The Brutal Tactics of Female Sexual Competition - Dr Dani Sulikowski

How do you describe your area of research focus?

So my research focus is the evolutionary psychology of human behavior, and in the last few years in particular, I've really narrowed that focus down a bit to look at female intrasexual competition, which is just a, a big fancy word for how women compete with each other to see who gets the largest share of the population's reproductive success.

Okay, what is it trying to achieve? Fundamentally, what does female intrasexual competition try to do?

So the currency of evolution is reproductive success. The genes that promote reproductive success increase in frequency in the population, and so whatever mechanisms and behaviors they produce will also increase in frequency. So female intrasexual competition is the suite of behaviors that have evolved to maximize an individual's, uh, relative reproductive success, not absolute reproductive success, and that's a pretty important point. So you don't need to have as many babies as it's humanly possible to have to win the evolutionary game. What you do need to do is reproduce at a greater rate than the average reproductive rate for your population, and if that continues to happen in your lineage generation after generation, then you increase your representation in that population, and you win the evolutionary game. So it's relative reproductive success that matters. So you can win by increasing your own reproductive success or attempting to inhibit the reproductive success of rivals. Both of those will increase your net reproductive success.

Okay, so you can put your foot on the gas of how many surviving children you have, or you can try to put your foot on the brake of how many surviving children other women have?

Exactly.

Okay. This doesn't paint women in a particularly flattering light. How, how conscious is this? Is it, is it all women?

Ooh, excellent. You've hit on my least favorite question straight away. How conscious is this? [chuckles]

Fuck me! Okay. Thanks, Dani.

No, that's okay. No, that's, that's fantastic. It's the question I get the most often, and you'd think I would've invested some time in coming up with a better answer. I try to answer it a little bit differently each time in the hope that it's a more satisfactory answer. So how conscious people are, uh, unclear. Unclear, it varies from person to person, and it's probably doesn't really matter very much. So, mmm, understanding what... Very briefly, understanding what consciousness is and for is a really difficult question, and there's no consensus. How it operates with respect to sort of evolved behavioral tendencies is it's develops kind of post hoc justification for what you've done and why you've done it. In fact, that's sort of what consciousness does with all behaviors, really. You ask people why they've done something, they don't know, right? We can, we can do experiments where we manipulate the information that people get, and they don't know we've manipulated that, and then we ask them why they made their decision, and they just make something up, and they don't know they've made something up, right? So people generally don't know why they're doing what they're doing. So the majority of people, um, not just women, but people generally, really don't know why they're doing what they're doing. They don't know why they find this particular person attractive. They don't know it's because the shape of their face signals they, uh, that they have particular levels of testosterone or estrogen that contribute to fertility and predict behavior in really nice, adaptive ways. They just look at someone and go, "Oh, he's hot. She's nice." Right? They don't have to understand why, and so women and men, because intrasexual competition applies to men as well, it's just a completely different ballgame when it comes to men. Um, they don't have to understand that the consequences of their behavior is inhibiting the reproductive success of other women. They just have to be compelled to behave that way. So it doesn't necessitate that women be sort of overtly aware of some nastiness in their behavior. Having said that, though, women are definitely overtly aware of much nastiness in their behavior, as most women will attest to. Most women have been the recipients at some point or another of the bullying behavior from other nasty women.