A new study on human behaviour has given a reality check to the stereotype of the "gold digger" - a term often associated with a woman who strategically dates wealthy men for financial gain. The study finds men are just as likely to pursue partners for their money, and in some groups, even more so.
The research, published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, shows gold digging is "an exploitative strategy beyond a simple preference for resourceful partners, involving explicit trade-off between intimacy and material benefits".
Researchers surveyed 351 adults, about two-thirds female and one-third male, all around age 30 and representing a range of sexual orientations. Participants completed a 15-item forced-choice questionnaire measuring whether they preferred intimacy or material gain in relationships.
Sample prompts included choosing between a "wealthy, faithful partner" or a "faithful partner with limited financial stability".
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The survey also measured personality traits such as narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy and sadism. It also included demographics, political views, city size and perceived mate value.
Participants rated how much they agreed with statements like "People who mess with me always regret it" for psychopathy or "I have some exceptional qualities" for narcissism.
The study was led by psychologist Lennart Freyth of the Behavioral and Social Sciences Institute in Vienna.
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"Gold digging, often stereotyped as female behavior, is in fact not limited to women," the researchers wrote. Both men and women value resources in partners, but gold digging specifically means trading intimacy for material benefits.
The study also claimed that left-wing men scored highest in gold digging. Among women, mid-left non-heterosexual participants scored higher than heterosexual women, while right-leaning non-heterosexual women scored lower.
According to the study, "In both sexes, gold digging is linked to narcissism, psychopathy, date investment expectations, and mate value".
"Probably, on the right, individuals are more successful and therefore more desirable as mates. Therefore, right-wing men and women report higher gold digging. In contrast, leftist men-but not women-report more gold digging," the authors wrote as quoted by phys.org.
"One tentative interpretation is that, among men, left-wing identification may partly function as sexual signaling, consistent with previous work on moral and political traits as potential mate-signals. This finds support in similar findings on self-described mate value and in the exploratory sex-specific analyses on wealth, studying, and political orientation," they added.
