Female Mate Choice: A Comparison Between Accept-the-Best and Reject-the-Worst Strategies in Sequential Decision Making

Information about prospective mates is typically acquired in a sequential and cumulative fashion. The aim of this study was to examine whether a reject-the-worst strategy is more efficient than an accept-the-best strategy for women in response to serial information and to identify the point at which a woman will terminate her assessment of a prospective mate’s attributes. A pilot survey was conducted to determine the chronological order in which attribute information typically becomes available during the early stages of a relationship. Using this order of presentation, attributes were presented to participants one at a time. After participants specified their minimum acceptable percentile level for each attribute, they were given numerical feedback about the extent to which the prospect exceeded or failed to meet their standard. Participants were randomly assigned to either the accept-the-best condition (accept a date or request more information) or the reject-the-worst condition (reject a date or request more information). Participants in the reject-the-worst condition requested more trait information before making a decision than those in the accept-the-best condition. This suggests that the costs of a false-negative error exceed those of a false-positive error and that in actively accepting a mate, women satisfice rather than optimize.