Women and Social Signaling

Yes, symbols of wealth (expensive watches, certain name brand clothes, expensive fancy cars, etc..) will attract women of a certain subset of personality types. There have been numerous social experiments which proved this to be true (you can find some on youtube...they are pretty funny).

Of this subset of women who are attracted to these status symbols,

(a) some % (estimate 15%) will just see the dollar signs, and are planning on getting married for the intent of getting divorced with a nice settlement (this is a minority, but they exist)... (b) The majority (estimate 70%) will see these symbols as indicators of success and that they should investigate further. They tend to have the mentality of "lemme see if there is more here...in the personality department...because if you fall in love with a rich guy..there's nothing wrong with that if you really like him".
(c) There is also some % (a minority..about 15%) that will think "ugh....this dude is overcompensating...go away".

Statistically, having these symbols of wealth will be beneficial when it comes to attracting women (because group (b) is the largest % of the population), but unless you are with group (a) you will still need to have that confident but not cocky personality with all those intangibles that make people "charismatic" to go from initial attraction to "i really like this guy".

Studies of female evolutionary biology (there are many books on the topic) teach us that the most significant attraction switches for the female brain are

1) physical health 2) Social intelligence 3) compatible sense of humor 4) relative social status 5) wealth / ambition 6) confidence 7) pre-selection 8) congruence

Each switch has a story. Long story short, you want to hit ALL of those attraction switches to attract the "better" girls.

There are long explanations for each. Take #4 "relative social status" as an example. In a bar, the bartender often has high relative social status...everybody at the bar desires the bartender to show them some degree of respect and admiration. This usually makes people feel good, especially in front of their peers. Its "cool" for the bartender to remember your name, and give you a free round of drinks because you are best buds. But take the party elsewhere....say...to a finance industry event like a healthcare investor conference where the drinks are free...and the bartender is no longer the relatively high social status individual. In the bar, the bartender can often have his pick of the women. But goto another environment, and being a bartender becomes lower social status. This isn't to say that the bartender is the only person with high social status in the bar...but the bartender has social status by default in that environment. (the game is his to lose, as they say).

Many of the attraction switches bleed into the others...confidence is an attraction switch because it signals that most likely the confident individual also has some of the other switches in his favor, and thus he has been successful in life, and those people tend to be confident. So, its a psychological signal to a girls subconscious. This bleeds into congruence, and other switches as well. This all goes back to millions of years ago...how did our prehistoric ancestors determine who would be the ideal mate? Only a % of the population survived over the ages...good DNA was a big part of that...and over the years....all species, thru the process of natural selection...evolved to select those with traits that were most likely to survive, and replicate...to populate the gene pool.

You can argue that with the advances in technology and society, what was needed to survive and replicate 500,000 years ago will be different that what allows a person to succeed today. But evolutionary biology teaches us that the wiring in our brains has not caught up to the times. This not a 100% hard and fast rule...its just a preference that we all have wired into our brains from our DNA that survived the process of natural selection. So, if you are alive and reading this today, then congratulations...your DNA lineage was naturally selected to survive and replicate...while others failed to survive and replicate...and they are no longer part of the gene pool. Your ancestors survived,....and they passed on their winning DNA to YOU. That should give you immense confidence.