Looks trump brains when women seek a partner

IT’S THE age-old question – whether looks or brains are more important.

A paper published in the British Journal of Psychology shows women want men to be smart – but not too smart. A man who is more intelligent than 90 per cent of people is more desirable than one who is more intelligent than 99 per cent of them, according to data in the paper.

Just over 200 young men and women were asked to rate the desirability of hypothetical partners based on kindness, intelligence, physical attraction and how easygoing they were. It asked how attracted they would be to those who were kinder than 1 per cent of the population, and then asked the same with the level set at 10 per cent, 25 per cent, 50 per cent, 75 per cent, 90 per cent and 99 per cent.

Respondents said their ideal partner was near the top of the scale on all attributes. But women’s interest peaked at men smarter than 90 per cent of others, but fell for the very smartest men. The same pattern was repeated when women were asked how easygoing they would like a male partner to be.

But physical looks were as desirable in both 90 and 99 per cent categories. The same pattern applied to kindness.

Gilles Gignac, of the University of Western Australia, the paper’s author, said: “It appears you can have too much of a good thing.” The academics argued that negative stereotypes of extremely smart people – such as social competence and OCD – might be off-putting and that as a result intelligent men might not be getting a fair deal.