Evolutionary Psychology ch 11_1-6.pdf

CHAPTER 11 Confict Between the Sexes Learning Objectives Afer studying this chapter, the reader will be able to: ■ Defne “strategic interference theory.” ■ Analyze why men and women sometimes get into confict about the occurrence and timing of sex. ■ Describe key predictors of sexual harassmen...

CHAPTER 11 Confict Between the Sexes Learning Objectives Afer studying this chapter, the reader will be able to: ■ Defne “strategic interference theory.” ■ Analyze why men and women sometimes get into confict about the occurrence and timing of sex. ■ Describe key predictors of sexual harassment. ■ Compare and contrast the adaptation versus by-product theories of rape. ■ Describe women’s potential anti-rape defenses. ■ Summarize three fndings that support the hypothesis that women and men difer in the triggers of sexual jealousy. ■ Describe the contexts infuencing the intensity of mate-retention tactics. ■ Analyze the possible evolutionary causes of resource inequality between the sexes. Men and women need each other for successful reproduction. Cooperation between the sexes, therefore, is a cardinal feature of human mating. Men and women fall in love, mutually choose each other, mutually consent to have sex, and have a shared interest in their children, their jointly produced “vehicles.” Despite the necessity for cooperation, confict between the sexes pervades group living. Sexual confict may be defned as “a confict between the evolutionary interests of individuals of the two sexes” (Parker, 2006, p. 235). “Evolutionary interests” boil down to “genetic interests.” So whenever the genetic interests of a male and a female diverge, sexual confict can ensue. A few examples help to illustrate the concept of sexual confict: (1) Vladimir wants to have sex at the end of the frst date, whereas his date, Mashenka, prefers to wait (confict about sexual access); (2) Silvio gets Maria drunk and forces her to have sex while she is incapacitated (male rape that conficts with female choice); (3) Yolanda deceives Cesar about the number of previous sexual partners she has had (deception about a possible cue to future sexual fdelity); (4) Sue wants to go to a party without her husband Marc to check out whether there might be a better mate for her, whereas Marc wants to keep Sue at home to prevent her from interacting with other men (confict between freedom of mate choice and mate guarding). In each of these cases, there is sexual confict—a confict between the genetic interests of the individual man and the individual woman. This chapter explores some of the major forms of sexual confict—conficts over the occurrence and timing of sex, sexual aggression and defenses against sexual aggression, jealous conficts that arise from potential “mate poachers” and signals of infdelity, mate guarding that limits a partner’s behavior by preventing full freedom of mate choice, and confict over access to resources. The most poignant forms of sexual confict center on mating confict. As Helena Cronin observed, “Conficts over mate choice have led males into advertising and deception, stealth and force—and females into counter-adaptations ranging from lie-detectors to anticlamping devices” (Cronin, 2005, p. 18). 11 CONFLICT BETWEEN THE SEXES Strategic Interference Theory Human confict is a universal feature of social interaction, and it occurs in many forms. In Chapter 10, we examined same-sex confict, including derogation of competitors, physical violence, and warfare. Members of the same sex are ofen in competition with each other for precisely the same resources: members of the opposite sex and the resources needed to attract them. Evolutionary psychologists have predicted confict between the sexes, but not because men and women are in competition for the same reproductive resources. Rather, many sources of confict between the sexes can be traced to evolved diferences in sexual strategies. As we saw in Chapters 4, 5, and 6, both sexes have evolved short-term and long-term mating strategies. But the nature of these strategies difers for the sexes. One of the most important diferences pertains to short-term mating strategies. Men, far more than women, have evolved a stronger desire for sexual variety. This desire manifests itself in many forms, including seeking sexual access sooner, more persistently, and more aggressively than women typically desire. Conversely, women have evolved to be more discriminating in short-term mating, typically delaying sexual intercourse beyond what men usually desire. Clearly, the sexes cannot simultaneously fulfll these conficting sexual desires. This is an example of a phenomenon called strategic interference. Strategic interference occurs when a person employs a particular strategy to achieve a goal and another person blocks the successful enactment of that strategy. If a woman delays sexual intercourse until she feels some emotional involvement or commitment from a man, for example, and the man persists in his sexual advances even after the woman has indicated her desire to wait, then the result is interference with the woman’s sexual strategy. At the same time, however, the delays imposed by the woman interfere with the man’s short-term mating strategy of seeking sex sooner. In sum, men and women come into confict not because they are competing for the same resources, as often occurs in same-sex strategic interference, but rather because the strategy of an individual of one sex can interfere with the strategy of an individual of the other. The theory of strategic interference applies not just to conficts about the timing of sex. Confict can pervade all relations between the sexes, from contact in the workplace and on the dating scene to skirmishes that occur during a marriage. Sexual harassment is a form of strategic interference in the workplace. Deception on the dating scene is another form of strategic interference. A man who deceives a woman about his marital status and a woman who deceives a man about her age both violate the desires of the opposite sex, forms of strategic interference. Within a marriage, sexual infdelity represents another form of strategic interference because it violates the desires of the spouse. Coercive control, threats, violence, insults, and attempts to lower a partner’s self-esteem constitute other forms of strategic interference. The key point is that strategic interference—blocking the strategies and violating the desires of someone else—is predicted to pervade interactions between the sexes. The second component of strategic interference theory postulates that the “negative” emotions such as anger, distress, and upset are psychological solutions that have evolved in part to solve the adaptive problems posed by strategic interference (Buss, 1989b). There are quotation marks around negative because although these emotions are generally painful to experience, they are hypothesized to be functional in solving the adaptive problems of strategic interference. First, they focus our attention on problematic events and momentarily screen out less relevant events. Attention is a scarce resource and must be allocated judiciously. When a person experiences anger or distress, these emotions guide his or her attention to the sources of the distress. Second, the emotions mark those events for storage in memory and easy retrieval from memory. Third, 305 PROBLEMS OF GROUP LIVING 306 emotions lead to action, causing people to strive to eliminate the source of strategic interference or future interference. In summary, the theory of strategic interference has two main postulates. First, strategic interference is predicted to occur whenever members of one sex violate the desires of members of the opposite sex; historically, such interference would have prevented our forebears from successfully carrying out a preferred sexual strategy and hence would have reduced their reproductive success. Second, “negative” emotions such as anger, rage, jealousy, and distress represent evolved solutions to the problems of strategic interference, alerting people to the sources of interference and prompting action designed to counteract it. We must note two important qualifers. First, confict per se serves no adaptive purpose. It is generally not adaptive for individuals to get into confict with the opposite sex as an end in and of itself. Rather, confict is typically an undesirable by-product of the fact that the sexual strategies of men and women difer in profound ways. A second qualifcation is that the metaphor of the “battle between the sexes” can be misleading. The phrase implies that men as a group are united in their interests and women are likewise united in their interests and that the two groups are somehow at war with each other. Nothing could be further from the truth. An evolutionary perspective helps us to understand why. Men cannot be united with all other men as a group for the fundamental reason that men are in competition primarily with other men. The same is true for women. Therefore, a unifcation or a “confuence of interests” cannot occur between all members of one sex. Of course, men and women can form specifc alliances with particular members of their own sex, but this in no way contradicts the fundamental principle that individuals are primarily in competition with members of their own gender. Confict About the Occurrence and Timing of Sex Disagreements about the occurrence and timing of sex might be the most common sources of confict between men and women (see Figure 11.1). In a study of 121 college students who kept daily diaries of their dating activities for 4 weeks, 47 percent reported one or more disagreements about their desired level of sexual intimacy (Byers & Lewis, 1988). These disagreements show a predictable sex diference. In one study of Australian undergraduate students, for example, 53 percent of the women in the study reported that at least one man had “overestimated the level of sexual intimacy . . . desired,” whereas 45 percent of the men reported that at least one woman had “underestimated the level of sexual intimacy . . . desired” (Paton & Mannison, 1995, p. 447). Men sometimes seek sex with a minimum of investment. Men often guard their resources and are extraordinarily choosy about who they invest those resources in. They often preserve their investment and resources for long-term mates. Because women often pursue a long-term sexual strategy, they often seek to obtain investment, or signals of investment, before consenting to sex. Yet the investment that women seek is precisely the investment that men most vigorously guard. The sex that men seek is precisely the resource that women are so selective about allocating. Figure 11.1 An Example of Sexual Confict in Which the Optimum for Time Elapsed Before Sexual Intercourse Occurs Difers for Men and Women. Recurrent zones of sexual confict over evolutionary time select for adaptations in each sex to infuence the other to be closer to each other’s optimum. Other examples include amount of investment prior to sex, frequency of sex within a relationship, and amount each invests in ofspring. Source: Buss, D. M. (2017). Sexual confict in human mating. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 26(4), 307–313. 11 CONFLICT BETWEEN THE SEXES Confict Over Sexual Access Inferences About Sexual Intent A major source of confict is that men sometimes infer sexual interest on the part of a woman when it does not exist. A series of experiments has documented this phenomenon (Abbey, 1982; Lindgren, George, & Shoda, 2007). In one study, 98 male and 102 female college students viewed a 10-minute videotape of a conversation in which a female student visits a male professor’s ofce to ask for more time to complete a term paper. The actors in the flm were a female drama student and a professor in the theater department. Neither the student nor the professor acted firtatious or overtly sexual, although both were instructed to behave in a friendly manner. People who witnessed the tape then rated the likely intentions of the woman using a seven-point scale. Women watching the interaction were more likely to say that she was trying to be friendly, with an average rating of 6.45, and not sexy (2.00) or seductive (1.89). Men, also perceiving friendliness (6.09), were signifcantly more likely than women to infer seductive (3.38) and sexual intentions (3.84). A speed-dating laboratory procedure had men rate women’s sexual interest in them afer a brief interaction and compared those ratings to women’s self-reported sexual interest in each of the men (Perilloux et al., 2012). Again, men exhibited a sexual misperception bias, perceiving women as signifcantly more interested in them than women actually were. Men high in selfperceived attractiveness and female-evaluated mate value are especially vulnerable to the sexual over-perception bias (Kohl & Robertson, 2014; Perilloux et al., 2012). And men who pursue a short-term mating strategy are also more prone to the sexual overperception bias (Perilloux et al., 2012), likely because this bias facilitates more frequent attempts to initiate sexual overtures. In a cross-cultural test of the sexual over-perception bias, a sample of 196 Brazilian college students, 98 men and 98 women, evaluated four hypothetical scenarios presented in Portuguese (DeSouza, Pierce, Zanelli, & Hutz, 1992). A parallel sample of 204 American college students evaluated the scenarios in English. In each scenario, a man and a woman spent time together at a party. The scenarios difered in whether the participants had been drinking alcohol and in whether the woman agreed to go back to the man’s dorm room with him. The results are shown in Figure 11.2. Brazilian college students consistently perceived more sexuality in the characters’ behavior than did the American college students, with mean scores of 18.77 and 14.27, respectively. Gender diferences were also highly signifcant, as shown in Figure 11.2. Men across both cultures perceived more sexual intent in the characters’ actions than did women, with mean scores of 17.53 and 15.50, respectively. The male sexual overperception bias has also been robustly replicated in Norway, one of the most sexually egalitarian countries in the world (Bendixen, 2014). When in doubt, men infer sexual interest. Men act on their inferences, occasionally opening up sexual opportunities. If over evolutionary history even a tiny fraction of these inferences led to sex, men would have evolved lower thresholds for inferring women’s sexual interest. This male mechanism is susceptible to manipulation. Women sometimes use their sexuality as one such tactic. In one study of 200 university students, signifcantly more women than men reported using smiling and firting as a means for eliciting special treatment from members of the opposite sex, even though they had no interest in having sex with those men (Buss, 2016b). An interesting real-world demonstration of the sexual overperception bias occurred when a supermarket chain implemented a “superior customer service” program—store employees were instructed to smile at customers and make eye contact with them. The program backfred when a number of female employees fled sexual harassment charges against the supermarket. Apparently, their friendly actions caused some of the male customers to interpret their behavior as signaling sexual interest, leading to sexual comments, overt sexual come-ons, and even stalking (Browne, 2006). 307 PROBLEMS OF GROUP LIVING 308 Figure 11.2 Average Judgments of Sexual Intent in Brazil and the United States. The fgure shows that men tend to infer more sexual intent than women in response to the same scenario. Source: DeSouza, E. R., Pierce, T., Zanelli, J. C., & Hutz, C. (1992). Perceived sexual intent in the United States and Brazil as a function of nature of encounter, subjects’ nationality, and gender. Journal of Sex Research, 29, 251– 260. Reprinted with permission. The fact that men are likely to perceive that women are interested in them sexually when they really aren’t, combined with women’s intentional exploitation of this psychological mechanism, creates a potentially volatile mix. The difering sexual strategies of men and women lead to conficts over desired levels of sexual intimacy, over men’s feelings that women lead them on, and over women’s feelings that men are too pushy about having sex. Deception About Commitment Another manifestation of confict over sexual access comes from research on deception between the sexes. Men report intentionally deceiving women about emotional commitment. When 112 college men were asked whether they had ever exaggerated the depth of their feelings for a woman to have sex with her, 71 percent admitted to having done so, compared with only 39 percent of the women (Buss, 1994b; Haselton et al., 2005). In a study in which women reported on their actual experiences of deception at the hands of men, they reported the following forms of deception (percentage of women reporting them is in parentheses): “falsely implied that he had stronger feelings for me than he really had” (44 percent); “exaggerated how sincere, trustworthy, or kind he was” (42 percent); “led me to believe that we were more compatible than we really were” (36 percent); “led me to believe that he had stronger feelings for me in order to have sex with me” (25 percent) (Haselton et al., 2005). Men high on Dark Triad traits—narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy—are more prone to using these forms of deceptive tactics (Jonason, Lyons, Baughman, & Vernon, 2014). In human courtship, women shoulder the costs of being deceived about a potential mate’s resources and commitment more heavily. An ancestral man who made a poor choice of a sex partner risked losing only a small portion of his time, energy, and resources, although he might also have evoked the rage of a jealous husband or a protective father. An ancestral woman who made a poor choice of a casual mate, allowing herself to be deceived about the man’s long-term intentions or willingness to devote resources to her, however, risked untimely pregnancy and unaided childrearing. Because the deceived can sufer severe losses, there must have been tremendous selection pressure for the evolution of psychological vigilance to detect cues to deception and to prevent its occurrence. The modern generation is merely experiencing another cycle in the endless spiral of an evolutionary arms race between deception perpetrated by individuals of one sex and detection accomplished by individuals of the other. As the deceptive tactics grow more subtle and refned, the co-evolved ability to penetrate deception becomes more acute. Women have evolved strategies to guard against deception. When a woman seeks a committed relationship, the frst line of defense is imposing courtship costs by requiring time, energy, and commitment before consenting to sex. More time permits more assessment. It allows a woman greater opportunity to evaluate a man, to assess how committed he is to her, and to detect whether he is burdened by prior commitments to other women and children. 11 CONFLICT BETWEEN THE SEXES Cognitive Biases in Sexual Mind Reading Humans live in an uncertain mating world. We must make inferences about others’ intentions and emotional states. How attracted is he to her? How committed is she to him? Does that smile signal sexual interest or mere friendliness? Some psychological states, such as smoldering passions for other people, are intentionally concealed, rendering uncertainty greater and inferences more tortuous. We are forced to make inferences about intentions and concealed deeds using an array of cues that are only probabilistically related to the deeds’ occurrence. An unexplained scent on one’s romantic partner, for example, could signal sexual betrayal or an innocuous aroma acquired from a casual conversation. In reading the minds of others, there are two ways to go wrong. You can infer a psychological state that is not there, such as assuming sexual interest when it is absent. Or you can fail to infer a psychological state that is there, such as remaining oblivious to another’s true romantic yearnings. According to error management theory, it would be exceedingly unlikely that the cost–beneft consequences of the two types of errors would be identical across their many occurrences (Haselton, 2003; Haselton & Buss, 2000, 2003; Haselton & Nettle, 2006). We intuitively understand this in the context of smoke alarms, which are typically set to be hypersensitive to any hint of smoke. The costs of occasional false alarms are minor compared to the catastrophic costs of failing to detect a real house fre. Error management theory (EMT) extends this logic to cost–beneft consequences in evolutionary ftness. According to EMT, asymmetries in the cost–beneft consequences of mind-reading inferences, if they recur over evolutionary time, create selection pressures that produce predictable cognitive biases. Just as smoke alarms are “biased” to produce more false positives than false negatives, EMT predicts that evolved mind-reading mechanisms will be biased to produce more of one type of inferential error than another. Two mind-reading biases have been explored in mating. The frst is the sexual overperception bias, whereby men possess mind-reading biases designed to minimize the costs of missed sexual opportunities. EMT provides a cogent explanation for the fnding that men appear to falsely infer that a woman is sexually interested in them when she merely smiles, touches his arm, or happens to stop at the local bar for a drink. Interestingly, men who view themselves as especially high in mate value are especially prone to experience the sexual overperception bias (Haselton, 2003). Men who are dispositionally inclined to pursue a short-term mating strategy also exhibit a more pronounced sexual overperception bias—a bias that would facilitate the success of a short-term mating strategy by minimizing lost opportunities (Kohl & Robertson, 2014; Lenton, Bryan, Hastie, & Fischer, 2007; Perilloux et al., 2012). The second is the commitment skepticism bias in women (Haselton & Buss, 2000). According to this hypothesis, women have evolved an inferential bias designed to underestimate men’s actual level of romantic commitment to them early in courtship. This bias functions to minimize the costs of being sexually deceived by men who feign commitment to pursue a strategy of casual sex. If men give fowers or gifts to women, for example, the recipients tend to underestimate the extent to which these oferings signal commitment in comparison with “objective” outside observers. Of course, there are good reasons for women’s commitment skepticism. Men who are motivated to seek casual sex frequently attempt to deceive women about their commitment, social status, and even fondness for children (Haselton et al., 2005)—domains of deception about which women are well aware (Keenan, Gallup, Goulet, & Kulkarni, 1997). Women’s commitment skepticism bias can be reduced or eliminated when men display strong behavioral cues to commitment, although women nonetheless need more behavioral evidence than do men to infer that their partner is truly committed to them (Brown & Olkhov, 2015). Younger women have more to lose by being deceived about a man’s commitment. Older postmenopausal women not only have less to lose by such deception but have been hypothesized not to display the commitment skepticism bias, since they might miss out on opportunities to partner with men who could help them raise their children and grandchildren (Cyrus, Schwarz, & Hassebrauck, 2011). A study conducted in Germany replicated the commitment skepticism bias 309