social reading

some personals readings

Here's a paper called Passions Within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions by Robert H. Frank that critiques the market model of relationships that Gary Becker espouses in A Treatise on the Family. This paper is very much worth reading for next week.

There's also this one by Buss and Barnes called Preferences in Human Mate Selection. They examine the characteristics people prefer in their mates, including a few notable (and anecdotally unsurprising) gender differences. I'm not sure if the paper as a whole is worth reading for the group, but it's definitely worth it to consider these tables that I yanked out:

1. The results of a factor analysis of the major components of marital preferences: image
   
2. A ranking of the importance of characteristics in a potential mate. Significant gender differences are in italics:
   image