| Popis: |
Reproductive success (fitness) is the currency for species evolution, and therefore, the establishment of sexual relationships is one of the most fundamental interactions underlying life on Earth. Sexual selection theory aims to explain the strength and implications of sexual bonds as a result of traits that evolve to influence sexual encounters and thus, reproductive success. Humans offer a valuable ‘model’ to understand the nature of sexual behaviour, especially because their preferences can be directly communicated by individual participants, in contrast with non-human animals in which preferences are inferred from behavioural observations. The high social complexity of humans has led to multiple approaches to understand individuals’ attitudes and behaviours within an eco-evolutionary context, particularly with regards to investigating how ‘attractiveness’ traits influence sexual relationships, and how the expression of these traits matches sexual outcomes (i.e., as a proxy for mating success). Although humans traditionally fall between a polygyny and serial monogamy mating system, it remains poorly known how promiscuity is associated with a ubiquitous factor underlying human social/sexual dynamics: ‘love’. This research investigated how promiscuity (measured as numbers of self-reported sexual partners and as the desire to be promiscuous) and simultaneous love (individuals declaring whether they can ‘fall in love’ with more than one person simultaneously) are affected by a number of different traits (gender, age, self-assessed attractiveness, sexual orientation) and interpreted under predictions of sexual selection theory. Using a newly generated dataset, it was quantified how self-assessed attractiveness traits influence the expression of promiscuous desires across participants. The majority (84.5%) of participants displayed a desire for promiscuity. Gender and sexual orientation are the main variables in which there is a relationship in participant’s desires for promiscuity and simultaneous love. Notably, this research revealed that more than half of the individuals in the sample (57.1%) expressed the possibility to love more than one person simultaneously. This finding goes against fundamental norms underlying monogamous sexual relationships in most human societies. Collectively, this thesis provides novel data to further discuss promiscuity in humans. |
