The Other Woman: Women\u27s Tendencies to and Perceptions of Mate Poaching Across the Menstrual Cycle

Mate poaching, or romantically pursuing an individual already in a committed romantic relationship, is a potentially hazardous mating tactic for women, as it opens them up to retaliation from scorned women. Because of this danger, from an evolutionary perspective, mate poaching would be most valuable to a woman when she would benefit most from the poached partner in the form of offspring, or when a woman’s conception risk is at its highest. Research in the field strongly suggests that women who are partnered to genetically desirable men are wary of ovulating women because of their tendency to mate-poach. The present work examines this relationship more closely. The first experiment examined if women were in fact more likely to mate poach when they are ovulating as opposed to when they are not. The second experiment examined how women perceive other, ovulating women that they imagine are interacting with their significant other.https://ecommons.udayton.edu/stander_posters/2245/thumbnail.jp