particular he addressed Charles Darwin’s theory of sexual evolution and belief in preferential mate choice. Buss proposes that there are three components to human mating. He states that “human mating is inherently strategic… mating strategies are context-dependent… [and that] men and women have faced different mating problems over the course of human evolution and, as a consequence, have evolved different strategies” (Buss, 1994, p. 241). He uses this theory to propose nine different hypotheses to prove that despite humans being varied and different from each other, all humans look for similar characteristics when trying to find a mate (Buss, 1994). To investigate his research hypotheses, Buss collected data from two sources. His first source was college students in the United States. For his second source, Buss (1994) worked with 50 other scientists in order to survey over 10,000 men and women from around the world. This was his greatest strength in the article. He had collected so much research that it made the data seem credible, and the fact that the participants came from diverse backgrounds means it is a better representation of the

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