The Hidden Motives Behind Female Friendships - Dr Tania Reynolds | Modern Wisdom Podcast 580

what we might be doing when we form opposite sex friends is basically recruiting kind of like backup mates the preferences that we espouse for our opposite sex friends look pretty similar to our preferences for mates and so it suggests we might be cultivating backup mates and there are some data that people do this explicitly they'll report being distressed if their backup mate forms a relationship among over 11 600 U.S employees women were less satisfied with their jobs when they're reported to a female boss whereas men showed no difference in job satisfaction based on their supervisor's gender why do you think that is so I think this goes back to the challenges faced by our female ancestors throughout human history a larger percentage of social groups were Patra local meaning that when women were married they left their families to go live with their husbands and so this would have been particularly challenging for ancestral women because they were surrounded by individuals with whom they weren't genetically related and we know that it's harder to form Cooperative relationships with non-kin compared to Kin and so I've thought about okay well how might women have navigated these relationships how might they have recruited allies in these contexts and Dave Geary has made the argument that one way women might have formed Cooperative Bonds in these contexts is through either reciprocal altruism or mutualism so meaning they're forming relationships based on shared goals or exchanging benefits in a tit-for-tat manner and so if you look at what are the contexts that allow those types of relationships to succeed it tends to be when relationship Partners have symmetrical levels of power and resources and so I think one way to think about this might be what would it look like if say there was a huge asymmetry in resources between partners so say a famous celebrity tried to form a Cooperative relationship with an unhoused person or a homeless person this would be very challenging because they it would be quite unlikely that they'd have mutually aligned goals and over time you would expect that this relationship would devolve into either um kind of exploitation or just kind of you know a unilateral extraction of resources so leeching on another person's resources and indeed that's what mathematicals find is that when Partners diverge in power and resources The Cooperative bonds kind of um they're no longer mutually beneficial it's one partner taking advantage of the other partner and so if these are the conditions that uphold reciprocal altruism what I suspect is that women throughout human history upheld their reciprocal bonds with unrelated same-sex women under such conditions such that they preferred contacts where they were of equal power and equal resources and too strong of deviations would have led to conflict and kind of corroded the relationship and so I think that this can become problematic in modern context where there are clear demarcations in status and resources or in contact say where we have social media and we could observe the lives of people who deviate strongly from us and their social conditions that basically these deviations might be more corrosive to women's same-sex relationships if throughout human history our female ancestors were forming Cooperative bonds with one another under conditions of symmetry why is that not the same case for men so great question throughout human history our male ancestors were more often involved in coalitionary contexts so they were forming larger groups both for the context of hunting but also I think more consequentially for the context of warfare and so when you form these large groups um there tends to be especially in Warfare there's an advantage to having larger numbers so a numerical Advantage so having more men kind of on your team is advantageous and so in these contexts what helps is a strong hierarchy this is really useful for organizing large groups and it's really helpful for kind of a chain of command to organize and attack so if every man out on the battlefield is kind of going with his own whims that is really uncoordinated so if we think of a modern context of warfare I think the one example might be football kind of an analog there is a clear line of command in which there's the coach and then maybe the quarterback reads the plays and everyone knows what the game plan is and that leads to success on the field so too is the case in Warfare where you need a strong chain of command to organize the attack and so you also need Beyond just a chain of command you also need specialization so not every man is going to be equally talented in every role so maybe there's one guy who's great at throwing the spears one guy who's great at making the spears one guy who's great at kind of coming up with the strategy and so having these this role specialization is really useful for large groups because then you can maximize your talent and so if men throughout human history were more often in competing in these group based contexts then they stood to gain from asymmetries and power insofar as that meant their group was going to be more organized and cohesive and successful on the battlefield and so I think this group component is really important because what that meant is that for our male ancestors if they were successful they all lived and the genetic data suggests they reproduced with the local women which is not you know Pleasant to think about but that's what the evidence suggests and so there are reproductive benefits but also just survival and then for the men who lost it wasn't just losing a football match it was death you got slaughtered potentially the people back home got slaughtered so there was a lot on the line and so what that meant is men stood to gain if there were asymmetries in power that led to success on the battlefield likewise they stood to gain by having same-sex peers on their team who may have been more talented and who may have been rewarded with status so if you were on a football team and your quarterback is phenomenal and he gets more status than you do you might still be happy because your team wins as a whole even if he is relatively better off there's a trickle-down effect of his his ability to help you and because men it seems were more coalitional that benefits everybody overall in terms of Bible and reproduction whereas with women it seems like they didn't need this coalitional thing so much you would have had women presumably competing some a little bit of polygyny perhaps going on so you'd have had co-wives of one particular person you would have had all of the concerns you have around child rearing Joyce beninson was on the show a little while ago and obviously she's done that great work to do with uh tennis but she's studying tennis players at the moment have you seen this most recent stuff so she's moved on from female sports teams and she's now obsessing over tennis players and she's looking at what happens after a match between male male and female female tennis players the amount of physical contact that they have the sort of body language the kind of words that they use presumably to describe how the match went and you'll be familiar with the work that she's done but for the people that aren't um it seems like in sports teams men who compete against other male teams that compete against other male teams show both more cohesion within the competition itself amongst their own team and then once the game's over they're more happy to be uh physically and sort of verbally um collaborative and and complementary with the uh opponents females during sports games seem to show both more disdain for their own side and for the other side as well like they're just not really friends with anybody at all and I think female intersexual competition for me has been such a like an obsessively interesting topic it's so much more female competition and friendships is way more interesting than male competition and friendships I think uh it's just there's more nuanced and there's a lot more going on I'm very very glad that I'm not female like trying to navigate the world of female friendships to me seems unbelievably difficult is that right to say is it right to say that female friendships are more complex than male friendships do you think I think so um I've become increasingly interested in how women form Cooperative relationships because I just for so long focused on the competitive aspect of it and the Cooperative part I also find very interesting because it's they're intertwined so as you're saying you know tying into Joyce bennetson's work yeah she's found that Co-op competition tends to corrode female relationships more than men's like men can more easily return to cooperation following competition than can women she finds it in little kids um she finds it in adult athletes where that's an explicit goal of the activity um but yeah there's other work showing that yeah um in for female relationships they tend to dissolve if there's more competition in it and male relationships aren't as corroded by it and in fact I think if anything it seems like there can be a positive aspect to competing with your male friends and so yeah there's just so much more overt interactions happening in male same-sex relationships whereas for women's it seems to be a lot more kind of under the surface things all these dynamics that are happening that aren't explicitly acknowledged and so I've started to look at you know what are the conditions under which women form friendships and it seems that the some of the transgressions that they would most get upset about that would most compromise their same-sex friendships are perceiving another woman as unkind or perceiving her as not personally committed to to you and so I think that this makes sense if we think about our female ancestors if they were in these Patra local contexts they were surrounded by unrelated women they had to figure out who they could trust and one cue is just someone who's kind on average that's someone who's going to be a generous and forgiving exchange partner so if you mess up they won't hold it against you I was going to say what what's kind mean kind meaning um altruistic pro-social generous supportive um yeah kind in that sense nice um and the ethnographic data support it too so if you look at um what they've looked at with female adolescents basically in order to be popular as a female you have to be super nice otherwise other girls will hate you they won't let you be popular they'll really resent you and envy you so you have to display at least what that's what they find in these ethnographies among female adolescents you have to displace strong cues of niceness and indeed that's the trait that women report as most important in a friend um men value it too but just not to the same degree and then the other thing that we find is that women tend to get upset if their friends aren't personally loyal to them so we used examples we tested this by looking at what transgressions would upset them and it was things like you know forgetting it was your birthday not asking you about how your family's doing um never being the first to reach out to you you always have to reach out to them and so I think this also makes sense because if we think about our female ancestors trying to figure out who they can trust well whoever is giving off cues of personal commitment and loyalty and devotion is going to be someone you can more confidently trust and our female ancestors had a lot at stake because of another woman became disloyal to them that could mean a reputational attack and it could be something like spreading a rumor that you're cheating on your husband and if your husband believes it that could mean your death or he abandons you and you no longer have access to his resources and support nor do your children so there's a lot on the line in terms of reputational loyalty but also if women were helping out with one another's um provisioning to Children than if another female really disliked you that could lead to harm to your child maybe in the form of negligence or spiteful harm now I'm not sure how often that happened so there is some evidence among the dogon people in Mali that at least among co-wives there were a lot of rumors that they were poisoning one another's children and so what this meant is like innerport interpersonal loyalty was a really big deal for our female ancestors and perhaps not to the same degree as our male ancestor so our male ancestors I suspect would have cared more about whether the man was loyal to the group because that predicted the group's success whereas if he you know was your best friend that's not as important what's important is that he doesn't defect or commit treason and so there's an asymmetry here and kind of the importance of interpersonal loyalty Joyce also taught me about this sort of um veneer egalitarianism that happens among women and the reason for that being that any one girl that uh kind of seems to be rising up too much above everybody else is treated pretty poorly and that resonates exactly with what you said there in order to be the most popular girl in school you have to over deliver on niceness because popularity and not niceness are negatively correlated like if you were someone that wasn't nice you're immediately going to be pulled back down right and it makes sense that women would care about niceness and kind of popularity and Status driving because you could imagine that if there were if you were trying to form a relationship with a woman who was very status driving or very competitive she might feel that she's entitled to more resources than you or she might abandon you for another female friend who's going to benefit her more strongly and so there were potential potential risks to forming Cooperative relationships with women who were really status driving and competitive and so it would make sense that in these modern contexts we see kind of disdain for those patterns there's some evidence uh I believe it's Redmond's study that found that women preferred another woman who was self-effacing rather than self-promoting and I think you see a lot of this these patterns in women's same-sex relationships where I've noticed this anecdotally that you can't you cannot brag and if you um receive a compliment you have to kind of undermine it so someone if someone compliments your hair you need to be like oh my God no I haven't washed it in days it's so oily I can't like oh my God no you have to like almost like undermine the compliment um they poke fun at this and the movie Mean Girls which I think just got female interactions pretty spot on um but there are data to support this so women tend to engage in this pattern of co-rumination in their friendships where they tend to get into these conversations where it's kind of rehashing problems um it's really focusing on vulnerabilities and your setbacks you're re-analyzing you know why did my boyfriend break up with me or you know why was why does she not like me so it's just like this really negative problem-focused discussion in and so you tend to see this more often in women's relationships and I think it makes sense because it's the exact opposite of bragging instead of focusing on all the things that are going well in your life which might signal that you're a threat and you're competitive and you're status driving you're focusing on everything that's not going well in your life and this tends to be associated with closeness in women and I think that one reason women do this is because it signals that they're not a threat you're focusing on everything that's going wrong and then a second reason that I think women do this is it's basically by sharing all your vulnerabilities you are it's an honest display of commitment because you're giving someone personal information that they could later use against you and so by offering that up you're basically kind of locking yourself in it increases the risk of defecting that if we get into a fight later on you can now use all this dirt that I told you about myself and so I suspect that women respond quite warmly to these types of disclosures compared to the opposite where you know it's just telling you everything that's going well and how strong and wonderful my relationship is as an example well I can imagine given how complex female relationships are that performative vulnerability could be something that's used or tactical vulnerability this is a piece of information which in the wrong hands oh no I really hope that someone doesn't find out about this but in reality you wouldn't really care and I suppose uh who is it that did the work about venting is that um it's not Candace Blake is it Jamie krams Jamie crumbs thank you very much uh so she did that I also got the thing that it's made me think about is um David puts his work where he looked at the vocal pitch of men when they were around men who are higher in status or lower in status than them and if it's a man who's significantly higher in status the other man tends to raise his vocal pitch a little bit and that's the exact same thing I'm not a threat listen to how puny my vocal folds are you have absolutely nothing to worry about from me please do not smash me into the ground and then the converse happens and it happens even more if there is a woman around if there's a woman present both men drop their vocal pitch more and more and more to try and sort of give off this uh auditory um aggressive sound I guess this sort of uh competition they've got going on talking about things going well and things going badly you did some research about men's suffering and people's responses to it as well what was that yeah so that was the theoretical framework was based on Kirk Gray's work and he has looked at in the domain of moral psychology he's looked at moral type casting which is this tendency to he argues that when we perceive a moral action we kind of instinctively classify people as either the perpetrator or the victim so we have this dyadic heuristic when we perceive moral actions and so we took that framework and we looked at okay might there be a gender bias and our tendency to place men and women in the victim and perpetrator categories and so across a series of studies what we found was that we more instinctively classify women as victims and men as perpetrators and so Kurt Gray's model argues that when you classify someone as a perpetrator it makes it more challenging to see them as a victim and vice versa so if you classify someone as a victim it's harder to see them as a perpetrator and so these roles are pretty consequential because they're associated with sympathy and blame and so what we found is that congruent with these this type casting we found that people more easily blame men than women and they more easily feel sympathy for women than men is that both men and women fail that yes we did find in some of our studies we found that women showed the bias to a stronger degree than did men but we didn't find that super consistently um and so I think that this makes sense from an evolutionary perspective because if we think about reproduction women set the upper limit so women contribute they basically bring more to the reproductive table they're more valuable exactly and so if you have a group with very few women you're not going to have many babies being produced compared to if you have a group with a lot of women you really only need a couple of men to still produce many babies a couple of men having an absolutely fantastic time yeah I'm sure they would be very delighted until an enemy group comes in and then they have to having a bad time yeah yeah so probably wouldn't last long but exactly so women are more reproductively valuable so I think it it makes sense that we might have these biases to kind of protect women from harm but this can be really problematic when we might be less likely to recognize men suffering so I think when we think about the distribution of social outcomes we tend to focus at the top end of the distribution where we might recognize like oh women are less often CEOs less often world leaders this is certainly true but when you look at the bottom end of the distribution men are more often homeless more often imprisoned more often dropping out of school they're more likely to die by Suicide die by drug overdose so men aren't thriving at this side of the societal distribution and so I think in this case it can be really problematic that we don't recognize or less easily recognize men as victims and have less sympathy for their suffering you see this reflected in IQ distribution as well right that you have more men at the top and more man at the bottom and it's kind of the same the men are just who is it that said might have been David bus that said uh men are Evolutions play things that you just you roll the dice with them a little bit more there's more genetic variation we'll see what happens they're kind of more disposable because as you say it's women that set the upper Bound in terms of uh procreation so I understand why it would be the case that we're more prepared to see men suffer in one regard that they're just kind of like less they need to be less protected and they need to be less valuable the interesting question I suppose is in a modern world where women don't need to be coddled so much anymore we don't have the same um physical concerns and yet we have this mismatch now where the ability to give sympathy to Men Who perhaps very much need it isn't there yeah it is problematic in a modern environment and I mean for both for multiple reasons so not only that we can't recognize men's suffering but also that we if we're more inclined to see women in this like patient role this like suffering victim role it makes us it harder for us to see them as agentic and so I think this might contribute to why we more easily recognize men as leaders and so it's not always you know unilaterally positive to see women as like the patient that's very interesting yes yeah and so it's like it can be harmful when you want to you know in the voting booth you're not going to be recognized as an agent and maybe not as a CEO um but in the context of moral harm you're not going to be blamed to the same degree did you see speaking about the in the voting booth thing Christina Durante taught me that in a political race between two women the woman who loses is the one that has better marital outcomes long term like her relationship is the one that ends up being better long term for for her relationship yes yeah for her private relationship I just thought that was so funny it just everything gets folded into this I remember seeing a tweet from you as well about Steve Stuart Williams study Steve Stewart Williams found that people respond more favorably to Scientific findings showing women outperform men versus the converse people wrongly assumed men prefer male favoring findings may suggest gender biases in reviews slash publishing of research what do you think's going on there yeah so I think that because we tend to you know see women we want we want women to to have beneficial beneficial outcomes we put them in this like let's help the victim category it can make them more appealing and and easier to support compared to men if we if we view men as perpetrators and agents it's easier to see what they're doing as malicious and so if we're kind of encountering information that women are have some positive trait we're like oh good let's help them I suppose as well what would be the social signal that would give you um some reflected glory of championing the underdog if you're championing the one that in terms of a cliche archetype is already the one that used to do this thing that used to overperform exactly yeah yeah so you look more beneficial or you look more pro-social by championing you know women's success because we assume women are doing worse across the board which is true at the top end of the distribution not at the bottom um and so yeah I think that that can that's an interesting it'd be fun to look at like what moral credits do people get for you know helping women they're promoting these things that help women versus men we did actually conduct a study we haven't submitted it yet but it was um it was a politician talking about men's afflictions in the world and we didn't say what the politician's gender was um so it was them giving a speech talking about all the ways that men are suffering in the world and then in the other condition we just changed men to women and so in that condition it was the statements were no longer true and because it was about women and women are actually in those contexts doing better so they're like you know not dropping out of school to the same degree as men are and so what we found is that people liked the politician talking about the female disadvantages even though their statements were not true so they liked that politician more were more likely to vote for that politician wanted to donate more perceive them as more immoral even though the statements weren't true and so it was interesting because our male participants identified correctly identified that the statements were less true but I don't think our female participants did and so I think there support some of that bias that I was telling you about where our female participants tended to show more favoritism towards women across the board which I think makes sense if we think about our female ancestors they needed to recruit female allies so one way to do that might be to Signal hey I'm on team women which probably throughout human history was pretty consequential because say your you know male partner was being really violent towards you you would want a female Ally that was team women because she might be more likely they recruit social support on your behalf but if that occurred enough throughout human history that other women preferred the females that had the female bias then that might contribute to why we see you know modern women today showing this pro-female bias what is it that women want from a same same-sex friendship I can see what men want the coalitional you go kill me drag back type relationship what is it that women want so they want someone super nice and very committed to them some data suggests they don't want a friend that exceeds them in attractiveness so they don't mind if they're you know have these other admirable attributes but attractiveness seem to be one where women are like she doesn't need to be prettier than I am which makes sense because then she's more of a mating rival um and so yeah what use are these female friends like what you've got someone who is caring and loyal and not that hot um what is it that you want them to do what are you doing with them yeah it's a great question so I think this is actually a more complicated question in terms of what is the function of female friends at least throughout human history a lot of arguments have been made that female allies were useful for Aloe care so helping you care for your children when I go through the data I have a hard time finding evidence that it's non-kin providing aloe care so when I look at these non-industrialized groups what I tend to find is that the um the studies suggest that it's genetic kin that tend to be caring for women's Offspring suggesting that it's just that could be predicted by kin selection and so in terms of what are non-kin female allies doing I find it more challenging honestly to identify what are the tangible benefits of having these friends because if you look at Food provisioning it tends to be men's yields that are shared more widely throughout the group what women bring back tends to be shared more within their families and so it's not like they're providing additional food Aid and if they're not providing aloe care like what are they doing and so what I suspect a female Ally is actually doing is being a kind of coalitional partner in reputational Warfare and so basically that she is protecting your reputation and Hess and Hagen have cool data showing that women are less likely to spread negative gossip about a woman if she has a friend present compared to if she doesn't so I think having female allies could protect your reputation they can also shut down a rumor and say oh my God no she's not cheating on her husband or you know whatever and then they can also help you be a more effective competitor by spreading your gossip because if gossip is repeated multiple times by independent sources it's more likely to be believed so if you wanted to take out a rival and you have you know 10 female friends to spread the information it's now distributed much more widely and people are going to believe it more readily compared to if you have no female allies and then there are also sources of reputational ammo so they can bring you information question about other same-sex competitors or opposite sex if you wanted to you know take out a man but I think more often women's conversations are about same-sex peers so I think that what female allies might actually be doing is helping women better compete but in a social pro-social anti-social reputational gossip way physical fights I'm so glad every single day I'm reminded of being being glad that I'm a male um all right what about opposite sex friends why is it that women would want non-kin non-partner male compatriots the data that I've seen suggests that what we might be doing when we form opposite sex friends is basically recruiting kind of like backup mates and so um that basically the preferences that we espouse for our opposite sex friends look pretty similar to our preferences for mates and so it suggests we might be cultivating you know backup mates and there are some data that people do this explicitly and you know they'll report being distressed if their backup mate forms a relationship and so some people do this consciously my guess is a lot of people might be doing it non-consciously but still espousing similar preferences it's possible also that maybe same or excuse me opposite sex friends might have served as protection perhaps if you're we're really aggressive so we might also be looking for those especially if you're Patra local right because one of the ways that a cost inflicting mate who is doing more mate guarding would typically behave is that they would isolate their partner their female partner from uh brother's father's grandfathers Etc and if you've already been displaced geographically from wherever it is you're pretty much on your own and especially when it comes to physical vulnerability I suppose that having a male friend around to do that but it also explains given the fact that you had to really scrape the bottom of the barrel to find a reason that isn't to do with mating for women to have male friends I think that explains one of the reasons why men get so uncomfortable when their partner their female partner talks about that male friend that they've got at work and this is what I learned from David buss's Men Behaving Badly the failure of cross-sex mind reading the male over perception and the female underperception bias of attraction that you have this situation where women and men basically exist in different worlds when it comes to perceiving what's going on and this failure of ability to work out to model the other person's World very much can cause two people both acting in a true way acting in a fair and loyal way to see completely different situations and to actually have an awful lot of friction in their relationship and I mean even just the integration of male and female spheres is probably pretty recent you know so probably throughout much of human history women were spending a lot of time with other women and men were spending a lot of time with other men you see this in children you know we segregate really early and so the concept of working with all these opposite sex peers is probably pretty a pretty novel Challenge and so it would make sense that it would cause a lot of friction if we haven't you know encountered it much through human history that now it's like we just need to adjust to these new conditions do you remember when Peterson said on an interview we don't know if this experiment of men and women working together in the workplace has worked out a notch remember when he said this it was about three or four years ago he got slammed he got absolutely destroyed for it and maybe it needed more context or caveats or maybe it's just the fact that he's a lightning rod for the culture war and anything that he says kind of gets taken as like this is the new headline and we can go after him about like enforced monogamy or whatever but um that's a genuinely interesting question and it also I've been on this thing for a little while that the current framing around uh men and women and their relationships is very adversarial right it's super adversarial that men and women are competing with each other for something I don't know what it is resources or or positions within companies or status or victimhood uh position or whatever it is right men and women for almost all of history kind of really didn't give a [ __ ] about each other men were off with their men doing their men thing and women are off with their women doing the woman thing and they would come together they would have sex the man would contribute a bit here and there but for the most part we're in different worlds and this is one of the reasons that I've been really trying to drive home this intersexual competition point because I think it is a really lovely antidote to this adversarial world where men and women don't have the language or the mental models to be able to understand how to compete with each other or why they should compete with each other and they feel like they're in different teams but they kind of really don't have any ground to be able to do it and it causes people to concept creep and just randomly create problems out of nowhere in an attempt to justify post-hoc rationalize this reason for some sort of discontent but when you realize that almost all competition between women is with other women and almost all competition from men is with other men I know it gives me a little bit more breathing room and it also means that I know right okay this is the rules of the game are better defined I understand how to compete with men I don't understand how to compete with women and I don't feel like I do and yet I'm being told that I am and yeah I think the intersexual competition thing in my opinion is going to be a very important area of research um to publicize to like really really get out there because it's this beautiful um calming bomb antidote to kind of the cultural milieu that we've seen at the moment I I totally agree and the argument that now we're portrayed as you know men and women are portrayed as antagonistic I think it's true and I I have some data with some some colleagues um my colleague Carl Aquino um and Simon uh and so what we find is this when you when people encounter um sexual harassment policies that are really strict and so basically these narratives that sexual harassment is widespread and the consequences are really steep so the the risks of an accusation are very high what we find is that corrodes opposite sex benevolence so people are less willing to work with opposite sex peers they feel less benevolence towards opposite sex peers they have less motivation to engage in romantic and sexual relationships with them and we even did this study where we asked them how much do you want to donate to prevent the suicides of opposite sex individuals and they donated less and so what I think is going on is that we keep talking about all the ways by which men and women could have antagonistic Relationships by focusing so much on sexual sexual harassment and sexual harassment is a problem but when we emphasize it we are creating this stereotype of men as sexual perpetrators and women as ready to Levy an allegation at any Behavior perceived as sexual and so it's creating this you know the antagonism it's describing who's Marina gertzberg do you know her oh I I think I might have found one of her papers so this is from my newsletter a little while ago uh hashtag metoo has hurt women's careers women's productivity fell post me too largely due to fewer collaborations with men a study of research collaborations involving Junior female academic economists showed that they started fewer new research projects after me too the decline is driven largely by fewer collaborations with new male co-authors at the same institution the drop in collaborations is concentrated in universities where the perceived risk of sexual harassment accusations for men is high that is when both sexual harassment policies are more ambiguous exposing men to a larger variety of claims and the number of public sexual harassment incidents is high the results suggest that metoo is associated with an increased cost of collaboration that disadvantaged the career opportunities of women metoo was important to raise awareness but the intent was not to impose costs on women's careers totally yeah I I think I I found her paper and I was like oh my God this is the same exact pattern there are other data yes showing that people um are less like so women don't want to be mentored by a senior male and that senior males don't want to they're less willing to Mentor Junior women they're less willing to hire attractive women they don't want to hold one-on-one meetings with women and so that's isn't that strange that that's that's men right that's male mentors do you meant that yeah but so it was both the ways yeah yeah but the point being that we're about to get onto it women also don't like attractive women if men are fearful now in a post-metu world of collaborating with women especially attractive women and women had a genetic biological predisposition going back tens of thousands of years of not liking attractive women it's a pretty bad situation yeah yeah yeah it's not great it's so it's creating the very thing we'd like to prevent you know that this hyper focus on everything that could go wrong is creating less mentorship for women if we want to enhance women's you know career advancement then I think we just we need to have a more nuanced approach of kind of what are the negative externalities of focusing so heavily on these problems which do it's tough because they do want attention but it's worth considering how our attention has also created problems the problem that you have is there is a current Trend I think reinforced by the reward of inflammatory Language online that overcooking or over egging over emphasizing any issue that as yet hasn't been fixed is uh allowed because we will get there quicker right if there is one sexual harassment that is one too many that means that we need to continue to hammer the sexual harassment thing and if we overblow some of the claims or if we make it more aggressive then it needs to be that doesn't matter because when you compare using words that are slightly more inflammatory to somebody being sexually harassed they do indeed Palin's insignificance the problem is that you don't get to see these much more below the surface longer term externalities that come about by doing this by overblowing these sorts of topics there was also another study that you cited saying a more Cooperative sex in a meta-analysis of social dilemmas 31 000 people women were more Cooperative in mixed sex interactions but less Cooperative in same-sex interactions men became more Cooperative than women over repeated interactions what's that yeah so it was um a large meta-analysis of economic games and it was really interesting because they found that the sex differences and cooperativeness widened over iterations so the more games that you were playing with a partner you found larger disparities between men and women's same-sex interactions such that men became more cooperative and women became less cooperative and so what I think is going on there is that women's women's cooperation was more Tit for Tat that if there was one defection it would lead to defection with women whereas men if there was one defection they could maybe recover from it and so I think this gets back to kind of what we were talking about with our female ancestors is that if you want to kind of sustain a Cooperative relationship that's through reciprocal altruism then you're attending to benefits exchanged and if you're caring a lot about interpersonal loyalty like who has my back one defection is a sign that maybe you can't trust that person and so this meta-analysis is kind of revealing these patterns using really large samples that for women one defection is hard to recover from again similar to like what Joyce Bennington is finding with the athletes like that competition is kind of corroding the cooperation and so I think that this this information is useful because we can think about okay well maybe then one way to actually help women and promote cooperation is perhaps to focus on forgiveness if it's the case that we are so attuned to whether this woman is kind whether this woman is devoted to me then maybe interventions that focus on forgiveness or like how do I I focus on for example all the ways that my friend demonstrated loyal to loyalty to me instead of focusing on the one way that she was not loyal to me her signaled defection so that might be useful for Designing interventions to promote female cooperation because yeah these data are suggesting that all it takes is you know one defection or maybe one or two defections and then it derails the cooperation you mentioned about how same-sex friendships for women are kind of um Troopers within this reputational Army almost um gossip is kind of the the bullets that get fired or it's the weapon of choice I suppose what's the what's the use of gossip so gossip one reason that it's advantageous is that it's not physical attack so the reason that women don't engage in physical aggression is because throughout human history these are Ann Campbell's arguments women were more often caregiving for dependent Offspring and so what that meant is that if you die your child is more likely to die and indeed across cultures and throughout history children are more likely to die if their mother is not around compared if their father's not around and so when women risk physical violence when they risk injury or death they are risking those things for their children as well and so Ann Campbell has argued that's why women do not use physical aggression and so gossip is indirect and one of the reasons it's great is because you can deny culpability you can spread this information without it necessarily being clear that you were the one that spread it um and that's important to prevent retaliation either in the form of physical violence or reputational violence you know so if someone then spreads a rumor about you you're worse off and data suggests that gossip is useful because it lowers people's social appeal and so if we were competing for mates and someone sped a rumor that you know I've already cheated on my last partner or um you know I'm undesirable for whatever reason maybe I'm mean and if that changes a potential mate's decision that could be the difference between my pairing with someone who could provide for my children and someone who can't you know so it's really consequential and if people are affected by social information then that's going to be consequential it seems like women's well-being is a lot more on a knife edge than Menses both reputationally and physically as well I know that they've got um a lower threshold for pain they've got a lower threshold for infection and other sorts of things like just generally physically are more wired to be vulnerable and emotionally presumably the same as well to be sensitized to these threats so the argument this is an extension of Ann Campbell's kind of staying alive theory is that if women needed to stay alive to provide for their children in a way that men maybe didn't then they're one way to stay alive is to be very sensitive to threats both physical and social so women are more responsive to cues in their body so they're more interceptive or sensitive to enteroceptive cues they have more nightmares they have more fears they have more phobias and part of that makes sense because you're basically just Vigilant to any threat that could harm your well-being um but yes as you're saying you know the social vulnerability that is particularly strong because so one another aspect of why women are so vulnerable is one huge component of their mate value is their sexual history so across human history and across cultures men tend to show a preference for sexual chastity at least in their long-term partners and so what's tough about sexual Chastity is it's a negative state so you can never prove it you can't prove that you're a virgin so if someone were or that you're sexually restrained if someone were to call you promiscuous there's really nothing you can do to counteract it look at all of this sex that I'm not having exactly and so it's a it's really easy to kind of undermines someone's reputation in that domain because there's no way that they can counteract it whereas for men if you call them physically weak they could lift up something strong if you call them you know not courageous then they could I don't know do some feat that demonstrates that they are courageous so you can't counteract an accusation of promiscuity um and that was really consequential to women's mate value and their potential to attract a desirable mate and so they are also incredibly vulnerable in this way and so if you don't have allies or if other women dislike you your reputation could be on the line and that could jeopardize so steering clear of accusations of sexual indiscretion in the past is a Big Driver of all of the different social setups that women have got that we've gone through so far yeah it's a huge contributor because that is kind of that's like the Achilles heel in in some ways of women's reputation like it's very vulnerable because that affected make value and your ability to attract a mate you can call it into question and you can't undermine those accusations and so it that was probably and if you look at the information that women tend to guard it's really interesting because women tend to disclose a lot about themselves um to their friends but their sexual history is one kind of piece of information that they keep close to the chest they don't share that as willingly and I've also found that sexual information tends to pretty strongly harm women's reputation and their desirability as friends romantic Partners um so other women tend to dislike promiscuous women um partially I think they do that for two reasons one is to Signal how sexually chaste they are like oh God I would never do that and then two is to avoid the woman that could steal your mate so if you have a reputation of being sexually promiscuous that's going to harm your desirability to other women but also to men at least as a long-term partner if men are prioritizing sexual Chastity um in their long-term mating decisions does that mean that women's preparedness to talk about their sexual history is mediated by the local sex ratio have you looked at this no that's interesting wouldn't that be cool if if you were in an environment where there was tons of men and women started to become more open about their sexual past yeah I mean there are so yeah Dave Schmidt has data that women become more unrestricted in their sexuality when they are in um actually more female biased India they need to play by the rules of the men exactly but there are also data that when women are when the sex ratio is more skewed towards women men and women diverge further in their purity concerns and so what I think might be going on there is women might be trying to Signal their sexual Purity in these contexts where there's strict competition for men so maybe there's kind of two routes who could either go the sexual route and play by men's rules or you could signal I am not going to do that you know and I'm going to be so pure so then at least I get selected for the long term oh very interesting yeah well that's a that's a really fascinating duality of what's going on because the the problem that you have with a woman who's prepared to give it away on the first or second date is that she is going to out compete the woman that wants to make you wait until the third or the fourth date and that may be able to capture that man but there is the Madonna [ __ ] kind of uh Paradox or whatever it's called where positioning a woman in one particular bucket as easy or whatever and I could you know I know this from my own life that the girls that I've got into long-term relationships with have very rarely been ones that I've slept with within the first few dates it's always been the ones that I've ended up sticking about for longer now is that because I knew that it was a longer term investment is that because of some sort of um increased closeness when it comes to make value so you know that they can't give it up so much and the ones that have the high make value or the ones that you're going to get in the relationship with the longer like there are a whole bunch of different ways that it plays about but I totally know what you mean that you could have this sort of forking in a high female skewed sex ratio ecology you could have a double-pronged assault but what you would actually want to have as a woman is to um show sexual Chastity publicly no matter what is happening and because there is no real advantage to showing that you are easy and then privately that's when the different strategy would come through yeah yeah I like your your gameplay because it is challenging to navigate because it's like okay well there's so much competition and they've done studies at least in like these female skewed environments and universities women feel pressured to have sex sooner and so there is this feeling of like well okay everybody else is doing it you know who's going to be willing to wait for those four dates or however long you would normally want to wait and so women do feel pressured to have sex sooner than they would otherwise but then you also get this pattern of this like Purity concern and so maybe one strategy would be I'm gonna signal that I'm you know so high mate value that I'm not going to have sex but I think that different women are going to have different abilities to leverage that so based on their mate value yeah so you'd probably would find that that would be correlated with which strategy they're going to use if you can afford to wait longer you should but of course that's not easy you know that's not going to be true for everyone yeah so it's not just going to be your main value it's going to be your main value in relation to the man that you are with so you could imagine a situation in a High female skewed sex ratio ecology where a high mate value woman and a moderate make value man the woman may play Still by her own sort of slightly more Chastity rules in order to get more investment from the man in advance of and then also kind of bypass that Madonna Madonna [ __ ] complex thing so what about [ __ ] shaming is like if that if the sexual derogation of Rivals and kind of the gossip and rules is like the sniper rifle [ __ ] shaming is kind of like the dirty bomb that you just throw across the entire mating Market in an attempt to raise the supposed price of sex have you done much research about [ __ ] shaming particular threat of the woman that you are shaming and so my research has found that women are more likely to share negative reputational information particularly about women's you know sexual history when the other woman is attractive when she is provocatively dressed or if she flirts with their romantic partner so it's more and there it's more tailored to the particular mating threat that each woman poses however I've seen other information other data that find that women are more strongly opposed female promiscuity when they have more male Sons so I believe this is Candace Blake's work where it was kind of like support for female veiling I've gotten on the show I've got her on the show next week so I'll ask her about this oh they more strongly supported restrictions on female promiscuity when they had more Sons so basically when they had more interest in their son's paternity certainty and so I think that is one ecological factor is like when does paternity certainty matter and that's when you're going to see more clamping down on female promiscuity so they've done some work finding that when women um in the environment depend more on men's provisioning that's when you see more strong more intense condemnation of women's sexual promiscuity and so you would predict that over time as we as women become less and less dependent on men's resources to survive and care for their children you're going to see fewer and fewer restrictions on women's sexuality wow so that would suggest in a world where women are out educating and out earning men especially at younger ages in a world where women it is popular both uh socially in terms of how you grandstand and uh to proselytize around how women are the victim and they're the ones that need to be upheld you could see a situation in which more loose sexual Norms or less derogation of loose sexual Norms would be something that would be foreign Ed up due to the fact that women need less resource provisioning from the men around them [ __ ] that's cool yeah and it makes sense that like Society would have an interest men themselves would have an interest in restricting women's sexuality when they need to be certain this is my biological child before I provision resources you're going to see in those contexts that men should value women's Chastity because then they could be more certain and I am provisioning resources to my genetic Offspring and then in those cases when men aren't provisioning those resources they don't need to be as concerned Society doesn't need to be as concerned if children are still surviving and thriving without men's being confident and therefore investing these resources that is cool okay so other than sex what else do women gossip about they tend to share information about women's at least my research has found that they also share information about how other women have treated them and so they share information about their friends treatment their friends transgressions against themselves um and so this is work that I've done with Jamie Palmer Hogg and what we argue is that this strategy is a way to spread gossip without appearing malicious so if I were to tell you like oh Mary really hurt me the other day she made this comment about how I've gained weight and that like really hurt my feelings I sound so much nicer than if I'm like God Mary's such a [ __ ] she's always making me feel bad and like saying all these rude things like I sound mean when I say it that way but when I frame it as Mary did this thing that really hurt me um then you don't recognize me as a gossiper and I've shared that same information that Mary's probably a bit cruel but you think very differently of me and so we studied this and what we found is that women are pretty sensitive to how their friends treat them and that this sensitivity compels repeating those transgressions to other people and so they share this information with others and then when people hear this information they are less likely to view women as gossipers and they like them more when they frame it as a first person victimization Mary did this to me compared to we manipulated whether they said it as a third person statement so Mary did this to Susan people are better at recognizing that's gossip but they don't recognize it if it's your personal story I think we maybe just have some belief like oh it's your story to tell that doesn't count as gossip yet it's still harming other women's reputation so what we found is these types of statements like Mary was mean to Susan or made this mean comment about her people disliked the female perpetrators more than they disliked the male perpetrators so if a guy's saying like oh Bob was mean to Steve people don't get as worked up about Bob being mean to Steve as they do about Mary being mean to Susan so when we manipulated the sex of who's saying these things it was more consequential for women's reputations than for men's reputations what's the bless her heart effect oh this is kind of another version of that where I looked at kind of what are the indirect ways that women spread information um and so this was my dissertation and so this was basically trying to show that The Way by which women spread gossip or one way that they spread gossip is to frame it as pro-social concern so if I were to tell you like oh Tammy's been sleeping around a lot and I'm just I'm really worried she's gonna get hurt or taken advantage of versus Tammy's such a [ __ ] you know same thing where I don't appear mean or cruel if I frame it I'm just so worried about her and so I did kind of a similar study where I manipulated these statements where I gave people the same factual information like Tammy has been sleeping around a lot lately and then at the end it ended with I'm so worried about her or what a [ __ ] or there was nothing there and so what I found is that if you say it with concern people prefer you as a social partner relative to who you're talking about but if you say it meanly if you say what a [ __ ] people actually don't like you and if anything they you've actually harmed your reputation more than who you're talking about you've taken the mask off around this flagrant status removal yeah and so people see through that when it's that overt and they don't actually like you so it's really malicious gossip carries social costs and so that would favor kind of these really indirect forms of Gossip that we might not recognize as gossip and the data suggests people don't recognize it as readily and so it's basically a way to harm your same-sex Rivals reputations without incurring social penalties who are the most common uh victims or who are the who which sorts of women are the most common targets of gossip so they tend to be tend to be women who are attractive but particularly sexually provocative those women get targeted the most um and then other women who are kind of competitive or really status driving and agentic they also get targeted by other women's aggression and so it suggests that women are kind of taking out anyone could who could be a threat in The Mating domain or anyone who's not a very useful Cooperative partner not as you know altruistic that's very interesting the um the attractiveness thing is such a double-edged sword right because we hear about the halo effect or pretty privilege and I I it would be almost impossible to do because what outcomes is it that you're going to judge for but it'd be fascinating to work out what is the optimal amount of good lookingness that a girl should have because if you are better looking than 99 out of 100 other women all of them are going to have a reason to have a problem with you I could imagine a world in which it would be better to be 90th percentile good looking because at least there would be a small number of women above and below you that you would be able you said most women want to have friends that are kind of around about their attractiveness level at least you would be able to have a coalition of friends like that whereas if you're 99 out of 100 who are you going to be friends with yeah unless I think the only way you could get away with like being really attractive is if you have super low self-esteem and just talk about how insecure you are like self-degration yeah that's really nice yeah overly nice not trying to steal anyone else's mates but I mean people have eyes so I don't know how far that would that would go Michael malice who you may or may not know is a good friend of mine and he is a professional troll on the internet great writer great podcast a very smart guy he has made a profession out of winding people up right online and he once said to me if I was three inches taller I wouldn't be able to say half of the things that I can and he's I think he's maybe like five six five seven something like that so he's like a shorter guy and uh yeah he said and I think that there's something similar going on there it's more on the male side obviously but there's something about being seen as less of a Potential Threat especially for men physically right look at what he said it's not about his attraction he didn't change his attraction he changed his Threat Level his his formidability and um yeah if I was three inches taller I wouldn't be able to say half of the [ __ ] that I do yeah no that's interesting I think I think one of the domains that's like most comparable to women's feelings about their bodies like that is you know something that we observe women care about in their mating preferences and other men derogate one another based on their height which I just find so mean and unnecessary but I also just don't I find male male interactions so interesting how there's so much derogation and that's how like they bond with each other where it's like for women it's the exact opposite like I would never make a rude comment about my same-sex friend's appearance that's like the last thing you would be you would have no friends how are you marry you're looking particularly full today you must have had lots of gluten last night can you imagine you know it's the exact opposite women are like no no no you're so beautiful what do you what do you mean no you look great and then men are just like could you be shorter you know like just so harsh to each other it's just like night it feels like night and day when you observe like within sex interactions what was that study that you did about how female competition changes approaches to diet and self-image oh yeah so I've done a few studies related to that um so one study was um looking within married couples we found that when women were the more excuse me the less attractive partner um and their husbands were really attractive they tended to feel worse about themselves and feel more motivated to diet um and exercise so that suggests there is kind of some relative comparisons we make within our mateship of like okay you know how but interestingly it didn't affect men's motivations to diet and lose weight now perhaps we would have found you mean if if the men were of lower mate value it or at least we looked at attractiveness right okay we didn't look at things like income so maybe you would find that and we didn't look at drive for muscularity so that might be where we would find it where men tend to show stronger drives for muscularity and that's like kind of the way their body dissatisfaction manifests now so that suggests like this is a domain at least in The Mating world that women care about is like being relatively attractive to retain their established makeshifts but women also use their appearance to attract makeshift um and preserve the ones that they have and so this other study that I conducted it looked at the sex ratio of the local environment and found that when women perceive there to be more women in the environment they perceive there to be more intense mating competition and then they feel worse about their bodies and feel more motivated to like diet and lose weight and so this would make sense that when there's more you know same-sex Rivals basically if we're making relative comparisons then you're falling farther and farther from the ideal if there are more and more women around you the likelihood that you're the most attractive is now lower and so you have more women you're competing with yeah you you're 99 out of 100 but only 990 out of a thousand yeah yeah so there's there's more intense competition in women's you know intersexual competition for mates tends to focus at least in one domain on their physical attractiveness and so it led to more body dissatisfaction and a greater desire to lose weight and so I think that this might be consequential if we think of you know modern University is the sex ratio is becoming more and more skewed towards more women um and so this might not actually be even though we might be like Yay more women are getting their degrees you know we might value it for these other reasons it might not feel really great for the women who are on those campuses to be surrounded desperately dieting because there's loads of hot women around them yeah and I think it's it is worth noting that there's you know we are designed to make relative comparisons so throughout human history we're in relatively small groups like 50 to 200 and so maybe the people that you were competing with for a mate was just like a handful maybe a dozen people and it mattered whether you were the most attractive or the least attractive it didn't really matter your absolute level of attractiveness it mattered how you compared because that predicted your um likelihood of you know Landing the most desirable relatively desirable me and so because we evolved in these contacts our brains still make these relative comparisons even though in really large populations we probably shouldn't be doing that as well almost impossible to be one of the most attractive people yeah but then if you if sorry if you globalize the uh sexual comparison marketplace with Tinder and Instagram and only fans and Tick Tock you're basically saying okay now let's compete with seven billion people right and so we're like wrongly interpreting them that is our relevant peer groups social media is like particularly bad because they feel like our peers you know when I'm scrolling through a magazine I'm not thinking this celebrity is my peer I don't know for some reason it's less distressing compared to if I'm on social media even though I could be just as removed from This Woman's life as you know Taylor Swift it's still they feel like peers and so this might be particularly bad because we're designed to make relative comparisons with our peer group so if we're interpreting them as peers they might be you know particularly problematic didn't Candace do something about sexy selfies as well in areas of particularly High female sex ratio split so I believe what she found with the sexy selfies was that they were more prevalent in context where there was greater income inequality oh [ __ ] yes it was you're right it was yes [ __ ] what what why is that the case was that there's more competition for the few men some men that have all the resources and a lot of men who have none that there is steep competition for the few men at the top you know you're not going to be very well served if you're with the men that don't have access to resources when they're such high payoffs to being with the men that have all the resources do you think that the current mating crisis sex ratio skew in universities hypergamy creating this sort of Baseline of women dating up in a cross and ever increasing group of high performing women competing from ever decreasing group of high-performing men do you think that that is motivating and increasingly sexualized culture for women to step into yeah it's a good question I I think in some ways yes but then I also see kind of also this like backlash culture of kind of not meeting a man you know so for these women that are really high achieving these like female CEOs you know who are they going to mate with there's going to be a very limited pool of men that have more resources than they do and at least the data suggests that women who have high access to resources don't decrease their preference for resources very much if anything they just want at all and so it suggests that they're going to be pretty Limited in their options but I also think there's like this like kind of counterculture of like you know to be the ultimate woman you don't need a man full Sigma female mode yeah so then you might be just like saying more you know I know some women who are really successful that are just going like kind of the sperm donor route and I've got a couple of friends that are the same both of them are female millionaires yeah yeah and to hear about the process is actually so cool they have I didn't know that they have this they have voice clips so you can listen to voices of the men who donated the sperm and I do think that that's like useful information to get a sense it's really useful than going like that with a test tube isn't it yeah so I wonder whether a genuine polarized counterculture to a hypersexualized world in which women are being more sexually promiscuous at least online you're doing most actually sexy selfies Etc I would have said that the opposite of that would have been like a Trad culture it would have been conservatism what I think the boss [ __ ] lean in lifestyle that you're talking about is is more of a cope I think that's an inner Citadel that women are retreating to when they're struggling to find men I don't think that that's the opposite and I'm completely pulling this out of my ass but I don't think that that's necessarily the opposite energy of this over-sexualized world I think that it is High achieving women outright realizing [ __ ] I've managed to rise to the top of my own uh dominance hierarchy or competence hierarchy I'm looking across and above and there's no one there uh I'm I'm not going to let go of the things that I've got I can't go back so I'm just going to go on on my own I think that a true kind of culture would be something like the Trad conservative side which is also what is Trident conservatism well that's sexual Chastity right that's Purity just coming up again so it's another sexual strategy that just happens to appear in a different way yeah no it'll be so interesting to see and maybe it's like kind of like what we were talking about like maybe you'll just find this like forking of like two different strategies you know one's going the super Chase route one's going the sexually uninhibited you know men are you know disposable or rejecting men all together those are the three main strategies I think that I genuinely think that look Tanya you are absolutely fantastic I very very much appreciate your time today where should people go what are you doing next when are you going to write a book Rob Henderson wants to know when you're going to write a book I would love to um I think it'd be so much fun um I do want to write a new I want to write a new Theory paper about women's strategy to evoke care like if you even look at Women's um like their faces they're they're more neatness like women tend to have like like larger eyes like they're more their body structure is literally more like children um and so I think it'd be fun to just write a whole paper on like how women are designed to evoke care from others and that's a way by which that they survived throughout human history there was a Rutger bregman wrote a book called humankind and in that he talked about the puppification of humans and that was the same thing that evoking of some sort of uh sense of of care I love that the puffy vacation yeah yeah I mean it's not this not the slickest word in the world uh let's say that someone's loved what they've heard today where should they go to check out more of your work and follow the stuff that you do you can find some of my work on Research gate and then I'm on Twitter as Tanya Arlene um but yeah not Super Active on it because I think it might be bad for mental health so I'm trying to be productive instead I like it Tanya I appreciate the hell out of you thank you so much thank you this is fun what's happening people thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that episode then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks and don't forget to subscribe face [Music]

Channel: Chris Williamson

Views: 310,634

Keywords: modern wisdom, podcast, chris williamson, Female Friendships, Dr Tania Reynolds, Psychology, opposite-sex friendships, evolutionary psychology, intrasexual competition

Id: m5w0sALvppU

Length: 78min 32sec (4712 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 23 2023