The Hidden Motives Behind Female Friendships - Dr 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)

Among 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?

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.