Nice guys (and girls) don't always finish last: Acts of charity could help spice up your sex life

                

Helping an old lady cross the road, giving blood or volunteering in a soup kitchen could all help boost your sex life, according to new research. 

Scientists have found that selfless behaviour in both men and women can make them more attractive to a potential sexual partner. 

The results were even better for men, with women finding altruistic traits sexually attractive in both a one-night stand and a long-term relationship

The study could help in our understanding of how natural selection can favour behaviours that involve investing significant time in helping others.

Researchers from the University of Nottingham and Liverpool John Moores University conducted an experiment with 32 women and 35 men, asking them to rate the attractiveness of the opposite sex based on a list of qualities.

These included attributes that were selfless such as ‘he does the shopping for his elderly neighbour’, and those that were considered neutral such as preferences for food.

The results, which have been published in the BMC Evolutionary Biology, showed that both sexes rated potential partners for a long-term relationship as more attractive when they were told that the person had invested in altruistic acts.

‘At first glance, it's difficult to see how natural selection could favour behaviours that involve investing significant time and resources to help others at a cost to oneself,’ said Dr Freya Harrison, a Research Fellow in The University of Nottingham’s Life Sciences Centre for Biomolecular Sciences.

‘We now know that “altruistic” helping can actually increase evolutionary fitness in various ways — people might preferentially help their relatives, with whom they share genes, or they might target their helping toward others who are likely to reciprocate in the future.’

An additional factor that researchers have started to investigate is that ‘altruistic’ acts might make someone more attractive to the opposite sex, increasing their chances of having children and passing on their genes.

‘We're not sure whether being helpful to others signals that you’re more likely to be a good parent who helps your partner with the work involved in raising children, or whether it might be a signal that you carry “good genes” that will produce healthy children,’ added Dr Harrison.

‘Having the energy and ability to help others might be a show of vigour, rather like a peacock’s tail. It would be really interesting for future work to try to tease these two possibilities apart.’