Stories, News, Books, and Videos on Science, Technology, Computers, Environment and the Realites of Life, for the general, smart public
Posts tagged sex differences
Don’t kid yourself girls! Attractive women get it all! Unattractive ones significantly lower their standards.
Mar 22nd
Attractive women… Who doesn’t want them?! In this article we’ll see who get’s them. And no, we won’t leave normal and unattractive women out of the picture… We’ll see what kind of man they can get.
So why not talk about “smart women”, “ambitious women” or “intelligent women”. Well, whether or not it is harder to admit by the ladies, the physical attractiveness of a female is the most important characteristic she possess, and it is the primary tool with which she attracts her short and long-term partners, and the fundamental knob with which she calibrates the expected value of her future male mates.
Furthermore, it important to say the age of the women is a direct representation of her attractiveness. Women below 30 years old are considered very attractive and healthy, whereas older women begin to score lower points in the above characteristics. Natural selection has programmed women’s brains to follow specific algorithms that make them pursue mates with the overall mate value approximately the same as the their personal mate value. A lot of studies gave us hints about the relation between a woman’s attractiveness and a man’s masculinity, physical attractiveness, sex appeal, muscularity, symmetry, physical fitness, intelligence and confrontativeness, all indicators of good male genes.
More >
Breakthrough in evolutionary psychology! How depresive people sell themselves in the mating arena
Mar 12th
Negative affect? Yes! Whether we are talking about depression, anxiety, low self-esteem or self-worth, we will refer to these sets of negative emotional states as “the Negative Affect”. Why the need to talk about this when discussing mating strategies that had started to evolve eons ago? Well, social scientists and evolutionary psychologists have long established a strong connection between one’s emotional state and the mating strategies that he/she will use to elevate his reproductive fitness.
Wondering about what is a mating strategy? Let’s imagine it as the software that was installed by natural selection in each and every one of us so that we can select, attract, and retain sexual partners that are the best possible pick to produce healthy offspring and to provide them with the safest possible environment to live and develop in. Although men and women adopt significantly different strategies when searching for a long-term partner, the overall value of each mate in a relationship is about the same. We’re practically talking about a business deal, an exchange of different resources, with the condition that the “perceived value” of these investments must be relatively similar for the two partners to remain in the relationship. Why the “perceived value”? Because, when we talk about the mating dance, we do not talk only about sexual intercourse, but about complex emotional states and cognitive behavior switches built into us by natural selection, that regulate the amount of control one mate can have over the other by using sex as a primary trade currency. Thus, we will call the “total mate value” as the “perceived self value” plus the “matting effort” or the amount of investment, that is the amount of time, energy and attention you are willing to bring to table so you can retain your partner in the relationship. This total mate value is the perceived value we were talking about when we said it needs to be the same for the two partners to remain in the relationship.
More >
Are you tall? Then you shouldn’t be so jealous anymore!
Mar 10th
Before we reach the main subject of the article, let me pave the way towards it by reviewing all the scientific knowledge we have about male height and its consequences on mating and relationship satisfaction.
First of all, male height is a direct indicator of good genetic material, health and promising mating opportunities. In general, men that are taller are considered more dominant, physically attractive and of course as having a higher social status than their shorter counterparts. The property of tallness, by its nature, is in direct relation with the level of testosterone the individual male has, and by logical deduction, with the amount of socioeconomic status and resources the prospective male might achieve and gather.
Besides the popular common knowledge, for example from your own or my personal experience, there is sufficient scientific evidence to suggest a definite advantage in reproductive success that taller men enjoy. Taller men are considered more attractive, therefore women are more responsive and open to their courtship strategies. For example taller men receive more responses to ‘lonely hearts’ column advertisements on online dating websites than their shorter male counterparts. Female surveyed in several studies stated they have dated taller men more frequently than shorter males. Also, men that are tall are less likely to date an unattractive female, and less likely to die childless. Tall men are considered superior by the female gender and you can see this all around you. You don’t particularly need a survey to validate this fact of the matter.
More >
Women with a high libido, male providers and young attractive females. What do they have in common?
Mar 8th
Love. More specifically, “falling in love”. Why is that? What is falling in love useful for anyway, besides the enjoyment its quale-o-philic indescribable properties give you? For a long time social scientists categorized romantic love as a western culture specific peculiarity, a signaling of cultural fineness or elegance and taste.
But psychologists, specifically evolutionary psychologists, have long made evident the human species typical adherence that the “falling in love” burst of emotions take part in. Thus, love and more peculiarly romantic love is not a culturally biased induced quirk, but seems to be a human species typical trait and for a good amount of time nobody worthy of any scientific reconnaissance doubted this fact.
So, what is falling in love useful for? There is a considerable amount of evidence suggesting it is a “commitment device”, evolved in our ancestors brains for detecting good partners for stable monogamous relationships, that are a good social medium for rearing healthy human offspring that of course require an unusually long maturation period. “Falling in love” is a commitment device that works in double shifts; both men and women fall in love, but what’s interesting is that both men and women have devices that detect if their mate is also in love with them! How does this commitment device work? Well, the “in love individual” will start making “costly displays” that consume a lot of time, resources and effort that will give a visual hint of how much in love he/she really is. The more costly the displays the more honest the individual must be, therefore the more in love he or she is and therefore the more prone to invest in a long term relationship.
More >
Do bullies get more sex ? Well Yes, and this doesn’t depend on the gender!
Mar 6th
The Gallup, O’Brien, White and Wilson study from 2009 validated the idea that the majority of adolescent victims of peer aggression are abused by same-gender peers; that is 85% of victimization is directed towards same-sex peers indicating an arms race intra-sexual competition that evolved in both males and females.
Also, the study confirmed the lower age threshold of first sexual intercourse that female victims of peer aggression supposedly engage in; the more victimized you are as a female, the more sexual partners you seem to have during your lifetime and the lower the age of first sexual intercourse.
As for the males, the facts are exactly the opposite; it seems, the study concluded, the more bullying you are subjected to, the higher the age for your first sexual intercourse and the less sexual partners you will have during your lifetime. Other studies showed a direct correlation between indirect bullying (peer aggression) between females at a young adult age, that is indirect aggression through hurtful rumor spreading, and the rate of attractiveness of the victim/abuser.
It seems the more attractive you are as a female the more you are going to experience the intra-sexual competition pressures engaged by your less attractive but more angered adolescent same-sex peers. This of course is a behavioral adaptation evolved in the less attractive genetic lines of the female gender to compete with the superior more “pleasing to the eye” and thus healthier genetic set of the same gender.
How does this behavioral strategy achieve its desired effects? Well, on the one hand through communicating to other males and females signals of the victim’s promiscuity and possible infidelity a potential mate might be subjected to. Let’s call it the tribal effect, because in the early ages of our evolutionary history we lived in small groups where everyone knew everyone.
More >
The reality of jealousy – Who is more vigilant ? Men or Women ?
Mar 5th
I think that from a scientific point of view, apart from the question of whether men or women cheat more often, the question concerning jealousy is a more interesting and enlightening one. Why? Because it reaches at the basic heart and core workings of the strategies men and women use in their mating dance.
More interestingly, even though one might conclude that the question of whether men are more jealous than women is in direct relation with the question of whether women cheat more than men, we will approach the issue separately. Let’s analyze it from the cost effectiveness point of view.
That is what Aaron T. Goetz from The Department of Psychology at California State University and Kayla Causey from The Department of Psychology at Florida Atlantic University did in a study that tried to answer the question of whether there are any sex biased differences in perceptions of infidelity. Do really men often assume the worst?
What were the risks of not being able to detect your partner’s infidelity in the early days of our ancestors? Either if you were a man or a woman you risked losing your reputation, contacting sexually transmitted diseases or terminating the relationship. But more than that, if you were a man you were never sure if you were rearing the offspring that shared half of your genes! A woman always knew that of course, because she was the one giving birth to the child. So the risk of cuckoldry to which a man was exposed to, that is the risk which he was subjected at in investing his time, resources and even his life to rear a child that was not even his, plus the time, effort and resources spent attracting his partner, represented an evolutionary driving force that has not left its effects expected.
