While there is much research on what people want in their romantic and sexual partners, the methods are limited in several ways (e.g., ad hoc, limited ecological validity, exploratory). In this pilot study (N = 185), we present and validate a simple, flexible, behavioral, and straightforward way of assessing mating decisions as opposed to mate preferences, economic tradeoffs, or gestalt choices like in speed dating studies. In this method, participants are asked to choose between pairs of traits they might desire in their romantic and sexual partners, and the number of times each trait was chosen is summed. Further, we advance a need-based approach, suggesting that the things people want in their partners serve psychological and physical needs that can be present today and could have been present over evolutionary time. We suggest that seeking or choosing physicality, compassion, competence, and compatibility solve the major challenges presented in relationships like sexual arousal, intra-relational safety, extra-relational safety, and long-term coordination of life, respectively. We replicated effects in relation to sex differences and contexts effects consistent with sexual strategies theory and extended that to show that compatibility is the most highly valued trait in their partners by men and women regardless of context.

In this cross-sectional study, we examined whether the personality traits and specialty preferences of Turkish medical students (N = 269; 166 women), aged 18 to 25 (M = 20.69, SD = 1.72), changed as they progressed through their education. We found that (a) students who were further along in their education had less empathic perspective-taking and enjoyed competition less; (b) while the enjoyment of competition decreased it did so more strongly in women than in men; (c) women who were further (compared to less further along) along in their education were more narcissistic, especially when individual differences in the enjoyment of competition were accounted for; (d) students’ preferences for surgical and psychiatric specialties decreased as they progressed through their education, an effect mediated by individual differences in perspective-taking; and (e) the decline in the preference for surgery was stronger in women than in men, an effect that became stronger when individual differences in narcissism were removed. These findings suggest that medical school education may influence both personality traits and specialty preferences, with potential differential effects in men and women. As students progress, shifts in empathy and competitiveness could play a role in shaping their career interests, particularly in relation to surgery and psychiatry. However, as this is a crosssectional study, longitudinal research is needed to better understand the direction and stability of these changes over time.

It has been extensively documented that collaboration in memory can result in both costs (e.g., collaborative inhibition) and benefits (e.g., error pruning and post-collaborative memory benefit). It remains unclear whether these effects apply to remembering the social information and whether their occurrences might be influenced by the setting of part-set cues during recalls. To address these concerns, the current participants were asked to study gender stereotype words with differing emotional valences individually. They then completed two recall tests, Recall 1 and Recall 2. Recall 1 was conducted either individually or collaboratively, while Recall 2 was consistently performed individually. Both recalls tested participants’ memory of the studied words (item memory) as well as the gender of the speaker who just presented them (known as source memory). We discovered that the detrimental effect of collaborative inhibition was absent, indicating that the mechanisms elicited by part-set cues are comparable to those of social collaboration. Additionally, there were significant beneficial effects of error pruning and post-collaborative memory benefit. However, these effects demonstrated distinct sensitivity to our manipulations, emphasizing that the mechanisms of the retrieval strategy disruption hypothesis (RSDH) and the processes of the dual-process theory operate conditionally. Incidentally, we found the stereotype-consistent effect in both ongoing and post-collaboration situations, as well as in both item memory and source memory, indicating that this effect is insusceptible to the status of social collaboration and memory tasks. Finally, future research directions are provided.