Evolutionary Psychology Reports:

St. Andrews, UK. Psychologists at the University of St. Andrews suspected that attractiveness would play a role in preferences for who should pay for a dinner date. Dr. Michael Stirrat and colleagues predicted that attractive people would show less willingness to pay for the hypothetical meals because people that are more attractive bring more to the table (literally) in the dating market.

They predicted that people who considered themselves more attractive would prefer that the other party pay. Yet they thought that the attractiveness of the other person would depend on their sex; men would be more willing to pay for attractive women but women would want attractive men to pay for them.

We might also expect that when dating partners are more attractive, people would prefer to pay for the meal with them. However, this is not what Dr. Stirrat predicted, at least not for female participants. Food provisioning is part of courting behaviour in species from insects to chimpanzees, and in most species it is the male that provisions the female.

Dr. Stirrat therefore predicted that women would prefer to accept food from the best candidates, the more attractive ones, and would be less willing to obligate themselves to worse candidates, the less attractive ones. Women would, quite rightly, want it all and prefer the more attractive males to pay for the meal, hoping that this may indicate that he was interested in taking the relationship to a second date.

They set up hypothetical blind dates and asked participants how they would prefer the bill to be paid for. About half prefer to split the bill regardless of sex, though more men than women prefer to pay themselves. In line with predictions, both men and women who consider themselves highly attractive were less inclined to pay for the meal on a blind date. Although men would rather pay the bill on a date with an attractive woman, women would rather have their meal paid for by an attractive man.

Men overall reported a much greater willingness to pay for the meal than the women, consistent with social norms in dating. Women almost never indicated that they would pay.