When faced with risky decisions, people typically choose to diversify their choices by allocating resources across a variety of options and thus avoid putting “all their eggs in one basket.” The current research revealed that this tendency is reversed when people face an important cue to mating-related risk: skew in the operational sex ratio, or the ratio of men to women in the local environment. Counter to the typical strategy of choice diversification, findings from four studies demonstrated that the presence of romantically unfavorable sex ratios (those featuring more same-sex than opposite-sex individuals) led heterosexual people to diversify financial resources less and instead concentrate investment in high-risk/high-return options when making lottery, stock-pool, retirement-account, and research-funding decisions. These studies shed light on a key process by which people manage risks to mating success implied by unfavorable interpersonal environments. These choice patterns have important implications for mating behavior as well as other everyday forms of decision making.
BakerM. D.Jr.ManerJ. K. (2008). Risk-taking as a situationally sensitive male mating strategy. Evolution and Human Behavior, 29, 391–395.
2.
BarberN. (2001). On the relationship between marital opportunity and teen pregnancy: The sex ratio question. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 32, 259–267.
3.
BenartziS.ThalerR. H. (2001). Naive diversification strategies in defined contribution saving plans. American Economic Review, 91, 79–98.
4.
BernoulliD. (1954). Exposition of a new theory on the measurement of risk (SommerL., Trans.). Econometrica, 22, 22–36. (Original work published 1738)
5.
CummingG. (2014). The new statistics: Why and how. Psychological Science, 25, 7–29.
6.
DalyM.WilsonM. (2001). Risk-taking, intrasexual competition, and homicide. In FrenchJ. A.KamilA. C.LegerD. W. (Eds.), Nebraska Symposium on Motivation: Vol. 47. Evolutionary psychology and motivation (pp. 1–36). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
7.
DuranteK. M.GriskeviciusV.SimpsonJ. A.CantuS. M.TyburJ. M. (2012). Sex ratio and women’s career choice: Does a scarcity of men lead women to choose briefcase over baby?Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103, 121–134.
8.
EmlenS. T.OringL. W. (1977). Ecology, sexual selection, and the evolution of mating systems. Science, 197, 215–223.
FoxC. R.RatnerR. K.LiebD. S. (2005). How subjective grouping of options influences choice and allocation: Diversification bias and the phenomenon of partition dependence. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 134, 538–551.
11.
GriskeviciusV.TyburJ. M.AckermanJ. M.DeltonA. W.RobertsonT. E.WhiteA. E. (2012). The financial consequences of too many men: Sex ratio effects on saving, borrowing, and spending. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 102, 69–80.
12.
GuttentagM.SecordP. F. (1983). Too many women? The sex ratio question. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
13.
HahnA. C.FisherC. I.DeBruineL. M.JonesB. C. (2014). Sex ratio influences the motivational salience of facial attractiveness. Biology Letters, 10(6). doi:10.1098/rsbl.2014.0148
14.
HalberstadtJ. (2006). The generality and ultimate origins of the attractiveness of prototypes. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 10, 166–183.
15.
HayesA. F. (2013). Introduction to mediation, moderation and conditional process analysis: A regression-based approach. New York, NY: Guilford Press.
16.
HowellD. C. (2013). Statistical methods for psychology (8th ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
17.
HudsonV. M.Den BoerA. (2002). A surplus of men, a deficit of peace: Security and sex ratios in Asia’s largest states. International Security, 26, 5–38.
18.
KahnemanD.LovalloD. (1993). Timid choices and bold forecasts: A cognitive perspective on risk taking. Management Science, 39, 17–31.
19.
KenrickD. T.GriskeviciusV.NeubergS. L.SchallerM. (2010). Renovating the pyramid of needs: Contemporary extensions built upon ancient foundations. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 5, 292–314.
20.
KrugerD. J.SchlemmerE. (2009). Male scarcity is differentially related to male marital likelihood across the life course. Evolutionary Psychology, 7, 280–287.
21.
LiY. J.KenrickD. T.GriskeviciusV.NeubergS. L. (2012). Economic decision biases and fundamental motivations: How mating and self-protection alter loss aversion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 102, 550–561.
22.
ManerJ. K.AckermanJ. M. (2015). Sexually selective cognition. Current Opinion in Psychology, 1, 52–56.
23.
MishraS.BarclayP.LalumièreM. L. (2014). Competitive disadvantage facilitates risk taking. Evolution and Human Behavior, 35, 126–132.
24.
MossJ. H.ManerJ. K. (2016). Biased sex ratios influence fundamental aspects of human mating. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 42, 72–80.
OlofssonH.RipaJ.JonzénN. (2009). Bet-hedging as an evolutionary game: The trade-off between egg size and number. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 276, 2963–2969.
PolletT. V.NettleD. (2008). Driving a hard bargain: Sex ratio and male marriage success in a historical US population. Biology Letters, 4, 31–33.
29.
ReadD.LoewensteinG. (1995). Diversification bias: Explaining the discrepancy in variety seeking between combined and separated choices. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 1, 34–49.
30.
RosenthalR.RosnowR. (2007). Essentials of behavioral research: Methods and data analysis (3rd ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Higher Education.
31.
RothschildM.StiglitzJ. E. (1971). Increasing risk: II. Its economic consequences. Journal of Economic Theory, 3, 66–84.
32.
SegerJ.BrockmannH. J. (1987). What is bet-hedging? In HarveyP. H.PartridgeL. (Eds.), Oxford surveys in evolutionary biology (Vol. 4, pp. 182–211). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
33.
SimãoJ.ToddP. M. (2003). Emergent patterns of mate choice in human populations. Artificial Life, 9, 403–417.
34.
SimonsonI. (1990). The effect of purchase quantity and timing on variety-seeking behavior. Journal of Marketing Research, 27, 150–162.
35.
SouthS. J.TrentK. (1988). Sex ratios and women’s roles: A cross-national analysis. American Journal of Sociology, 93, 1096–1115.
36.
SperberD.HirschfeldL. A. (2004). The cognitive foundations of cultural stability and diversity. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8, 40–46.
37.
Van den BergI.FrankenI. H.MurisP. (2010). A new scale for measuring reward responsiveness. Frontiers in Psychology, 1, Article 239. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2010.00239
38.
WatkinsC. D.JonesB. C.LittleA. C.DeBruineL. M.FeinbergD. R. (2012). Cues to the sex ratio of the local population influence women’s preferences for facial symmetry. Animal Behaviour, 83, 545–553.
39.
WeirL. K.GrantJ. W. A.HutchingsJ. A. (2011). The influence of operational sex ratio on the intensity of competition for mates. The American Naturalist, 177, 167–176.
40.
WhiteA. E.LiY. J.GriskeviciusV.NeubergS. L.KenrickD. T. (2013). Putting all your eggs in one basket: Life-history strategies, bet hedging, and diversification. Psychological Science, 24, 715–722.
41.
WilsonM.DalyM. (2004). Do pretty women inspire men to discount the future?Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 271(Suppl.), S177–S179.
42.
ZebrowitzL. A.MontepareJ. M. (2006). The ecological approach to person perception: Evolutionary roots and contemporary offshoots. In SchallerM.SimpsonJ.KenrickD. (Eds.), Evolution and social psychology (pp. 81–113). Madison, CT: Psychosocial Press.
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
