Modern WisdomThe Hidden Motives Behind Female Friendships - Dr Tania Reynolds
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
135 min read · 26,828 words- 0:00 – 0:26
Intro
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
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. (wind blows)
- CWChris Williamson
Among
- 0:26 – 9:06
Why Women Don’t Like Female Bosses
- CWChris Williamson
over 11,600 US employees, women were less satisfied with their jobs when they 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?
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
So, I think this goes back to the challenges faced by our female ancestors. Throughout human history, a larger percentage of social groups were patrilocal, 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're 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 lever- 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, 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 contexts where there are clear demarcations in status and resources, or in contexts, say, where we have social media and we could observe the lives of people who deviate strongly from us in 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.
- CWChris Williamson
Why is that not the same case for men?
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
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 an 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 (laughs) 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 a 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 in 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.
- CWChris Williamson
There's a trickle-down effect of his-
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... his ability to help you. And because men, it seems, were more coalitional, that benefits everybody overall in terms of survival and reproduction, whereas with women, it seems like they didn't need this coalitional thing so much. You would've had women presumably competing, some a little bit of polygyny perhaps going on, so you would've had co-wives of one particular person. You would've had all of the concerns you have around child-rearing. Uh, Joyce Benenson 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.
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
Beautiful.
- CWChris Williamson
And she's looking at what happens after a match between male-male and female-female tennis players, uh, the amount of physical contact that they have, uh, the sort of body language, the kind of words that they use presumably to describe how the match went. And, uh, 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 ... ma- 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 is over, they're more happy to be, uh, physically and sort of verbally, um, collaborative and, and complimentary with their, 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 intrasexual competition for me has been such a, like, an o- o- obsessively interesting topic. It's so much more ... Female competition in friendships is way more interesting than male competition in friendships, I think. Uh, it's just, there's more nuance and there's a lot more going on. I'm very, very glad that I'm not a female. Like-
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
(laughs) .
- CWChris Williamson
... trying to navigate the world of female friendships to me seems unbelievably difficult.
- 9:06 – 19:04
Are Female Friendships More Vicious?
- CWChris Williamson
You ... Is, is that right to say? Is it right to say that female friendships are more complex than male friendships, do you think?
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
I think so. Um, I've, I've become increasingly interested in how women form cooperative relationships, because I s- 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, uh, you know, tying into Joyce Benenson'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 w- in male same-sex relationships, whereas for womens, 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 patrilocal 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.
- CWChris Williamson
I was gonna say, what- what- what's kind mean?
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
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 display strong cues of niceness. Um, 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. Um, 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 if 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 was 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, then if another female really disliked you, that could lead to harm to your child, maybe in the form of negligence or spiteful harm. Um, now, I'm not sure how often that happened, though 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 interport- interpersonal loyalty was a really big deal for our female ancestors, and perhaps not to the same degree as our male ancestors. 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 in kind of the importance of interpersonal loyalty.
- CWChris Williamson
Joyce also taught me about this sort of, um, veneer of egalitarianism that happens-
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
Hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... 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.
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
Right. And it makes sense that women would care about niceness and kind of popularity and status-striving, because you could imagine that if there were... if you were trying to form a relationship with a woman who was very status-striving 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-striving and competitive. And so it would make sense that in these modern contexts we see kind of disdain for those patterns. Um, 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 poked fun at this in 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, 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-striving, 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.
- CWChris Williamson
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 uh and I suppose uh who is it that did the work about venting is that um it's not candace blake
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
is it jamie krems
- CWChris Williamson
jamie krems thank you very much uh so she did that i also got the thing that it's made me think about is um... David Putz's 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
- 19:04 – 28:22
How People Respond to Male Suffering
- CWChris Williamson
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.
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
Hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
What was that?
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
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 typecasting, 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 in 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 Kirk 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 typecasting, we found that people more easily blame men than women and they more easily feel sympathy for women than men. And-
- CWChris Williamson
Is that both men and women feel that?
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
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.
- CWChris Williamson
They're more valuable.
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
Exactly.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
And so if you have a group with very few women, you are not gonna have many babies being produced compared to if you have a group with a lot of women, you really only need a couple men to still produce many babies. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) A couple of men having an absolutely fantastic time.
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
Yeah, I'm sure they would be very delighted.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
Until an e- enemy group comes in, and then they have to-
- CWChris Williamson
Having a bad time.
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
... 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's suffering. So, um, 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, le- 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, um, imprisoned, more often drop- 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.
- CWChris Williamson
You see this reflected in IQ distribution as well, right, that you have more men at the top and more men at the bottom, and it's kind of the same that men are just, who was it that said, might have been David Buss that said, uh, men are evolution's playthings.
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
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. W- so I understand why it would be the case that we're more prepared to see men, uh, suffer in one regard, that they're just kind of like less, that 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, the, we- 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.
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
Mm-hmm. Yeah, it, 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- 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, d- you know, unilaterally positive to see women as, like, the patient.
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, that's very interesting.
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
It-
- CWChris Williamson
Yes.
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
Yeah, and so it's like, it can be harmful when you want to, you know, in the voting booth, you're not gonna be recognized as an agent and maybe not as a CEO, um, but in the context of moral harm, you're not gonna be blamed to the same degree. Um-
- CWChris Williamson
Did you see, speaking about the in-the-voting-booth thing, Christina Duranti taught me that in a, uh, political race between two women...... the woman who loses is the one that has better marital outcomes long-term. Like, her-
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
Oh-
- CWChris Williamson
... relationship is the one that ends up being better long-term. I-
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
Oh, her ... For, for her relationship?
- CWChris Williamson
Yes. Yeah, for her-
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
Yep.
- 28:22 – 32:02
What Women Get From Friendships
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
- CWChris Williamson
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.
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
What is it that women want?
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
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 their, you know, have these other admirable attributes, but attractiveness seemed to be one where women are like, "She doesn't need to be prettier than I am." (laughs) Which makes sense because then she's more of a mating rival. Um, and so, yeah, it's, the data-
- CWChris Williamson
But what use, what use are these female friends? Like, what, what ... They ... 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?
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
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 allocare, 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 allocare. 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, uh, 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. Um, and so it's not like they're providing additional food aid. And if they're not providing allocare, 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 Hagan 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 could 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 gonna 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 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.
- CWChris Williamson
But in a social, pro-social, anti-social, reputational gossip way.
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Not physical fights, but-
- CWChris Williamson
I'm so glad. Every single day I'm reminded of being, being glad that I'm a male. Um, all right. What about
- 32:02 – 45:18
Why Women Develop Opposite-Sex Friendships
- CWChris Williamson
opposite sex friends? Why is it that women would want non-kin, non-partner male compatriots?
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
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, the... 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. Um, it's possible also that maybe same, or excuse me, opposite sex friends might have served as protection perhaps if your mate were really aggressive, so we might also be looking for those attributes -
- CWChris Williamson
Especially if you're patrilocal, 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, brothers, fathers, grandfathers, et cetera. 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 under-perception 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, 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.
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. 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.
- CWChris Williamson
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 or not"? Do you 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-
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... um, that's a, a genuinely interesting question. And it also, I, 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, or positions within companies or status or victim-hood, uh, position or whatever it is, right? Men and women for almost all of history kind of really didn't give a shit about each other. Men were off with their men doing their man thing, and women were 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 were in different worlds. And this is one of the reasons that I've been really trying to drive home this intrasexual 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 on 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 for men is with other men, I don't know, it- 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-
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... the intrasexual 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 balm antidote to kind of the cultural milieu that we've seen at the moment.
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
I, I totally agree. And I, the argument that now we're portrayed as, you know, men and women are portrayed as antagonistic, I think is true. And I, I have some data with some, some colleagues, um, my colleague Carl Aquino, um, and Simon, uh, and h- 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, um, benevolence towards opposite sex peers, they have less, um, 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.
- CWChris Williamson
Who's Marina Gertzberg? Do you know her?
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
Oh, I, I think I might have found one of her papers.
- CWChris Williamson
So, this is from my newsletter a little while ago. Uh, #Metoo has hurt women's careers. Women's productivity fell post MeToo 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 MeToo. 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 a- 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 disadvantage the career opportunities of women. MeToo was important to raise awareness, but the intent was not to impose costs on women's careers.
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
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, yeah, 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 wanna hold one-on-one meetings with women. And so, it, it doesn't work-
- CWChris Williamson
But that's, that's, isn't that strange that that's, that's men, right? That's male mentors that you meant there? Yeah? But-
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
So it was both ways. Both the female-
- CWChris Williamson
Ah. Yeah.
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
But the point being that we're about to get onto it, women also don't like attractive women.
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
If men are fearful now in a post MeToo 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.
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's not great. It's, so it's creating the very thing we'd like to prevent, you know, is that this hyper-focus on everything that could go wrong is creating less mentorship for women. W- i- if we wanna 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- it's tough because they do warrant attention, but it's worth considering how our attention has also created problems.
- CWChris Williamson
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, overemphasizing 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 than 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 pale in 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?
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
Yeah, so it was, um, a large meta analysis of economic games, and it was really interesting because they found that the sex differences in 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, um, 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, 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, s- again, similar to like what Joyce Benson 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 are like, how do I focus on, for example, all the ways that my friend demonstrated loyalty, loyalty to me instead of focusing on the one way that she was not loyal to me or 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.
- CWChris Williamson
You mentioned about how
- 45:18 – 55:50
The Useful Weapon of Gossip
- CWChris Williamson
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, the, uh, weapon of choice, I suppose. What's the, what's the use of gossip?
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
So, gossip, o- 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 to 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 spread 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.
- CWChris Williamson
It seems like women's wellbeing is a lot more on a knife edge than men's is, both, uh, reputationally and, uh, physically as well. I know that they've got, um, a lower threshold for pain, uh, they've got a lower threshold for infection and other sorts of things, like just generally f- physically are more wired to be vulnerable-
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... and emotionally presumably the same as well.
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
Mm-hmm. Yeah, and one reason they are more kind of vulnerable is to be sensitized to these threats. So the argument, um, 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 there are... one way to stay alive is to be very sensitive to threats, both physical and social. So women are more, um, responsive to cues in their body, so they're more interoceptive, um, or sensitive to interoceptive 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 wellbeing. Um, but yeah, as you were saying, you know, the social vulnerability, that is particularly strong because... So o- 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. You-
- CWChris Williamson
Look at all of this sex that I'm not having.
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
... 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-
- CWChris Williamson
Wow.
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
... jeopardize (overlapping conversation) ... their reputation.
- CWChris Williamson
So, steering clear of accusations of sexual indiscretion in the past-
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... is a big driver of all of the different social setups that women have got, that we've gone through so far?
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
It, 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 mate 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 an... 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. Um, 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, partial... 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 gonna 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.
- CWChris Williamson
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?
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
No. That's interesting.
- CWChris Williamson
Wouldn't that be cool?
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
If, if you were in an environment where there was tons of men and women started to become more open about their sexual past?
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
Yeah. I mean, there are... So, yeah, uh, Dave Schmidt has data that women become more unrestricted in their sexuality when they are in, um, actually more female bias environment.
- CWChris Williamson
Correct. Yeah, they need to play by the rules of the man.
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
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. You could either go the sexual route and play by men's rules, or you could signal, "I am not gonna do that," you know, and, "I'm gonna be so pure so then at least I get selected for the long term."
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, very interesting.
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
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-whore kind of high po-
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... uh, paradox or whatever it's called, where positioning a woman in one particular bucket as easy or whatever, and I c- 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.
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
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 mate value so you know that they can't give it up so much and the ones that have the higher mate value are the ones that you're gonna 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.
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
- 55:50 – 1:02:09
Tania’s Research into Slut-Shaming
- CWChris Williamson
So, what about slut-shaming is like... if that, if the sexual derogation of rivals and kind of the gossip and rules is like the sniper rifle, slut-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 slut-shaming?
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
So, yeah. So, I've, I found that it tends to be predicted by the 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, um, provocatively dressed, or if she flirts with their romantic partner. So, it's more in their... it's more tailored to the particular mating threat that each woman poses. However, I've seen other informa- other data that find that women are... more strongly oppose female promiscuity when they have more male sons. So, I believe this is Candice Blake's work where it was kind of like support for female veiling, and-
- CWChris Williamson
I've got her on the show, I've got her on the show next week, so I'll ask her about this.
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
Oh, her stuff is the best.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, she's great.
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
Um, yeah. And so, yeah, it, that women condemn, um... they, 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 gonna 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 gonna see fewer and fewer restrictions on women's sexuality.
- CWChris Williamson
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, i- i- 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 opened up due to the fact that women need less resource provisioning from the men around them.
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
Fuck, that's cool.
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
Yeah, and it makes sense that, like, society, uh, 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 gonna see in those contexts that men should value women's chastity because then they can be more certain in, "I am provisioning resources to my genetic offspring," um, 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 mens being confident and therefore investing these resources.
- CWChris Williamson
That is cool. Okay, so other than sex, what else do women gossip about?
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
Um, they tend to derogate... well, so, they share information about women's... a- 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 bitch. She's always making me feel bad and, like, s- 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 (laughs) 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-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
... 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 reputations. So, what we found is these types of statements, like, "Mary was mean to Susan, or made this mean comment about her," t-... people disliked the female perpetrators more than they disliked the male perpetrators. So, if a guy is 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.
- 1:02:09 – 1:08:00
The ‘Bless Her Heart’ Effect
- CWChris Williamson
What's the Bless Her Heart effect?
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
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 slut." You know, same thing where I don't appear mean or cruel if I frame it as, "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 slut," 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 slut," people actually don't like you. And if anything, they, you've actually harmed your reputation more than who you're talking about.
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, you've, you've taken the mask off around this flagrant status removal?
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
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.
- CWChris Williamson
Who are the most common, uh, victims, or who are the, who, which w- sorts of women are the most common targets of gossip?
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
So, they 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.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm. That's very interesting. The, um, 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, 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.
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
I could imagine a world in which it would be better to be ninetieth percentile good-looking-
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
Mm. Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... 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.
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
At least you would be able to have a coalition of friends like that.
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
True.
- CWChris Williamson
Whereas if you're 99 out of 100, who are you gonna be friends with?
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
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-
- CWChris Williamson
Self-derogation.
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
Yeah. That's because-
- CWChris Williamson
Overly nice.
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
Yeah. Overly nice, not trying to steal anyone else's mates. But, I mean, people have eyes, so I don't know how far (laughs) that would, that would go (laughs) .
- CWChris Williamson
M- 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 podcaster, very smart guy. He has made a profession out of winding people up, right? Online. Uh, 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."
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
Interesting.
- CWChris Williamson
And he's, I think he's maybe, like, 5'6", 5'7", 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 shit that I do."
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
Yeah. No, that's interesting. I think, I think height is probably 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... (laughs) I find male-male interaction so interesting, how there's so much derogation, and that's how, like, they bond with each other. Whereas, 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 if you did.
- CWChris Williamson
"How are you, Mary? You're looking particularly full today. You must have had l- had a lot of gluten last night."
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
... 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 (laughs) so harsh to each other. It's just like night, it feels like night and day when you observe, like, within sex interactions. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
What was
- 1:08:00 – 1:13:22
How Female Competition Impacts Self-Image & Diet
- CWChris Williamson
that study that you did about how female competition changes approaches to diet and self-image?
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
Ooh, 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 that-
- CWChris Williamson
If, do you mean if, if the men were of lower mate value?
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
It n- or at least we looked at attractiveness.
- CWChris Williamson
Right, okay.
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
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 a 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 mateships. But women also use their appearance to attract mateships, 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 perceived there to be more women in the environment, they perceived 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.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. Yeah, you're, you're 99 out of 100, but only 990 out of 1,000.
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
Yeah. Yeah. So, there is, uh, there's more intense competition and women's, you know, intrasexual 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 universities, 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 by-
- CWChris Williamson
Desperately dieting because there's loads of hot women around them.
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
Yeah. And I think it's, it, 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 mate. And so, because we evolved in these contexts, our brains still make these relative comparisons, even though in really large populations, we probably shouldn't be doing that as much.
- CWChris Williamson
It's almost impossible to be one of the most attractive people.
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
Yeah, but our bra-
- CWChris Williamson
And then if you, if, sorry-
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
(laughs) .
- CWChris Williamson
... if you globalize the, uh, sexual comparison marketplace with Tinder and Instagram and OnlyFans and TikTok, you're basically saying, "Okay, now let's compete with seven billion people."
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
Right. And so we're, like, wrongly interpreting them as our relevant peer groups. You know, and I, I wonder if 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.
- CWChris Williamson
Didn't Candice do something about sexy selfies as well in areas of particularly high female, uh, sex ratio split?
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
So, I believe what she found with the sexy selfies was that they were more prevalent in contexts where there was greater income inequality.
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, shit. Yes, it was. You're right. It was, yes. Fuck. Why, why-
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... wh- why is that the case?
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
Her argument was that there's more competition for the few men at the top. So, basically when there are 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, you're not gonna be very well served if you're with the men that don't have access to resources when there are such high payoffs to being with the men that have all the resources.
- 1:13:22 – 1:16:40
What is Driving the Increasing Sexualisation of Society?
- CWChris Williamson
Do you think that the current mating crisis, sex ratio skew in universities, hypergamy creating this sort of baseline of women dating up and across, an ever-increasing group of high-performing women competing from an ever-decreasing group of high-performing men, do you think that that is motivating an increasingly sexualized culture for women to step into?
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
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 needing a man, you know? So, for these women that are really high achieving, these like female CEOs, you know, who are- who are they going to mate with? There's gonna 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 it all. And so, it suggests that they're gonna 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, and so-
- CWChris Williamson
You go full sigma female mode.
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
(laughs) 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.
- CWChris Williamson
I've got a couple of friends that are the same, both of them are female millionaires, yeah.
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
Yeah. And it... Uh, 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, um-
- CWChris Williamson
It's more useful than going like that with a test tube, isn't it?
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. Uh, so I wonder whether a genuine polarized counterculture to a hypersexualized world in which women are being more sexually promiscuous, at least online, doing more sexy- sexy selfies, et cetera, I would've said that the opposite of that would've been like a trad culture. It would've been conservatism. What I think the boss bitch 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, "Shit (claps) 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- I'm not going to let go of the things that I've got. I can't go back, so I'm just gonna go on- on my own." I think that a f- a true counterculture would be something like the trad conservative side, which is also what is trad and 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.
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. 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 chaste route, one's going the sexually uninhibited, you know, men are, you know, disposable, uh, or rejecting men altogether-
- CWChris Williamson
Altogether. Those are the three main strategies I think that, I genuinely think that... Look,
- 1:16:40 – 1:18:32
Where to Find Dr Reynolds
- CWChris Williamson
Tanya, you are absolutely fantastic. I very, very much appreciate your time today.
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
Why, why?
- CWChris Williamson
Where should people go? What are you doing next? When are you gonna write a book? Rob Henderson wants to know when you're gonna write a book.
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
(laughs) I would love to. Um, I think it'd be so much fun. Um, I do wanna write a new, I wanna 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 neotenous, 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. Um-
- CWChris Williamson
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.
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
I love that, the puppification. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's not the sli- not the slickest word in the world.
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
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?
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
Uh, you can find some of my work on ResearchGate, and then I'm on Twitter as tanyaarlene, um, but yeah, not super active on it because I- I think it might be bad for mental health, so I'm trying to be productive instead. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
I like it. Tanya, I appreciate the hell out of you. Thank you so much.
- TRDr Tania Reynolds
Thank you. This was fun.
- CWChris Williamson
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. Peace.
Episode duration: 1:18:32
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