Can Strategic Ignorance Explain the Evolution of Love?

People's devotion to, and love for, their romantic partners poses an evolutionary puzzle: Why is it better to stop your search for other partners once you enter a serious relationship when you could continue to search for somebody better? A recent formal model based on "strategic ignorance" suggests that such behavior can be adaptive and favored by natural selection, so long as you can signal your unwillingness to "look" for other potential mates to your current partner. Here, we re-examine this conclusion with a more detailed model designed to capture specific features of romantic relationships. We find, surprisingly, that devotion does not typically evolve in our model: Selection favors agents who choose to "look" while in relationships and who allow their partners to do the same. Non-looking is only expected to evolve if there is an extremely large cost associated with being left by your partner. Our results therefore raise questions about the role of strategic ignorance in explaining the evolution of love.

[1]  Clayton R. Critcher,et al.  How Quick Decisions Illuminate Moral Character , 2013 .

[2]  J. Henrich.  Cultural group selection, coevolutionary processes and large-scale cooperation , 2004 .

[3]  Thomas S. Ferguson,et al.  Who Solved the Secretary Problem , 1989 .

[4]  Martin A. Nowak,et al.  Uncalculating cooperation is used to signal trustworthiness , 2016, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[5]  D. Kleiman,et al.  Monogamy in Mammals , 1977, The Quarterly Review of Biology.

[6]  James F. Wittenberger,et al.  The Evolution of Monogamy: Hypotheses and Evidence , 1980 .

[7]  S. M. Samuels,et al.  Optimal selection based on relative rank (the “secretary problem”) , 1964 .

[8]  D. Keltner,et al.  Love and the commitment problem in romantic relations and friendship. , 2001, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[9]  David G. Rand,et al.  Third-party punishment as a costly signal of trustworthiness , 2016, Nature.

[10]  R. Trivers.  Parental investment and sexual selection , 1972 .

[11]  Drew Fudenberg,et al.  Imitation Processes with Small Mutations , 2004, J. Econ. Theory.

[12]  Robert Boyd,et al.  Third-party monitoring and sanctions aid the evolution of language , 2015 .

[13]  David G. Rand,et al.  Intuition, deliberation, and the evolution of cooperation , 2016, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[14]  P. Freeman.  The Secretary Problem and its Extensions: A Review , 1983 .

[15]  M. Crockett,et al.  Inference of trustworthiness from intuitive moral judgments. , 2016, Journal of experimental psychology. General.

[16]  John L. Lastovicka,et al.  Truly, Madly, Deeply: Consumers in the Throes of Material Possession Love , 2011 .

[17]  Ben R. Newell,et al.  Learning and choosing in an uncertain world: An investigation of the explore–exploit dilemma in static and dynamic environments , 2016, Cognitive Psychology.

[18]  M. Schlossberg.  Passions Within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions. , 1990 .

[19]  K. Hugenberg,et al.  The Adaptive Utility of Deontology: Deontological Moral Decision-Making Fosters Perceptions of Trust and Likeability , 2017 .

[20]  D. Symons,et al.  Précis of The evolution of human sexuality , 1980, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[21]  Matthijs van Veelen,et al.  Robustness against indirect invasions , 2012, Games Econ. Behav..

[22]  David G. Rand,et al.  Third-Party Punishment as a Costly Signal of High Continuation Probabilities in Repeated Games , 2017 .

[23]  M. Nowak,et al.  Cooperate without looking: Why we care what people think and not just what they do , 2015, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[24]  R Boyd,et al.  Why people punish defectors. Weak conformist transmission can stabilize costly enforcement of norms in cooperative dilemmas. , 2001, Journal of theoretical biology.

[25]  Martin A. Nowak,et al.  Cooperate without Looking in a Non-Repeated Game , 2015, Games.