Costly but worthless gifts facilitate courtship | Hacker News Reader

Costly but worthless gifts facilitate courtship

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

47 pointsbootload23 comments

From my brief reading, this paper essentially deals with solving an information asymmetry. The males don't know if the females are willing to mate, and the females don't know if the males intend to stay around. Thus, gifts are used as signals that indicate, through a game-theoretic mechanism, the unknown values.

It's strange, then, that the paper doesn't look to the field of information asymmetry in economics, which is a fairly well-developed field at this point and more or less addresses all of the issues considered in this paper. Signaling is well-known as an approach to solving information asymmetries (a second approach is warranties).

The thing about any argument coming out of game theory is that it is going to depend fairly heavily on the tuning of the parameters you put into your model.

And unless you have really powerful evidence that your particular parameters are preferable, all you have accomplished is do a really go job of filling in a hypothetical argument. That doesn't prove you're wrong. It's just a long way from showing your right.

Could you elaborate ? Did you have any particular parameter in mind.

To me the model seemed strikingly simple with just 6 parameters. All assumptions seemed very mild, benign and sensible. Furthermore they list out the behavior and the nature of the equilibrium at different settings of those parameters.

There could be different points of criticism of the work, but over-dependence or sensitivity to finely tuned parameters does not seem to be very strong to me in this particular case.

I phrased my initial comment poorly.

I didn't mean any specific parameters within the model they are using.

I meant the quantities and framework which are looked to generate the model itself. For example, whether there is one quality "attractiveness" in a woman or say, two, "attractiveness" plus "pleasantness", etc.

People will be tempted to say "good job, science, now tell me something I don't know", but honestly, taking common sense and elevating it at least to the level of hypothesis is an underrated aspect of science. Every now and then, such a "non-discovery" can help us put other facts into context.

The assumption of this game is that women emotionally respond to men's gift giving. That would seem sensible. But it is patently false. Gifts do not facilitate courtship.

Have you ever won a woman's favor by buying her a drink? Would it help if instead you bought a vacation for this woman whom you hardly know? Buying things in order to win a woman's favor is the worst strategy ever.

Instead of taking a woman out to an expensive dinner on your first date, have ONE drink with her and see if you both like each other. Take away all the pressure and make it fun.

Yeah really.

And what does it say about the authors that they conclude that it's better to give women expensive worthless gifts to deter 'gold-diggers'? Hold on a sec, I'm just going to check with my SO to get her perspectives on that ...

UPDATE: She says her favorite gifts were my poems -- not expensive at all. And she really liked a watch I gave her: relatively expensive, and useful, and she still has it 20 years later. Shoot. I hope she's not a gold-digger.

poems are extremely expensive in terms of time. only those with the sharpest mind can afford to create them.

Or worse, a poem-digger. You don't want to be that guy who wakes up one day and realizes that she was only in it for the anapests...

Believe it or not, this has actually happened to me. I was going through a long literary dry spell, and my SO of the time turned to me once and said "I miss those poems you used to write." I told her, "the only thing I can write right now is soulless but amusing battleraps. I could write about how weak your rhymes are in comparison to mine, but it wouldn't be quite the same."

Cost is relative and does not need to translate to a monetary value.

1. An entrepreneur spending $500 on a gift after they've IPOed/sold the company compared to when they're ramen profitable. The significance is different because the level of sacrifice is different.

2. A hacker setting up a blog as a gift (easy) versus writing a sensitive poem (hard). The challenge and amount of effort (real or perceived) are what count in this case.

This is why unique, hand-made, decorative items work well as gifts, because they show a large time investment without having any appeal to gold-diggers.

When courtship is reexamined in this light, it fits the model pretty well actually.

There's countersignaling at play too. A woman has very little information about your true "value" at first blush. If you buy drinks for her, that indicates that you think she must be a good catch, i.e. she's out of your league. Knowing nothing about you other than that you think she's out of your league, why should she go out with you?

So guys "play it cool" as a way of signaling that their true social value is well above the woman's, and they don't need to play her with gifts for them to be worth paying attention to. It's a way of saying "I'm so cool that I don't need to buy you drinks to make you pay attention to me."

That's why dating is usually described as push/pull. You want to signal your interest and commitment to a woman. However, if you signal too hard, then the impression she gets is that you have nothing to offer other than your undying love (hence "coming on too strong"). But if you signal too little, it's indistinguishable from someone who doesn't care about her at all.

"... So guys "play it cool" as a way of signaling that their true social value is well above the woman's, and they don't need to play her with gifts for them to be worth paying attention to It's a way of saying "I'm so cool that I don't need to buy you drinks to make you pay attention to me."

Spot on observation. Obligatory reference to Feynman, "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" cf "You Just Ask Them?".

"If you buy drinks for her, that indicates that you think she must be a good catch, i.e. she's out of your league"

Could you elaborate on why buying a drink for someone indicates that she's out of your league? Is there an alternate approach in a drink-serving setting that would not hint that?

The mechanism proposed by the authors actually explained an interesting pattern for me - why people destroy value to signal superiority. Having lots of value (possessions, money, social capital) is already a hard-to-falsify social signal. But destroying the value significantly amplifies this effect. You're demonstrating that you must have a lot of less-visible value to be able to afford to do this. And then the act of destruction removes any unwanted side effects or false incentives for other parties involved.

I'm pretty sure this is a general pattern of interaction as it's been observed in tribal societies around the world - destroying or sacrificing valuable property and gifts to "service the purpose of buying peace" (Mauss). And I think the destructive aspect of this must contribute to some behaviours which are hard to explain economically - large corporate behaviour, personal conspicuous consumption, inefficient charity work.

The potlach was a tribal event where wealth was destroyed, but my reading of Mauss, etc is that it bought peace within the community by reducing the gap between what people had and didn't have. The power of envy in small communities seems to hold a great negative force, and the loss of material goods in order to reduce envy is worth it for the community in the long term (and in small communities, it's survival for all or for none).

The article represents US social science at it's worse - trying to map mental and psychological states onto purely skinnerian behaviorist model. In doing so, it ignores vast amounts of non-conforming data such as homosexuality and the courtship of post-menopausal women.

To the degree one can discount women having desires, perhaps the models may apply to human mating behavior. But women select men for the purposes of sexual gratification, social status, basic companionship, and many other reasons -none of which are centered around gift giving.

Despite model underlying the paper assuming a such a passive role for women in mating, it also assumes a model of courtship in which women have a far more active role than they have historically had. Even today, arranged marriage is not uncommon in many cultures and even within the United States, familial and religious obligations can effectively determine the outcome of courtship in a similar manner.

http://xkcd.com/182/

This is similar to other models of courtship behavior. Essentially, females prefer males that invest in their relationship because they are more likely to remain in the relationship. This same phenomenon can be found in all sorts of things, such as law offices (why are they so fancy?!).

A great general model on this can be found here (pdf): http://octavia.zoology.washington.edu/publications/forthcomi...

This is a chapter from a book (P. Zak, ed. Moral Markets: The Critical Role of Values in the Economy. Princeton University Press).

This makes me immediately thing of the 5 Love Languages:

http://www.5lovelanguages.com/

The Cliff's Notes version is that every human inately responds with various magnitudes to 5 love "languages" - ie, they have specific methods of expressing love that they respond to better than others. The 5, as defined by the author, are:

1. Physical Touch 2. Quality Time 3. Acts of Service 4. Words of Affirmation 5. Gifts

I've seen this in spades in both my previous dating life and my marriage. Once learning about the 5 love languages, I was better able to understand my wife and how she best responds to affection.

Whats interesting about this approach is that people often express their love / interest for others in THEIR love language, rather than that of their partner. Once they can identify the languages involved, they often find that their relationships become healthier because they are "speaking" the language their partner better understands.

Of course, "costly but worthless" is just another way of saying "art".

The BEST Presents for GIRLS:

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ovdO1QV2Jg

this is just another kind of display, which is very common in courtship. no mystery

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