It seems like being the nicer guy would translate to having fewer women. From my high school up till my university days, the nicer guys were deemed as unattractive by the ladies.
So what’s with women falling for the not-too-nice guys?
A study conducted by researchers from the University of Rochester, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya in Israel have answers to why men like nice women, and women don’t.
To conduct the study, 112 undergraduate students volunteered to take part. The volunteer pool was split evenly between men and women, and participants were paired randomly with an opposite-sex individual they hadn’t met before.
The study focused on sexual interest and the participants’ feelings on the possibility of long-term dating with their new ‘partners,’ and how those connected to their perceptions of a personality trait the study calls ‘responsiveness’.
In the first study, the researchers explored whether women or men perceived a receptive opposite-sex stranger as sexually desirable and, if so, whether that “responsive” quality registered as overtly feminine or masculine. The researchers found that men who perceived possible female partners as responsive found them to be ‘more feminine and more attractive’; whereas women didn’t necessarily perceive a ‘responsive’ man as less masculine, though they found him unattractive.
The first study revealed that men like nicer women, but women aren’t attracted to nicer men.
In the second study, the participants were required to engage with either a responsive or unresponsive person of the opposite sex, and then interact with them online while detailing a current problem in their life. Again the men found the responsive women more attractive and as potential partners, while the women found men with those same traits to be undesirable.
In the third study, the researchers aimed to test specifically whether the mechanism by which ‘responsiveness’ motivated individuals to pursue relationships, if it was sexual arousal. They discovered that when men found women to be responsive, it led to a heightened sexual arousal, and this in turn led to greater desire for a relationship. However, the researchers were unsure why women found responsive men to be unattractive.
According to Birnbaum, women may perceive a responsive stranger as less desirable for different reasons: “Women may perceive this person as inappropriately nice and manipulative (i.e., trying to obtain sexual favours) or eager to please, perhaps even as desperate, and therefore less sexually appealing. Alternatively, women may perceive a responsive man as vulnerable and less dominant.” He said.
So, now you know why women keep falling for the wrong guys.
S.O.Z