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Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
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Cooperative Courtship: Helping Friends Raise and Raze Relationship Barriers

Joshua M. Ackerman

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, joshua.ackerman{at}yale.edu

Douglas T. Kenrick

Arizona State University

Do people help each other form romantic relationships? Research on the role of the social environment in relationship formation has traditionally focused on competition, but this article investigates novel patterns of cooperation within courtship interactions. Drawing on a functional/evolutionary perspective, women are predicted to cooperate primarily in building romantic thresholds and barriers; men are predicted to cooperate primarily in achieving romantic access. In support of these predictions, four studies reveal that people consistently perceive cooperation, report cooperative behavior, and make cooperative decisions in romantic situations. People also provide the opposite pattern of help to opposite-sex friends from that provided to same-sex friends, suggesting that assistance is flexibly tuned to differences in the romantic selectivity of recipients. Cooperative courtship is revealed to be a commonly used set of mating strategies by which people functionally tailor aid to promote both their own and their friends’ romantic relationship interests.

Key Words: cooperation • romantic relationships • helping • prosocial behavior • courtship • evolutionary psychology

This version was published on October 1, 2009

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 35, No. 10, 1285-1300 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/0146167209335640
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