It's official: Men seek younger, beautiful mates

Wherever he is from, a man favours a mate who is younger and physically attractive, says a study involving participants from 33 countries.

Women, on other hand, seek older mates with good financial prospects, higher status and ambition across cultures, the study noted.

Men's and women's ideas of the perfect mate differ significantly due to evolutionary pressures, the researchers found.

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"Many want to believe that women and men are identical in their underlying psychology, but the genders differ strikingly in their evolved mate preferences in some domains," said co-author of the study David Buss, psychology professor at The University of Texas at Austin in the US.

"The same holds true in highly sexually egalitarian cultures such as Sweden and Norway as in less egalitarian cultures such as Iran," Buss noted.

The study of 4,764 men and 5,389 women in 33 countries and 37 cultures showed that sex differences in mate preferences are much larger than previously appreciated and stable across cultures.

Researchers found that they could predict a person's sex with 92.2 percent accuracy if they knew his or her mate preferences.

The research suggests that these patterns of mate preferences are far more linked to gender than any individual mate preference examined separately would suggest.

"The large overall difference between men's and women's mate preferences tells us that the sexes must have experienced dramatically different challenges in the mating domain throughout human evolution," lead study author Daniel Conroy-Beam, graduate researcher at The University of Texas at Austin noted.

"Because women bear the cost of pregnancy, they often faced the adaptive problem of acquiring resources to produce and support offspring, while men faced adaptive problems of identifying fertile partners and sought cues to fertility and future reproductive value," Conroy-Beam explained.

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Of the 19 mate preferences that researchers considered, five varied significantly based on gender: good financial prospects, physical attractiveness, chastity, ambition and age.

Four other preferences - pleasing disposition, sociability and shared religious and political views - were not sex-differentiated, said the study published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.