Cooperative courtship: helping friends raise and raze relationship barriers
Name
Ackerman_Cooperative courtship.PDF
Size
195.21 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
d3b420bc386cb5b293982afe7fe5b095
Author(s)
Ackerman, Joshua
Kenrick, Douglas T.
Date Issued
October 2009
Journal
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
Publisher
Sage Publications
Citation
Ackerman, Joshua M., and Douglas T. Kenrick. “Cooperative Courtship: Helping Friends Raise and Raze Relationship Barriers.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 35.10 (2009): 1285-1300.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Do people help each other form romantic relationships? Research on the role of the social environment in relationship formation has traditionally focused on competition, but this article investigates novel patterns of cooperation within courtship interactions. Drawing on a functional/evolutionary perspective, women are predicted to cooperate primarily in building romantic thresholds and barriers; men are predicted to cooperate primarily in achieving romantic access. In support of these predictions, four studies reveal that people consistently perceive cooperation, report cooperative behavior, and make cooperative decisions in romantic situations. People also provide the opposite pattern of help to opposite-sex friends from that provided to same-sex friends, suggesting that assistance is flexibly tuned to differences in the romantic selectivity of recipients. Cooperative courtship is revealed to be a commonly used set of mating strategies by which people functionally tailor aid to promote both their own and their friends’ romantic relationship interests.
MIT Department
Sloan School of Management
Terms of Use
Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0146167209335640
