There are two unresolved puzzles in the literature examining how people evaluate mates (i.e., prospective or current romantic/sexual partners). First, compatibility is theoretically crucial, but attempts to explain why certain perceivers are compatible with certain targets have revealed small effects. Second, features of partners (e.g., personality, consensually rated attributes) affect perceivers’ evaluations strongly in initial-attraction contexts but weakly in established relationships. Mate Evaluation Theory (MET) addresses these puzzles, beginning with the Social Relations Model postulate that all evaluative constructs (e.g., attraction, relationship satisfaction) consist of target, perceiver, and relationship variance. MET then explains how people draw evaluations from mates’ attributes using four information sources: (a) shared evolved mechanisms and cultural scripts (common lens, which produces target variance); (b) individual differences that affect how a perceiver views all targets (perceiver lens, which produces perceiver variance); (c) individual differences that affect how a perceiver views some targets, depending on the targets’ features (feature lens, which produces some relationship variance); and (d) narratives about and idiosyncratic reactions to one particular target (target-specific lens, which produces most relationship variance). These two distinct sources of relationship variance (i.e., feature vs. target-specific) address Puzzle #1: Previous attempts to explain compatibility used feature lens information, but relationship variance likely derives primarily from the (understudied) target-specific lens. MET also addresses Puzzle #2 by suggesting that repeated interaction causes the target-specific lens to expand, which reduces perceivers’ use of the common lens. We conclude with new predictions and implications at the intersection of the human-mating and person-perception literatures.

中文翻译：

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配偶评价理论。

研究人们如何评价伴侣（即未来或当前的浪漫/性伴侣）的文献中有两个未解之谜。首先，兼容性在理论上是至关重要的，但试图解释为什么某些感知器与某些目标兼容的尝试揭示了很小的影响。其次，合作伙伴的特征（例如，个性、一致评价的属性）在初始吸引环境中强烈影响感知者的评价，但在已建立的关系中影响微弱。伴侣评价理论 (MET) 解决了这些难题，从社会关系模型开始假设所有评价结构（例如，吸引力、关系满意度）都由目标、感知者和关系差异组成。MET 然后解释了人们如何使用四种信息来源从配偶的属性中得出评估：common lens，产生目标方差）；(b) 影响感知者如何看待所有目标的个体差异（感知器透镜，产生感知差异）；(c) 影响感知者如何看待某些目标的个体差异，这取决于目标的特征（特征透镜，它会产生一些关系差异）；(d) 关于一个特定目标的叙述和特殊反应（针对特定目标的镜头，这会产生最多的关系方差）。这两个不同的关系方差来源（即特征与目标特定）解决了难题 #1：以前尝试解释兼容性使用特征镜头信息，但关系方差可能主要来自（未被研究的）目标特定镜头。MET 还通过建议重复交互导致目标特定镜头扩展来解决难题 #2，这会减少感知者对公共镜头的使用。我们在人类交配和个人感知文献的交叉点得出新的预测和启示。