“Not another Intelligence!” If this is how you reacted when you saw the title of this book, we don’t blame you. These days, there seems to be an intelligence for everything—general intelligence (e.g., IQ), emotional intelligence, social intelligence, spiritual intelligence, executive intelligence—ad infinitum.
Some of these intelligences, such as general intelligence, are supported by a wealth of solid peer-reviewed journal articles, whereas others are linguistic inventions that capture the popular eye, but aren’t necessarily grounded in empirical reality. We, the authors of this book, believe that mating intelligence falls into the former category. Enough research findings from evolutionary psychologists have culminated on the topic of human sexuality and intimate relationships to reach an important threshold. This threshold marks the need for the field of intelligence to pay a bit more attention to the work of evolutionary psychologists, for evolutionary psychologists to pay a bit more attention to the work of intelligence researchers, and for everyone else (including you, the reader!) to pay attention to both.
Consider a recent analysis of articles of the journal Intelligence conducted by members of our research team. Since its inception in 1977, nearly 33 full volumes of this journal have been published. To examine the extent to which this journal (essentially the premier international journal on the topic of intelligence) includes content that pertains to human mating, members of our research team coded all articles published in the journal as having some mating-relevant component or not. The coding was specifically conducted on the titles, keywords, and abstracts of these articles. Guidelines for inclusion were relatively lax; any article that seemed to have something to do with mating and/or sexual relationships at all was to be included. Despite these relatively lax criteria, only eight articles (of 970; 0.8%) dealt with any issues regarding mating. In fact, “mating” is less likely to be associated with “intelligence” (121 papers) than with “cockroach” (168 papers), “Norway” (178), or “steel” (182). Thus, “mating” and “intelligence” do not seem very closely connected in the minds of scientists (we will refrain from speculating as to why this unfortunate state of affairs exists!). Until the advent of the mating intelligence framework, theories of intelligence across the entire history of psychology have had little to say about human mating.
Now, why should intelligence researchers care about human mating? To the general reader who isn’t locked up in the ivory tower, the answer to this question is pretty obvious. Nonetheless, we’ll take the question seriously and provide two answers. First, from an evolutionary point of view, the domain of human mating is arguably the single most important behavioral domain of human functioning. Every single one of you reading this book comes from a long line of mating-successful individuals. Well done. The second reason is that for most human beings, mating success is important. Research on happiness shows that the quality of intimate relationships (especially sexual relationships) is a major predictor of overall life satisfaction—often more important than education, income, or occupational status! Therefore, although intelligence researchers have gleaned important insights into human intelligence by looking at people’s performance at solving abstract puzzles in paper-and-pencil format, we suggest that they may have neglected the investigation of how intelligence operates in a domain that has a lot of importance to most people.
In this book, we will describe various cognitive processes that relate to the mating domain. Many of these processes are involved directly in understanding the mating world, but some processes are attractors—traits that tend to show a lot of variability among humans and are considered sexy. We hope that talk of a sexy brain is a refreshing topic in a society that is constantly bombarded with images and products relating to the more superficial aspects of sexual attraction, such as body type or facial structure. Yes, humans have deeper qualities as well, and they are immensely attractive.
Before we let you get on with this book, we—your “guides” to the scientific understanding of mating intelligence—thought we should add a personal note. We are both young scientists who are truth seekers. We are also male. As much as we’ve tried to write this book from a gender-neutral perspective, at the end of the day, we remain males. We are very interested in discussing the ideas and findings we present in this book with our female and male readers, and hope this book stimulates discussions that lead to positive change in society.
We, like you, have been fascinated with human mating behavior our entire lives and are excited to apply the scientific method to obtain answers that can’t be obtained by any other method. At the same time, we humbly admit that the mating intelligence framework proposed in this book is a work in progress. We also must acknowledge that most of the studies on human mating from an evolutionary perspective have been conducted on college undergraduates (typically sophomores) in the United States. To make more confident generalizations to all of human nature and to more fully investigate the breadth and depth of individual differences will require much more research.
Nonetheless, we felt it was time to put all the research together under a single framework. This does not mean that we have solved all the riddles of the mating world, or that future research won’t show that some of the past research was misguided. Throughout the book, we posed new questions and hinted at potential avenues for future research. If the mating intelligence framework stimulates thought, research, and new directions within our field and allied fields, then we will be ecstatic. At the very least though, we hope to share our enthusiasm of the power of science to answer some of life’s deepest and most important questions. Enjoy.