Short-term mate poaching in heterosexual men: The effect of dissimilarity in couples attractiveness and mate poaching

Short-term poaching allows men to gain reproductive benefits with a mated woman without the costs of commitment (Schmitt & Buss, 2001). The current research explores whether men target mated women for short-term poaches as a function of their and their partners’ relative physical attractiveness. By manipulating a hypothetical couple’s attractiveness discrepancy we found that men were more willing to strategically short-term poach mated women who were significantly more attractive than their mates compared to mated women who were equally or less attractive than their mates.