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When asked “With respect to your job/career you would like to have, how important are the following to you?” The rating scale ranged from 1 (not important) to 7 (very important). Men exposed to young, attractive women rated “having a large income” to be 5.09, whereas men exposed to older, less attractive models rated it only 3.27—an astonishingly large effect. Similar differences occurred in rating the importance of “being financially successful.” A full 60 percent of the men exposed to young, attractive models described themselves as “ambitious,” compared to 9 percent of the men exposed to older, less-attractive models. Another study found that merely having a young woman in the same room caused men to increase the importance they attach to having material wealth (Roney, 2003). Similar effects have been found by others. Men “primed” with attractive images of women display more creativity, independence, and nonconformity, causing them to stand out from other men (Griskevicius, Cialdini, & Kenrick, 2006; Griskevicius, Goldstein, Mortensen, Cialdini, & Kenrick, 2006). Chinese men also increase risk taking when being observed by women (Shan et al., 2012). In short, when mating motives are “primed” by exposure to young, attractive women, a cascade of psychological shifts occurs in men such that they value and display precisely what women want and hence what men need to succeed in mate competition.
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David M. Buss (Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind)