Women like a partner to be clever, but not too clever, a new study has claimed.
The figures come via the University of Western Australia after two of the institution’s researchers Gilles Gignac and Clare Starbuck sampled over 200 Australian students.
They asked them to complete questionnaires on the qualities most people value in a romantic partner.
The questions focused specifically on four qualities: good looks, cleverness, kindness and being easy going.
It asked participants how attracted they would be to a potential partner who had each quality more than a certain percentage of the population.
So, the question on kindness, for instance, asked the participants to say how attracted they would be in a potential partners who were kinder than 1 per cent of the population.
It then asked the same with the level set at 10 per cent, 25 per cent, 50 per cent, 75 per cent, 90 per cent and 99 per cent of the population.
They were rated on a six-point scale from “extremely unattracted” to “extremely attracted” for each of these percentages.
As you can expect, when the results were analysed, they showed participants of both genders found all four qualities attractive in a potential partner – and the more of the quality that was present, the more attractive they would be.
However, there was an exception to this for the women taking part.
For being intelligent, the female participants’ potential lovers lost appeal at the top of the scale.
While they rated a prospective partner as more attractive if the person was more intelligent than 90 per cent of the population, this didn’t ring true for if the person was they more intelligent than 99 per cent of the population.
The same pattern was recorded for being easy going, also.
“It is well established that several mate characteristics are valued highly in a prospective partner," said Gignac.
"But the sort of continuous measurement used in our research is making it clear that several of these characteristics are associated with a threshold effect – in other words, you can have too much of a good thing.”
Quite surprisingly, the results also demonstrated that there’s little benefit in being "exceptionally physically attractive", over being very attractive, in the eyes of the typical prospective partner.
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