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It’s a classic high school conundrum: Women want female companionship, but definitely don’t want a so-called friend to try and steal their partner. Or, in scientific parlance:
In a paper published on Thursday (Jan. 14) in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, psychologists from Arizona State University studied women’s efforts to guard their mates from other ovulating women.
The team conducted four studies with a total of 478 heterosexual engaged or married women. All participants were recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcing online marketplace. In each study, the women were shown photographs of a series of women, and were asked how willing they would be, on a seven-point scale, for the women to befriend their partner.
Participants were significantly more likely to want to create distance between the photographed woman and their partner when the woman shown in the photograph was ovulating.
For women, forming close, cooperative relationships with other women at once poses important opportunities and possible threats—including to mate retention. To maximize the benefits and minimize the costs of same-sex social relationships, we propose that women’s mate guarding is functionally flexible and that women are sensitive to both interpersonal and contextual cues indicating whether other women might be likely and effective mate poachers.
In a paper published on Thursday (Jan. 14) in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, psychologists from Arizona State University studied women’s efforts to guard their mates from other ovulating women.
The team conducted four studies with a total of 478 heterosexual engaged or married women. All participants were recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcing online marketplace. In each study, the women were shown photographs of a series of women, and were asked how willing they would be, on a seven-point scale, for the women to befriend their partner.
Participants were significantly more likely to want to create distance between the photographed woman and their partner when the woman shown in the photograph was ovulating.
Women instinctively guard their sexual partners from other women who are ovulating
Apparently, a likely poacher is an ovulating one—and women have an uncanny ability to detect fertility.
qz.com
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