Psychology: Concepts and Applications 3e   Halonen
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Culture and Marriage Partners

How do we choose our mates? Some psychologists say that biology makes men prefer young women who can reproduce, while women pick men who will help them gain wealth and raise children. On the other hand, social learning theorists claim that people pick spouses on the basis of costs and benefits. In societies in which women have low social status, little education, and are paid less than men, women are forced to look for men who will support them. In societies in which women and men are equal, they argue, both genders will have similar preferences.

Hatfield and Sprecher (1995) tested this idea by asking college students in the United States, Russia, and Japan to rate which characteristics are important in a mate. They found that across all three cultures, men rated physical attractiveness higher than women did, while women rated traits like potential for success and kindness as more important than men did, supporting the biologists’ view. However, the gap between men’s and women’s ratings was much larger for Japanese students than either Russians or Americans, possibly because Japanese women are strongly discouraged from working after marriage and must depend on their husbands. As with most behaviors, both biology and culture have a role in selecting a spouse.

Children’s Play

United States children are closely guarded before they go to school. Parents or caretakers watch them throughout the day. Not so in the Marquesas Islands, and most children survive. They also don't seem to go through quite the same stages of play as their U.S. peers.

Martini (1994) observed a group of thirteen children between two and five years old to figure out how they managed themselves, playing unsupervised for several hours a day. Marquesan adults tend to treat siblings and other groups of children as one entity. If one misbehaves, all are punished: the guilty child, and the others for not controlling their peer. The children also work to make their friends part of the group. Preschoolers go through “hazing,” and are taunted and attacked for doing dangerous things or not paying enough attention to their peer group's leaders. These actions have a strong effect on the children’s play. The Marquesan children spent none of their time in "solitary play," compared with thirty-six percent of the time for a U.S. sample. Instead, they spent ninety-three percent of their time playing in groups of three or more; Americans spent only nineteen percent of their time in groups.

Life Stages and Elderly People

How do you know when you're old? After all, there are no obvious hysical signs that a person has entered old age, unlike the change from childhood to adolescence. The answer may have less to do with age, and more to do with what a person thinks old age is like.

Heikkinen (1993) surveyed a group of eighty-year-old men and women from central Finland about what they thought about aging. Surprisingly, she found that most of her subjects did not feel old. For them, old age was defined by negative factors: failing sight or hearing, pain, weakness, having a spouse die, and so on. The eighty-year-olds who were lucky enough to be healthy saw themselves not as living an "old-age-existence,” but simply living their lives, like anyone else. It may be that older adults in Western countries enter new "life stages," like Erikson's "Integrity vs. Despair,” when they have "old" experiences, not when they have lived for sixty, seventy, or eighty years.

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