Evolutionary Psychology Chapter 11 PDF

PROBLEMS OF GROUP LIVING 328 Machiavellianism, and psychopathy—tend to use aggressive cost-inficting mate-retention tactics (Jonason, Li, & Buss, 2010). Both men and women who score low on the honesty–humility personality trait tend to use more manipulative, deceptive, and exploitative mate-retent...

PROBLEMS OF GROUP LIVING 328 Machiavellianism, and psychopathy—tend to use aggressive cost-inficting mate-retention tactics (Jonason, Li, & Buss, 2010). Both men and women who score low on the honesty–humility personality trait tend to use more manipulative, deceptive, and exploitative mate-retention tactics (Holden, Zeigler-Hill, Pham, & Shackelford, 2014). Violence Toward Partners Mate retention has an extremely destructive side: the use of violence against partners. The following is a frightening description of such violence among the Yanomamö: I was told about one young man in Monou-teri who shot and killed his wife in a rage of sexual jealousy, and during one of my stays in the villages a man shot his wife in the stomach with a barbed arrow. Another man chopped his wife on the arm with a machete; some tendons to her fngers were severed. (Chagnon, 1992, p. 147) Why would anyone ever commit violence against a partner? Wilson and Daly (1996) provide one hypothesis: Men use violence and threats as a strategy to limit a partner’s autonomy, decreasing the odds that the partner will commit infdelity or defect from the relationship. Indeed, women who actually leave their husbands are frequently pursued, threatened, and assaulted. Wives who have left their husbands are at greater risk of being killed than women who remain with their husbands. These spousal homicides often follow from threats to pursue and kill wives if they ever leave, and the murderers often explain their violent behavior as a reaction to the unacceptable departure of their wives from the relationship (Wilson & Daly, 1996). Intuitively, however, this homicidal behavior seems bizarre and maladaptive. Killing a wife imposes a cost on the perpetrator as well as the victim, as the husband has essentially destroyed any access to a reproductively valuable asset. Killing a wife, therefore, seems genuinely puzzling from an evolutionary perspective. Wilson and Daly (1996) explain this puzzle by proposing that violence is a means of deterrence. Threats require credibility to be efective. Men, according to this logic, sometimes use violence to enhance the credibility of their threats. The violence, and even killing, seems quite counter to the man’s self-interest. But if the violence increases the credibility of the threats, then it can pay of, on average, when the man is able to subsequently use threats without resorting to actual violence. In short, the willingness to resort to extreme violence, according to this hypothesis, represents a risky strategy of deterring the wife Men sometimes use violence or threats of violence as a strategy of mate from leaving and deterring sexual retention and infdelity prevention. Research suggests that these coercive tactics are used more ofen by men who are married to young and physically rivals—a strategy that sometimes attractive partners. has to be acted out to be efective. 11 CONFLICT BETWEEN THE SEXES Young and attractive women might be more vulnerable to violence from their partners. As Wilson and Daly (1993) noted, “Young wives may be more likely than older wives to terminate an unsatisfactory marriage, more likely to be approached by sexual rivals of the husband, and more likely to form new sexual relationships. Hence, we hypothesize that men will be especially jealous, proprietary and coercive toward younger wives” (Wilson & Daly, 1993, p. 285). This hypothesis is confrmed by the spousal homicide data. The wives who are at greatest risk of being killed by their husbands are in their teenage years; the lowest rates of spousal homicide are among post-menopausal women (Daly & Wilson, 1988). Sexual jealousy in men predicts violence against their partners. One study of 116 couples assessed men’s perceptions of their partners’ interest in other men, as well as women’s selfreported interest in other men (Cousins & Gangestad, 2007). Men’s perceptions of their partner’s interest in other men was a stronger predictor of male violence than women’s actual interest in others. Another study found that men who accuse their partners of sexual infdelity are more prone to be physically violent toward them (Kaighobadi & Shackelford, 2009). Pregnant women seem especially vulnerable to abuse, especially if the man suspects that his partner might have become pregnant by another man (Buss & Duntley, 2011). A trio of studies found that men who devote a lot of efort to mate retention, particularly those who use the tactics of emotional manipulation and monopolization of the partner’s time, are more likely to use physical violence to control their partner (Shackelford, Goetz, Buss, Euler, & Hoier, 2005). The presence of stepchildren in the home (or children sired by a previous partner of a woman) increases the woman’s risk of physical violence at his hands (see Goetz, Shackelford, Romero, Kaighobadi, & Miner, 2008; Miner, Shackelford, Block, Starratt, & Weekes-Shackelford, 2012). Another context that may provoke violence occurs when a man lacks the resources to provide positive incentives for a mate to remain in the relationship (Wilson & Daly, 1993). Empirical fndings support this hypothesis. One study examined 1,156 women age 16 or older who were killed in New York City over the 5-year period 1990 through 1994 (Belluck, 1997). Nearly half were killed by husbands or boyfriends, either current or former. Roughly 67 percent, however, were killed in the poorest boroughs of New York: the Bronx and Brooklyn. The fndings show higher rates of spousal homicide among men who are poor and unemployed— circumstances that prevent men from using positive incentives such as resource provisioning to keep a mate (Miner et al., 2009). Other factors that put women more at risk of violence from their partners include a proclivity toward short-term mating, psychopathic tendencies, and poor impulse control—components of what evolutionary psychologist A. J. Figueredo conceptualizes as a “fast life history strategy” (Figueredo et al., 2010). A fascinating study of the Tsimane foragers of lowland Bolivia found strong support for male sexual jealousy as a key predictor of wife abuse, especially if the wife was young (Stieglitz, Gurven, Kaplan, & Winking, 2012). However, this study also supported another hypothesis: That men’s infdelity precipitates spousal arguments and conficts and that unfaithful men abuse their wives as part of a strategy of diverting family resources toward other women. In short, both wife’s infdelity and husband’s infdelity appear to precipitate violence toward wives. Several contexts might protect women from being victimized by violence from their partners. One is the presence of the woman’s extended kin, who might deter a partner from committing violence against her. This is precisely what Figueredo found in his studies of domestic violence in Spain and Mexico (Figueredo, 1995; Figueredo et al., 2001). He conducted telephone surveys of battered and nonbattered women using a measure of domestic violence that included verbal abuse, physical abuse, escalated life-threatening violence, and sexual violence. The principal hypothesis was that a woman’s extended kin network would protect her against spousal abuse. Results confrmed the hypothesis: The higher the density of genetic kin both inside and outside Madrid, the lower the rates of domestic violence against women. The density of kin within Madrid had an especially strong efect, whereas having more distant kin had a weaker efect on reducing spousal abuse. Similar results were found in Mexico (Figueredo et al., 2001). 329 PROBLEMS OF GROUP LIVING 330 Personality characteristics are also predictors of the use of the more negative cost-inficting mate-retention tactics. Although all three Dark Triad traits are linked with some cost-inficting mate-retention tactics, psychopathy seems to be the strongest predictor (Jones & De Roos, 2017). Those high on psychopathy engage in more frequent verbal derogations of their mates, as well as threats and violence, particularly toward their intrasexual rivals. Interestingly, women high on Dark Triad traits are more likely to commit sexual infdelity while in relationships; and are also more likely to seek revenge on a partner who is unfaithful using verbal aggression and spreading bad rumors about their partner (Brewer, Hunt, James, & Abell, 2015). In contrast, the personality characteristics of Agreeableness and Conscientiousness are linked with beneftbestowing mate-retention actions, including love, attention, resources, and pleasuring a partner through oral sex (Sela, Shackelford, Pham, & Zeigler-Hill, 2015). In sum, male sexual jealousy appears to be one of the central causes of violence against women within relationships. Violence appears to be used as a coercive tactic designed to keep a mate faithful, prevent future infdelity, and prevent departure from the relationship. Not all men use violence for these goals, and not all women are equally vulnerable. Men lacking the economic resources that might otherwise keep a woman in a relationship voluntarily are more prone to using violence. Women who are young, and hence high in reproductive value and attractive to other men, appear to be especially vulnerable to violent victimization by their partners. Two factors appear to reduce a woman’s risk of violence: selecting a mate who has a reliable source of economic resources and having kin living in close proximity to her. Confict Over Access to Resources The generalization that men tend to wield power and control resources should not obscure the fact that in nearly every culture, women contribute substantially to the accrual of economic resources. In hunter-gatherer societies, for example, women sometimes contribute 60 to 80 percent of the calories through gathering food from plants (Tooby & DeVore, 1987). Furthermore, women ofen exert considerable power through various means, including exerting preferential mate choice, divorcing men under certain conditions, controlling or regulating men’s access to their sexuality, and infuencing their sons, lovers, fathers, husbands, sisters, mothers, and grandchildren (Buss, 2016b). It cannot be disputed that men often use resources to control or infuence women. If men possess the resources that women want or need, then men can use those resources to control women. In the mating domain, men use their resources to attract women, as we saw in Chapter 4. Furthermore, once in relationships, women who lack resources often feel at the mercy of their partners for fear of losing those resources (Wilson & Daly, 1992). These key points—men’s control of resources and men’s use of resources to control women—appear to be issues of agreement between feminist scholars and evolutionary psychologists (Buss, 1996a). Feminist scholars often trace the roots of women’s oppression by men to patriarchy, a term referring to men’s dominance over women in the family specifcally and in society more generally (Smuts, 1995). A reasonable scientifc question pertains to the origins of the phenomena that are subsumed under this term. Causes of Resource Inequality: Women’s Mate Preferences and Men’s Competitive Tactics An evolutionary perspective ofers insights into the origins and history of men’s attempts to control women (Buss, 1996a; Smuts, 1995). First, women’s preferences for men with resources, as documented in Chapter 4, are hypothesized to play a critical role in human evolution. These preferences, operating repeatedly over thousands of generations, have led women to favor men who possess status and resources and to disfavor men who lack these assets. In human evolutionary history, men who failed to acquire resources were more likely to have failed to attract women as mates. 11 CONFLICT BETWEEN THE SEXES Women’s desires for men with resources established the acquisition of resources as a major dimension of men’s competition with each other. Modern men have inherited from their ancestors psychological mechanisms that give priority to resources and status and lead men to take risks to attain resources and status (see Chapter 10). Men who failed to give the goals of status and resources high personal priority and failed to take calculated risks to best other men failed to attract mates. This sort of competition carries a large price tag in male–male violence and homicide, as well as in an earlier death, on average, than women. Women’s preferences and men’s strategies of intrasexual competition co-evolved, as did men’s preferences and women’s strategies of intrasexual competition. Men might have started controlling resources to attract women, and women’s preferences might have followed. Alternatively, women’s preferences for successful, ambitious, and resourceful mates might have selected men for competitive strategies of risk taking, status striving, and derogation of competitors along the dimensions of status and resources. Women’s preferences might have imposed selection pressure on men to form coalitions to gain resources and to engage in individual eforts aimed at besting other men to acquire the resources that women desire. Most likely, however, men’s competitive strategies and women’s mate preferences co-evolved. The intertwining of these co-evolved mechanisms created the conditions in which men could dominate in the domain of resources. This analysis of resource inequality does not deny the existence of other contributing causes such as the sexist practice of giving women and men unequal pay for the same work. Nor does this analysis imply that men’s greater control of resources is inevitable or desirable (see Smuts, 1995). It does suggest that evolutionary psychology is critical in identifying the causes of resource inequality. See Box 11.1 for further discussion of confict and cooperation between the sexes. 11.1 Are All Men United to Control Women? Feminist writers sometimes portray all men as united for the common goal of oppressing all women (Dworkin, 1987; Faludi, 1991). Evolutionary psychological analyses suggest that this cannot be true because men and women compete mainly against members of their own gender. Men strive to control resources at the expense of and to the exclusion of other men. Men deprive other men of resources, exclude other men from positions of power and status, and derogate other men to make them less desirable to women. The fact that roughly 70 percent of all homicides involve men killing other men is just the tip of the iceberg of costs that men incur as a result of their intrasexual competition (Daly & Wilson, 1988). Women do not escape the damage inficted by members of their own sex. Women compete with each other for access to high-status men, have sex with other women’s husbands, and lure men away from their wives. Women slander and denigrate their rivals, especially those who pursue short-term mating strategies (see Chapter 10). Women and men are both victims of the sexual strategies of their own gender and so cannot be said to be united with all members of their own sex for some common goal such as oppressing the opposite sex. The primary exception to this is when men form coalitions that function as subgroups, as we saw in Chapter 10. These coalitions are sometimes used to gain access to women’s sexuality, as in a raid to capture women (Smuts, 1992). Furthermore, men’s coalitions can sometimes be used to exclude women from power—for example, when exclusive men’s clubs in which business is transacted explicitly prevent women from joining. These same coalitions, however, are also directed against other men and their coalitions. In business, politics, and welfare, men form coalitions for their own beneft at the expense of other coalitions of men. It must also be recognized that both men and women beneft from the strategies of the opposite sex. Men provide resources to certain women, such as their wives, mistresses, sisters, daughters, and mothers. A woman’s father, brothers, and sons all can beneft from her selection of a mate with status and resources. Contrary to the view that men and women are united with members of their own sex for the purpose of oppressing the other sex, evolutionary psychology points to a diferent conclusion: Each individual is united in interests with some members of each sex and is in confict with some members of each sex. 331 PROBLEMS OF GROUP LIVING 332 Summary Sexual confict is defned as genetic confict of interest between individual males and females. Confict between men and women pervades social living, from disagreements on dates to emotional distress within marriages. Evolutionary psychology provides several key insights into why such conficts occur and the particular forms they take. The frst insight comes from strategic interference theory, which holds that confict results from a person blocking or impeding another person’s successful enactment of a strategy designed to reach a particular goal. If a woman happens to be pursuing a strategy of long-term mating and a man is pursuing a strategy of short-term mating, for example, each will interfere with the successful attainment of the goal of the other’s strategies. Negative emotions such as anger, distress, and jealousy are hypothesized to be evolved solutions that alert individuals to strategic interference. Confict over sex is one of the largest spheres of confict between the sexes and takes many forms. First, studies document that men consistently infer greater sexual intent than do women—a sexual over-perception bias—especially in response to ambiguous signals such as a smile, friendliness, or an incidental touch on the arm. Second, men sometimes deceive women about their emotional involvement and long-term intentions as a strategy for gaining short-term sex. Some of these conficts stem from evolved cognitive biases, as predicted by the logic of error management theory. According to this theory, the reproductive costs of making one type of error (e.g., over-inferring sexual interest when it is not present) difer from the costs of making the other type of error (e.g., failing to perceive sexual interest when it is really there). If these cost asymmetries recur over evolutionary time, selection will favor biases in social inferences. Thus, men are predicted to have a sexual over-perception bias that leads them to believe that a woman is sexually interested in them in response to ambiguous cues such as a smile or going to a bar alone, a bias that functions to prevent missing sexual opportunities. Women are predicted to have a commitment skepticism bias that leads them to be wary of men’s signals of commitment in order not to be deceived by men who are merely feigning emotional devotion to them. Another manifestation of confict occurs in the form of sexual harassment in the workplace. Men are overwhelmingly the perpetrators of sexual harassment, women overwhelmingly the victims. The victims also tend to have a particular profle: They are often young, single, and physically attractive. Women tend to get more upset about sexual harassment than do men in response to the same acts, supporting the postulate that this negative emotion serves as a signal of strategic interference. For any particular act of harassment, women’s upset tends to be greater if the harasser is low in status, such as a garbage collector, janitor, or construction worker, and less if the harasser is high in status. The co-evolution of men’s strategies of sexual exploitation and women’s defenses has commanded a new line of research and theorizing. Men who pursue sexually exploitative strategies, such as deception and high levels of verbal pressure, appear to focus on cues to female exploitable victims. Examples include open body posture, revealing clothing, signs of incapacitation through intoxication, and reckless behavior. Men fnd these cues especially attractive in short-term mates but not at all attractive in long-term mates. Attraction presumably functions to motivate men to choose women displaying these cues as potential victims of sexual exploitation. Men pursuing short-term mating fnd women displaying these cues especially exploitable. Women are not passive pawns, however, and some exploit the would-be exploiters for their own mating goals. That is, some women intentionally display cues to exploitability in order to attract high-quality short-term mates or as a lure as part of a long-term mating strategy. Sexual aggressiveness occurs outside the workplace as well. As with sexual harassment, women tend to be more upset than men by the same acts of sexual aggression, such as touching their bodies without their permission and persisting in sexual advances even if they have said no. Studies show that men tend to underestimate how upset women get about acts of sexual aggression. 11 CONFLICT BETWEEN THE SEXES One controversial issue is whether men have evolved specialized rape adaptations or whether rape is a by-product of other mechanisms such as a male desire for short-term sex combined with a generalized proclivity to use violence to achieve a variety of goals. The existing empirical fndings from studies of rape do not uniquely support one hypothesis or the other. The fnding that rape victims tend to be young (and hence fertile), for example, does not point to the existence of adaptations to rape, since we know that men have evolved mate preferences for young women in consensual mating contexts. Research is urgently needed on the underlying causes to aford paths for reducing or eliminating sexual assault. One promising line of research has identifed a subgroup of individual men who seem especially prone to rape. Rapists, compared to non-rapists, tend to start having sex earlier, have a wider variety of sexual experiences, show sexual arousal to stories and images depicting rape, and tend to commit other crimes in addition to rape. Some men, in short, seem to pursue sexual coercion as part of a life-history strategy. The mate deprivation hypothesis, the notion that men who fail in mating resort to rape as a tactic, is not generally supported by the empirical fndings. In contrast, men who rape their existing mating partners tend to discover infdelity or suspect their partners of infdelity, supporting the sperm competition hypothesis. Men high on psychopathy or who perceive themselves to be equal to or higher in mate value are especially prone to partner rape when they suspect infdelity. Recent attention has focused on women’s anti-rape defenses, such as the selection of “special friends” for protection, the choice of mates who are large and dominant, the fear of situations that place a woman at risk of rape, and the experience of psychological pain following sexual violence. Preliminary tests of hypotheses about women’s anti-rape defenses are promising. Jealous confict defnes another large category of confict between the sexes. Evolutionary psychologists have suggested that jealousy is an evolved solution to the problems of mate poaching and mate defection. Men’s jealousy, compared to women’s, will focus heavily on the sexual infdelity of a partner, since historically that would have compromised a man’s paternity certainty. Women’s jealousy, compared to men’s, is predicted to focus more on the long-term diversion of a mate’s investment and commitment. A large body of empirical evidence supports these predictions. The sex diferences are robust across cultures, including Brazil, Japan, Korea, Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands. They are reasonably robust using measures of physiological distress and highly robust using cognitive measures, such as involuntary attention, information search, decision time, and memory for cues to sexual versus emotional infdelity. And an fMRI study revealed diferent patterns of brain activation in the sexes, supporting the hypothesized sex diferences in the evolved design features of jealousy. The psychology of jealousy produces behavioral output that is designed to deter a romantic partner from leaving or committing an infdelity—behavior that ranges from vigilance to violence. Men tend to engage in intense mate-retention eforts when they are married to partners who are young and physically attractive, two known cues to a woman’s reproductive value. Women tend to engage in intense mate-retention eforts when they are married to men who have higher incomes and who devote a lot of efort to status striving. Violence toward partners is an extreme and destructive mate-keeping tactic. It is used by men more than women and tends to be used most by men who lack the economic means to keep a mate through positive incentives. Men and women also get into confict over access to resources. Evolutionary psychology sheds light on the pervasive fnding that men tend to control economic resources worldwide, although there are large individual and cultural diferences. This is one aspect of what has been called patriarchy. The gender diference can be traced to the co-evolution of women’s preferences and men’s competitive mating strategies. Women throughout evolutionary history have preferentially selected men who were able to accrue and control resources, and men have competed with one another to attract women by acquiring such resources. An evolutionary analysis also suggests that men cannot be united with all other men in their desire to keep women from gaining access to these resources. Men are in competition primarily with other men, not with women. Furthermore, men are aligned in their interests with many specifc women, such as their friends, sisters, wives, lovers, daughters, nieces, and mothers. 333