Evidence of mating-motivated altruistic behaviour in time spent on a shared online task

Altruistic behaviour has been shown to be an important trait in human mate choice, and as such it is often displayed in situations where an individual believes they are in the presence of a potential partner (mating motivation). The current study looked to further explore this finding using an online charity task (www.freerice.com) where time spent is the cost that individuals can incur. Here, heterosexual participants were presented with a shared task with hypothetical partners that were either the opposite or same sex, and asked to complete as much of the task as they wished. The results found that, overall, participants did not spend more time on the shared task (in this case, answering questions on the Free Rice website to earn grains of rice for the World Food Programme) in the presence of opposite sex partners (i.e. mating motivation). It was found, however, that when opposite sex partners were played with first then participants did spend more time on the task than when same sex partners were played with first. It was also found that the decrease in time spent was less when opposite sex partners were played with last. These findings offer partial support for mating motivation leading to increased altruistic behaviour, and also by showing that the above effects were present in men and women, that mutual mate choice is driving such behavior.