Women evaluate mate quality based on dancing ability

As a human female, this seems painfully obvious. He who has two left feet and/or does the robot sleeps alone. However, to examine the question of human mate choice from an evolutionary perspective can be astonishingly revealing. Why do women prefer men who can dance?

A recent study from the journal Personality and Individual Differences suggests that women have evolved cognitive adaptations to visually evaluate intra-male dominance potential in men in order to select the highest quality mate. Humans are physically  sexually dimorphic, such that males are usually stronger than women. Females developed a preference for stronger men because they tend to have had superior fighting and resource-holding potential. As a result, over the course of human evolution, those males subject to more prenatal and/or pubertal testosterone developed attractive physical and behavioral characteristics that facilitate the attainment of status and resources. There are certain honest signals that females find attractive because they serve as correlates indicating high quality mate potential. This study specifically investigated whether male physical strength is honestly signaled via dancing performance.

The study assessed physical strength by measuring the handgrip strength of the participating male subjects. They had a sample of 40 male dancers of equal body weight and height. They were instructed to wear the exact same outfit as the rest of participants, and a short digital video clip of their dances were taken with consistent lighting, a uniform background, and with the same beat playing. A blurring filter was applied to the video camera so the body shape of the dancers could not be distinguished. A sample of 50 females from a local university were recruited to judge the attractiveness of the male dancers on a scale of 1-7 (1 = low and 7 = high on the attribute).

The results support the hypothesis that male physical strength can be signaled through dynamic displays such as dance. Women found men who were physically stronger (i.e. those with higher hand-grip strength) more attractive and assertive.  

Hugill, N., Fink, B., Neave, N., Seydel, H. 2009. Men's physical strength is associated with women's perceptions of their dancing ability. Personality and Individual Differences 47 (5): 527-530.