I'm probably way behind on the discussion here but a few takes from that study:
- It has the WEIRD problem common to most psychology studies. All of the participants were college students and 70-80% were white. Other age ranges and cultures may produce different results. We've pretty much reached a consensus here already that college-age women pretty much only care about looks but that this changes throughout their twenties.
- Like others have said, it's a pretty contrived way of measuring the phenomenon. When you are viewing multiple people in sequence, the most attractive/stand-out ones are going to win out. This is why tinder sucks for average/below-average people. This gets broken in all sorts of interesting ways when you have real flesh-and-blood humans interacting though.
I actually read the study. They looked at the halo effect and found that it is actually stronger for women than for men. That is, if one trait was very strong (not just appearance), it was more likely to influence the others. Moreover, female respondents tended to agree on things like physical attractiveness more than men did.
Another funny thing is that not only does the results of this study support the idea that women are hypergamous,
it also says that men are. Which is pretty lol-worthy and definitely food for thought.
Anyway, for those who believe themselves to be at the other end of a dynamic that doesn't allow them to make any significant progress with the opposite sex; it's a pretty simple hypothesis to test by, you know, actually putting yourself out there. If you don't have the persistence to try any more beyond half-assedly installing Tinder and crying, you simply might not be cut out for evolution.
