Available online 5 October 2023

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The near totality of human mate choice research occurs in large-scale, urban, industrial populations. It is unclear to what extent lessons learned from such populations reflect generalizable features of human mating psychology as opposed to localized responses to the demands of these historically unusual environments. Here, we use couple simulation, an agent-based modeling technique, to compare models of mate choice across both a U.S. sample (n = 1678) and a sample of k = 15 couples from Conambo, Ecuador—a relatively remote community of horticultural-foragers in the Ecuadorian Amazon. The Conambo sample provides a unique opportunity to evaluate models of mate choice in that (1) this sample represents approximately 50% of the households within this community and (2) all of the participants in this sample are acquainted with one another. Participants in Conambo completed a ranking task in which each participant ranked each opposite-sex adult in the community in terms of their quality as a spouse. We used these rankings to simulate the mating market in Conambo under alternative models of mate choice. We find that these models are able to reproduce Conambo marriages at a high degree of accuracy and perform comparably across both the Conambo sample and U.S. samples. Specifically, the resource allocation model performs best in reproducing mate choices in both the U.S. and Conambo samples. These results suggest that at least some aspects of human mating psychology generalize across both large-scale industrialized and small-scale populations.

Section snippetsConambo sample

In total, participants were n = 79 residents of Conambo, Ecuador. These participants were adult members of the approximately 32 households present in Conambo; at least one adult from each household was present in this sample. Participants ranged in age from 18 to 79, with an average age of M = 37.67 (Mdn = 33.50) years old. Of these, n = 55 participants were Achuar; n = 23 were Quichua. Ultimately, because of the data requirements of couple simulation—each person must rate and be rated by other

Results

Fig. 1 shows the results of applying the couple simulation method to the U.S. sample. This exactly replicates the results of Conroy-Beam (2021), albeit with lower overall simulation accuracies owing to the relatively large sample size. Across all models, couple simulation accurately reproduced 14.86% of the real-world couples. The resource allocation model performed best in reproducing the sampled couples, accurately reproducing 29.89% of couples, 95% CI [26.77%, 32.89%]. The second-best

Discussion

Human mate choice is among the most studied topics in all of evolutionary psychology. Mate choice attains this position for good reason: the choice of a romantic partner is among the most important decisions a person makes in their lifetime owing to both its proximity to reproduction and its far-reaching impacts on life and wellbeing (Antonovics & Town, 2004; Holt-Lunstad, Smith, & Layton, 2010; Robles, Slatcher, Trombello, & McGinn, 2014). However, despite this great importance and widespread

Declaration of Competing Interest

None.

Acknowledgements

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1845586 and the Evolutionary Anthropology Program of California State University, Fullerton (CSUF). U.S. data were collected by Conroy-Beam. The data collection in Conambo was conducted in 2018 and was ethically reviewed by the Institutional Review Board at CSUF (HRS-17-18-271, John Q. Patton, PI). This research is part of an ongoing ethnographic research project, Anthropological Investigations in the

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