#Rejection #Less #Choosy #Romantic #Relationship

“All of this suggests that the feedback we receive within the dating world regarding how desirable we are as a potential partner has a direct and fast influence on the quality we expect in our own potential partners,” Welling explained. “If feedback suggests we are high quality, we expect our partners to be as well, but if feedback suggests we’re not that desirable, we’ll take what we can get.”

But the participants in the study weren’t left with suppressed sociometers. “Don’t worry — We promise that we told all participants afterwards, especially the ‘rejected’ ones, that the feedback they received was completely made up,” Welling said.

“There are certainly some limitations to the current work, and more work is certainly needed,” she added. “First, we only focused on women, and so similar research on men is needed. Second, the feedback participants received was from an experimenter (i.e., third-party information) and not directly from potential suitors, which may well have been a more salient cue. We could look at this type of manipulation in future work using actual dating scenarios, such as speed-dating, to see how feedback impacts actual mate choice with real, as opposed to hypothetical, people.”