Chapter 9 Attraction Assignment

Choose ONE of the following options for this assignment:

Option 1:

Review the material in chapter 9 on the evolutionary perspective on mate selection.
Find the personal ads section of a newspaper. Randomly choose twenty ads (ten for males seeking females and ten for females seeking males). Read each ad and makes notes of how the person describes themselves and how they describe the person they are seeking. Specifically, do the people look for younger or older partners? Are they seeking health and good looks or success? How do they advertise themselves? Do these ads differ by gender?
Write a brief essay in which you explain the evolutionary approach to mate selection and what it hypothesizes men and women look for in a mate. Then summarize the results of your survey of the personal ads. Specifically, summarize how men and women advertise themselves. Then summarize what men and women look for in a mate. Be sure to provide enough detail (e.g. 8 of the 10 males looked for a younger women). Finally, comment on whether or not the results were consistent with evolutionary theory.
Write your essay in a word processing program and save the essay to your computer as a .docx file. This is the format we will use for most essays in this course.
Click the link to Attraction Assignment below and attach your .docx file. . Be sure to click the Submit button or I will not receive your file.

Option 2:

Review the material in chapter 9 on physical attractiveness.
One explanation for the what-is-beautiful-is-good stereotype is that we learn it as children. For this assignment, randomly choose 10-15 children’s books. Read through the books and make notes of the physical attractiveness of the characters and their traits. Are the traits primarily positive (goodness, warmth, etc) or negative (mean, dumb, etc)?
Write a brief essay in which you explain the what-is-beautiful-is-good stereotype and whether or not research suggests that it is accurate or not. Then summarize the results of your review of the children books. Include a list of the books you reviewed as well as enough detail to present the results clearly (e.g. 6 of the books had “good” people being attractive). Then comment on whether or not what you found was consistent with the what-is-beautiful is good stereotype.
Write your essay in a word processing program and save the essay to your computer as a .docx file. This is the format we will use for most essays in this course.
Click the link to Attraction Assignment below and attach your .docx file. . Be sure to click the Submit button or I will not receive your file.

Option 3:

Review the material in chapter 9 related to proximity, mere exposure, similarity, the matching hypothesis and reciprocity.
The antecedents to attraction are all around us. What we see in books, movies, and our own lives are often a direct reflection of what happens when people enter into relationships. Using your favorite romantic novel, play, movie or television program analyze the factors that lead to attraction pointing specifically to examples that show how well the characters from the story demonstrate attraction as a result of proximity, mere exposure, similarity, “matching hypothesis” and reciprocity. Make sure you look for one example of four of the five concepts.
Write a brief essay in which, for each of the 4 concepts, you explain the concept and give us enough detail about the scene that we are able to understand how it applies to the concept you are writing about.