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THE RATING GAME—Arianna Young, an assistant professor of psychology at Cal Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks, was part of a team that performed studies on dating. It’s a familiar dating problem: In the quest to meet a soulmate, we sometimes find our ideal notion of a person—what “looks good on paper”—isn’t what we’re actually attracted to in real life.

What, then, do women really want? Well, the jury’s still out on that one. But when it comes to men, what they really don’t want is a woman who’s smarter than they are.

So say the conclusions of a study published in the November issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin,

Ariana Young, an assistant professor of psychology at Cal Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks, was part of a team that conducted a series of studies revealing that while most men claim they find smart women attractive and would date someone smarter than they are, when they meet these women in the flesh, they feel threatened and their interest wanes.

“What men say they want is not always what they actually want when they are faced with that situation in person,” Young said in an interview with the Acorn. “Even though men say they really want more intelligent women than themselves,

. . when they were faced with that particular situation, where woman outsmarted them, they didn’t actually want it.”

Young summed it ups as, “Basically, dating is complicated.”

Laws of attraction

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Young, a San Francisco Bay Area native who now lives in Thousand Oaks and is in her second year of teaching at CLU, said the idea of studying men’s attraction to smart women was sparked by another research project.

While pursuing her doctorate in social personality psychology at the University at Buffalo, Young worked with Lora Park, an associate professor of psychology at the New York university, to examine how women’s romantic goals affect their interest in math and science, fields where women are typically underrepresented.

Their hypothesis—that being intelligent in traditionally masculine domains may be perceived as incompatible with attracting a partner—appeared to be correct.

“Women distance themselves from math and science when they are pursuing their goal to be more romantically desirable,” said Young, 32.

This led researchers Young and Park to a new question: Are men really more attracted to women who are less intelligent than themselves?

To help them with their new line of research, they recruited Paul Eastwick, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin and an expert on the evolution of relationships, including mate preferences.

Getting the male perspective required six separate studies, all taking place at the University at Buffalo and involving a total of 650 male undergraduate college students as well as several female “confederates,” or actors.

The research took over three years to complete, with the first study beginning in the fall of 2009 and the last one wrapping up in spring 2013.

The male psyche

The first set of studies examined men’s evaluations of hypothetical partners who bested them on an intelligence test, while the second set examined attraction to live partners. They produced conflicting results.

In the first study, the hypothetical one, the men demonstrated greater romantic interest in women who were smarter than they were, placing value on intelligence in their partners—at least in the abstract.

In the second set of studies, men whose intelligence was outstripped by a female actor responded by physically distancing themselves from her, rating her as less attractive and exhibiting less of a desire to exchange contact information or plan a date with her.

In trying to make sense of this discrepancy, the researchers saw a pattern emerging based on how close the woman was to the man psychologically or physically.

“When she was hypothetical or down the hall, he actually liked when she outperformed him,” Young said. “It’s not that men don’t like smart women; it was more complicated. Men do like smart women in theory, but they don’t like smarter women who outperform them in the moment. That was a little twist.”

So the researchers performed a third set of studies to confirm these findings.

“When men were outperformed by women who were right there with them, they were threatened. And that makes sense,” Young said. “When someone is better than you, it hurts, it stings. It’s a bit of a threat to your masculinity, your ego. As a result of that threat (the men) tend to not like these women.”

With this new knowledge, Park suggested, men could work to bridge the gap between what they say they want in a partner and how they behave.

“If what one truly wants is someone smarter . . . then one might respond to a partner’s achievements by supporting them or being proud of their accomplishments rather than the default response of feeling threatened,” Park said.

This may be easier said than done. Young made the point that “the real world is messier” than the lab. The CLU professor also acknowledged that this selfprotective response is probably not unique to men.

“That would be some exciting future research . . . to see what factors contribute to women’s partner preferences,” she said. “What makes women more or less attracted to men?”