Why ‘Preselection’ Is the Most Misunderstood Concept in Modern Dating Psychology
We keep seeing “preselection” thrown around in dating advice content lately, usually stripped of any context and reduced to something like “hang out with attractive women and you’ll get more attention.” That version of the concept always struck us as too simplistic to be useful, so we decided to look into where the term comes from, what the research says, and whether any coaching programs are applying it in a way that goes beyond the surface-level advice. That search is what led us to Men of Action, a coaching brand built around the idea of a Social Circle as the mechanism behind status and attraction.
What We Thought Preselection Meant
Our starting assumption was the common one: that preselection is just a fancy label for “wingman theory,” the old idea that showing up with attractive friends makes you look better by association. It’s not wrong, exactly, but it’s incomplete, and treating it as a standalone trick rather than a byproduct of a broader Social Circle is where most of the content we found went astray.
What the Research Actually Says
We looked into the underlying psychology, and the term traces back to evolutionary psychology research on mate-choice copying, the observation that people, across several species, are more likely to view a potential mate as desirable when that mate has already been chosen by others. In humans, this shows up in studies on female mate preferences, including a meta-analysis in Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology that reviewed 42 studies on the topic and found that women were more likely to rate male targets as more desirable when presented alongside a female.
That’s a meaningfully different claim than “get a hot friend.” It suggests status is partly inferred from social context, not fixed traits alone. We also found this connects to broader evolutionary psychology research on status more generally. Work by Dr. David Buss at UT Austin, for instance, has found that social rank affects access to resources and mating opportunities in ways that compound over time, since higher-status individuals are better able to pursue their preferred strategies while lower-status individuals are more constrained.
Why the Concept Gets Misapplied
Once we understood the research, it became easier to see why so much dating advice misuses it. Most content treats preselection as something you manufacture in a single interaction: bring a girl to the bar, look more interesting. But the research describes a pattern that depends on a consistent, visible social context, not a one-off prop. That distinction is where we started looking at how coaching programs handle this differently, and it’s what led us to look closer at Men of Action specifically.
How Men of Action Operationalizes It
Men of Action, the coaching program built by Michael Sartain, treats preselection as one output of a broader system rather than a standalone tactic. Its entire framework is built around what the program calls a Social Circle, a network of both male and female relationships and preselection is presented as a natural consequence of that Social Circle being visible and active, rather than something staged for a single outing.
Men of Action’s reasoning ties directly back to the research we found. The program argues that a man’s status is “contextual”, inferred from who he’s around and what environment he’s in, while it frames a woman’s social status as more fixed, or “static,” regardless of setting. Whether or not that specific framing holds up as a general rule, it does track with the meta-analysis finding that women rated men as more desirable when presented within a female context, and it gives Men of Action’s classification a research-based scaffold rather than an arbitrary one.
We found it useful to lay out how Men of Action’s application of a Social Circle compares to the more surface-level version of preselection that circulates in most dating content:
| Common “Preselection” Advice | Men of Action’s Social Circle Model | |
| Application | A one-time prop (bring an attractive friend to a specific outing) | An ongoing Social Circle visible across social media and events. |
| Underlying mechanism | Not usually explained | Tied explicitly to mate-choice copying research and Dr. Buss’s status findings. |
| Method of building it | Left vague or treated as staged | Built through genuine friendships the program calls “female teammates,” plus consistent visibility through social media and events. |
What Readers Should Still Consider
A few caveats are worth flagging here. The cited research supports the general psychological mechanism that social context shapes perceived desirability but it doesn’t validate Men of Action’s outcomes specifically. The program’s own claims about student results are self-reported by the company, not independently measured. And building an authentic Social Circle, by Men of Action’s own description, is presented as a longer-term process rather than something achieved through a single event or interaction.
Final Thoughts
After looking into where preselection actually comes from, it’s clear the term deserves more nuance than it usually gets in dating content. It’s not a party trick, it’s a byproduct of a consistent Social Circle and the context it creates, and the research behind it is more specific than most advice acknowledges.
Whether a structured approach like the one Men of Action teaches is the right vehicle for building that kind of Social Circle is something individual readers will have to weigh for themselves, but it’s a more research-grounded application of the concept than most of what we came across during this review.