Passionate Love and Sexual Desire - Elaine Hatfield

17preferences. He found that for some traits—such as good looks and financial prospects—gender had a great influence on preferences. (While gender accounted for 40%-45% ofthe variance, geographical origin accounted for only 8%-17% of the variance.) For othertraits—such as chastity, ambition, and preferred age—on the other hand, culture matteredmost. (In those instances, gender accounted for only 5%-16% of the variance, whereasgeographical origin accounted for 38%-59% of the variance.) Wallen concluded that, ingeneral, the cultural perspective may well be even more powerful than evolutionaryheritage in understanding mate selection.Cultural researchers provide additional evidence that in different cultural,national, and ethnic groups, people often desire very different things in romantic, sexual,or marital partners. Hatfield and Sprecher (1996), for example, studied three powerful,modern, and industrial societies—the United States, Russia, and Japan. Men and womenin Western, individualistic cultures (such as the United States and to some extent Russia)expected far more from their marriages than did couples in a collectivist culture (such asJapan).As we observed earlier, cultural theorists have predicted that cultural rules shouldexert a profound impact on the commonness of passionate feelings within a culture, howintensely passion is experienced, and how people attempt to deal with these tumultuousfeelings. Alas, the sparse existing data, provide only minimal support for this intriguingand plausible sounding hypothesis.C. The Likelihood of Being-in-LoveSprecher and her colleagues (1994) interviewed 1,667 men and women in theUnited States, Russia, and Japan. Based on notions of individualism versus collectivism,