Chapter 7: Problems of Parenting

From an evolutionary perspective, offspring are the vehicles for parents genes, so selection
should favour parental mechanisms designed to ensure the survival and reproduction of
offspring.
Reproductive benefits must outweigh the costs of parental care
Why do mothers provide more parental care than fathers?
Paternity uncertainty hypothesis
o Males invest less than females because there is a lower probability that they
have contributed genes to their putative offspring (since maternity certainty is
100%, but paternity certainty is less than that)
o Paternity uncertainty especially strong in species with internal female
fertilization
o High cost incurred if parental effort is misdirected
Mating opportunity cost hypothesis
o Mating opportunity costs are missed additional matings as a direct result of
parental effort.
o The mating opportunity costs are higher for males than females because the
reproductive success of males tend to be limited by the number of fertile
females they successfully inseminate, whereas women generally cannot
increase their reproductive output directly by mating with a variety of men.
It follows that parents will have evolved mechanisms that favour offspring with greater fitness
(to reap higher reproductive return on the investment).
Three contexts in which evolved mechanisms of parental care are sensitive to:
Genetic relatedness to offspring
o Supporting empirical evidence
Stepparents have fewer positive parental feelings than genetic parents
Interactions between stepparents and stepchildren tend to be more
conflict-ridden than those between genetic parents and children
Newborn babies are said to resemble the putative father more than the
putative mother, suggesting mechanisms to influence the putative
father to invest in the child.
Investment in childrens college education is higher with genetic
children than with stepchildren and higher when paternity certainty is
high
Children living with one genetic parent and one stepparent are 40 times
more likely to suffer physical abuse and 40 to 100 times more likely to
be killed than are children living with both genetic parents
Because mothers have higher average genetic relatedness to offspring
than putative fathers, due to some level of compromised paternity,
women are expected to invest more heavily in children than fathers.
Indeed, women more than men prefer looking at images of infants, are

more skilled at recognizing infant facial expressions of emotion, and are

more likely to tend to infants and befriend others as a means of
protecting them.
a. More skilled in recognition of emotions in infants is consistent
with 2 variants of the primary caretaker hypothesis
i. attachment promotion hypothesis
1. Women better than men at decoding all facial
expressions of emotion, since responsiveness to
infants are likely to produce securely attached
children
ii. fitness threat hypothesis
1. A special sensitivity to dangers conveyed by
negative emotions particularly in women
The ability of the offspring to convert parental care into reproductive success
o Supporting evidence
Children born with congenital problems such as spina bifida or Down
syndrome are commonly institutionalized or given up for adoption; if
they are cared for and not given up for adoption, they are far more
likely to be physically abused by their parents
Mothers tend to invest more in healthy infants than in their less healthy
twins (healthy baby hypothesis)
Young infants are at greater risk of abuse and homicide than are older
children
a. According to Daly & Wilson, a 14 year old will have higher
reproductive value than an infant (since the infant may die
before reaching puberty)
b. Note that Daly & Wilson are not proposing that child homicide
are adaptations, but rather, they are extreme manifestations of
negative parental feelings. Investing more in healthy than
unhealthy children however does suggest sensitivity to
reproductive value of children as psychological adaptations in
parents
Alternative uses of the resources that might be available (mating vs parenting effort)
o Supporting evidence
Based on assumption that homicides are the opposite manifestations of
parental care;
a. Young mothers more likely than older mothers to commit
infanticide, presumably because younger women have more
reproductive years ahead to bear and invest in offspring
compared to older women
b. Unmarried women are more likely than married women to
commit infanticide

Men who tend to have more opportunities to channel effort into

mating, tend to provide less direct parental care
a. E.g. among the Aka, men who are high in status invest less in
direct child care than men who are low in status. They channel
their efforts into attracting more wives.
Even when men do devote effort to parenting, it may be used as a
mating tactic
The evolutionary (Trivers) theory of parent-offspring conflict suggests that the interests of
parent and children will not coincide perfectly because they are genetically related by only 50%.
The theory predicts that each child will generally desire a larger portion of parental resources
than the parents want to give
Some predictions and empirical evidence on the parent-offspring conflict
o Mother-offspring conflict will sometimes occur in utero
Fetuses secrete large amounts of chemicals into the mothers
bloodstream, which prevents mother from menstruating and staying
implanted, subverting any attempts by mother to spontaneously abort
it
o Parents tend to value their children more than their children value them as both
get older
Homicide data shows that parents, who are less valuable as they grow
older, are more often killed by their older children than the reverse
Daly & Wilson vs Buller on Cinderella effect
The Cinderella effect refers to the significantly higher incidence of abuse and homicide
by stepparents compared to biological parents
Daly & Wilson studys study found that Canadian children under 5 years of age living
with one genetic parent and one stepparent are 40 to 100 times more likely to be killed
than are children living with both genetic parents
o Buller:
this phenomenon can be explained away as products of reporting bias
such that abusive behavior by stepparents is more likely to be detected
and recorded than identical abusive behavior by genetic parents
o Daly & Wilson:
In reality, there arent even enough dead children. Fewer than 400
Canadian children under 5 years of age died annually from all causes
other than diseases and congenital abnormalities (i..e homicides +
accidental injuries + unknown cases);even if a reporting bias were as
large as Buller fantasizes, it would not be large enough to explain way
the observed Cinderella effects
Daly & Wilson studys study found that Canadian children under 5 years of age living
with one genetic parent and one stepparent are 40 times more likely to suffer physical
abuse than are children living with both genetic parents

o Buller:
Same reporting bias argument
o Daly & Wilson:
The estimates from victimization surveys depend on the victims
themselves detecting and reporting the abuse, so Bullers conjecture
that stereotypes induce professionals to expect abuse in stepfamilies
and to overlook it in genetic parent families is irrelevant.
No-one knows whether reporting bias against stepparents really exist;
such bias may even run the other way. For instance, studies on cases of
sexual abuse have showed that maltreatment by genetic fathers may be
more likely to be reported to authorities than maltreatment by
stepfathers.
The underascertainment of child abuse mortality (i.e. unclear if child death was due to
maltreatment or negligence) suggest that there may be serious problem with US
mortality statistics
o Daly & Wilson:
Buller misrepresents researches he cites to support his claim. The very
studies that Buller cites actually provide additional confirmation of the
existence of very large Cinderella affects after the underascertainment
had been rectified
The Cinderella effect
Child abuse and homicide (with the exception of sexual abuse) rates appear maximally
in infancy and decline as a function of the childs age. (see context: ability to convert
parental care into reproductive success for prediction of homicides at the hands of
genetic parents)
o Possible explanations
Smaller children more likely than older children to be seriously injured
by blows of equal force
Older children can more readily escape and defending themselves
physically
a. However this is ruled out since child homicide by nonrelative
shows a markedly different pattern
i. Nonrelatives, unlike genetic parents, more likely to kill
one-year old children than infants
ii. Unlike genetic parents , who almost never kill their
teenage children, nonrelatives kill teenagers at a higher
rate than any other age category
Abuse of preschoolers are often easier to hide
Adolescents more overtly conflictual with their parents than toddlers
This age-related diminution of both lethal and nonlethal violence against children has a
much steeper slope for stepchildren than for those living with birth parents

o Conflict in stepfamilies cannot be explained by stroppy adolescents

If it is the child who refuses the new parent, then any problems peculiar
to steprelationships may be more severe with adolescents; such
problems should be absent in very youngest infants
If the problem resides in the substitute parents resentment and
disinclination to pseudoparental obligation thrust upon him, then
maltreatment will be worst when the anticipated dependency and
obligation is maximal. Greatest difference between stepparent and
natural-parent on maltreatment will, as observed, be in infants, not
adolescents
o The claim that stepparents treat children poorly in comparison to genetic
parents because they were late arrivals in the childrens lives and failed to bond
with them as infants is invalid
Studies showed children have significantly poorer relationships with
stepparents than with genetic parents, and this difference was not at all
diminished when stepparents had come into the scene when the
stepchild was an infant
Stepfathers who had been present from childs birth were significantly
more antagonistic to children than later arriving stepfathers, who were
in turn significantly more antagonistic than genetic fathers
Does not apply to cases of adoption (which Daly and Wilson have repeatedly explained)
o Important reasons:
The prospective adoptive parents are screened
Adoptive parents enter into the relationship with the explicit intention
of simulating the experience of genetic parent families
Not comparable to genetic-parent or stepparent families in many other
risk factors, especially socioeconomic status
Stepparenthood is cross-culturally universal, whereas adoption by
stranger is a modern novelty
Daly & Wilsons interpretation can explain the puzzle in which some fraction of the
homicides/maltreatment are by genetic mother herself than the stepfather
o Stepparental investment may be understood as mating effort
Single mothers who wish to re-enter the marriage market have reduced
value in that market, and often face a cruel bind in which they must
choose between their children or a new mate who wants no part of
them
Daly & Wilsons interpretation about the evolutionary basis of parental solicitude and the
complications of steprelationships:
Parental altruism is an evolved mechanism to ensure the fitness of their offspring such
that their genes are passed on

Substitute parents are less likely than natural parents to experience the emotional
rewards that make the costs of parenthood tolerable

Chapter 9: Cooperative Alliances

Hamiltons theory of inclusive fitness (c < rb) explains how kin altruism can evolve. This
extended on Darwins definition of classical fitness (i.e. personal reproductive success) to
inclusive fitness (personal reproductive success plus the effects of ones actions on the fitness of
genetic relatives, weighted by the degree of genetic relatedness)
The problem of altruism occurs however when explaining altruism among nonrelatives: design
features that aid the reproduction of other individuals, incurs a cost in the altruist who has this
feature
A possible solution is provided by the theory of reciprocal altruism which states that
psychological mechanisms for providing benefits to nonrelatives can evolve as long as the
delivery of those benefits causes the recipient to reciprocate at some point in the future
o One important adaptive problem the altruist faces, however, is the threat of cheaters
people who take benefits without reciprocating at a later time
Tooby and Cosmides developed a social contract theory that proposes the evolution of 5
cognitive capacities in humans to solve the problem of cheaters and engage in successful social
exchange
o Ability to recognise many different individual humans
Lesion to fusiform gyrus was implicated in highly specific deficit to recognise
faces (i.e. prosopagnosia)
o Ability to remember the histories of interactions with different individuals
o Ability to communicate ones values to others
o Ability to recognise the values of others
o Ability to represent costs and benefits, independent of the particular items exchanged
Do humans have a cheater detection module?
o According to Tooby and Cosmides, one subcomponent of the social contract algorithm
is a cheater detection device. They define a social contract as a situation in which one
party is obligated to satisfy a requirement in order to be entitled to receive a benefit
from another party, and they define cheating as the taking of the benefit without
satisfying the requirement. A social contract situation can be depicted in a selection task
by means of cards representing on one side whether or not the benefit has been taken
and on the other side whether or not the requirement has been satisfied. A cheater
detection device should favour the selection of the benefit taken and of the
requirement not satisfied cards, either of which could turn out to correspond to a case
of cheating.

When participants did the Wasons selection task involving logical problems, they did
not perform well. However, participants reasoned correctly (i.e. chose P, and not-Q
cards) when the problem was structured as a social contract.
According to Cosmides and Tooby, this is because humans have not evolved to respond
to abstract logical problems; they have, however, evolved to respond to problems
structured as social exchanges when they are presented in terms of costs and benefits.
Cosmides and Tooby claims to have ruled out a number of alternative hypotheses
The effect does not depend on being familiar with the content of the problem
When strange and unfamiliar rules were used, such as if you get a
tattoo on your face, then Ill give you cassava root, about 75% of the
subjects gave the logically correct answers (in contrast to less than 10%
gave the logically correct answers in the abstract version)
When the conditional rule was switched (e.g. If I give you cassava root, then
you must get a tattoo on your face),
67% of participants still choose the P and not-Q cards, despite them
being logically incorrect choices, hence reflecting operation of a cheater
detection module. Only 4% of participants choose the P and not-Q cards
in the logically incorrect abstract version.
Opponents (Sperber & Girotto) argued that many conditional
statements and in particular conditional promises are commonly
understood by implying their converse (i.e. they normalize the switched
conditional to the unswitched conditional of the original problem
formulation); thus participants are in fact not making logically incorrect
choices - Buller
The cheater detection mechanism also appears to be highly sensitive to the
perspective one adopts
75% of subjects cued to the employees perspective selected the
worked on the weekend (P card) and did not get a day off card (not-Q
card)
61% of subjects cued to the employers perspective selected the did not
work on the weekend (not-P card) and did get a day off card (Q card)
Fodor
Two different reasoning strategies
o Deontic reasoning
Reasoning about what a person is permitted, obligated,
or forbidden to do (e.g. am I old enough to be allowed
to drink alcohol?)
o Indicative reasoning
Reasoning about what is true or false (e.g. is there really
a tiger hiding behind that tree?)

When reasoning deontic rules, people spontaneously adopt a strategy

of seeking rule violators (e.g. when evaluating the deontic rule all those
who drink alcohol must be 21 years old or older, people spontaneously
look for other with alcoholic drinks in their hands who might be
underage)
In marked contrast, when people evaluate indicative rules, they
spontaneously look for respect or violation of the rule
o Sperber & Girotto
The cheating question (i.e. which requires deontic reasoning) is trivially simple
compared to the Wason question (i.e. which requires indicative reasoning):
The cheating question is a categorization question that only requires
participants to select cards that exhibit one of two features (taking benefit and
failure to fulfil requirement);
On the other hand, the Wason question involves applying conditional reasoning
to 4 hypothetical cases
o Fiddick, Cosmides and Tooby
In a task describing a social exchange , people performed equally well with or
without an explicit conditional, suggesting that they didnt reason on the
conditional logical form, but just on the logic of social exchange
E.g.
Child: I want to go out and play!
Mother: You must put on your coat!
o Sperber & Girotto
Argued that logical connectives are not necessary for people to give a
conditional interpretation to a text or dialogue. As such, the conditional form
(implicit or explicit) is irrelevant to the performance on FCT selection task
Costs and Benefits of Friendship
o Benefits of opposite-sex friends
Following from the logic of the theory of parental investment, males
reproductive success is constrained primarily by the number of women with
whom they have sexual intercourse. Thus it is hypothesized that male may have
an evolved desire for sexual access to a large number of women, including their
opposite-sex friends
As predicted, men more than women perceive short-term sexual access
as a benefit of opposite-sex friendships
Over the course of evolutionary history, women who were able to secure
resources and protection from men were more reproductively successful than
those who dont. It is hence hypothesized that women have an evolved
preference for men who are able and willing to offer them resources and
protection, or who have future prospects of an ability to offer such benefits

Women more than men perceive protection as a benefit of opposite sex

friendships
Both sexes perceive information about the opposite sex to be an important
benefit of opposite-sex friendship
o Cost of same-sex friendship
Intrasexual rivary
Sexual rivalry appears to be more prevalent among male friends than
among female friends, perhaps because of mens stronger desire for
short-term mating, which would throw them into conflict more often.
Humans form cooperative coalitions groups of people who use collective action to achieve a
common goal.
o Adaptive problems:
Defection
Defections jeopardize the success of the coalition; men who use excuses
are often branded as cowards
Free-riding
Free-riders are individuals who share in the rewards of the coalition but
fail to contribute their fair share of work
o Adaptive solutions to free-riding
Punitive sentiment a desire to harm slackers in the group may operate in
at least 2 ways:
To increase the chance that a reluctant member of the group will
contribute
To damage the free-riders fitness relative to those who participate fully
in the cooperative coalition
Scientists have also identified brain reward centres involved when people
punish noncooperators; people experience pleasure when punishing or seeking
revenge against violators
o Punishing others may however be evolutionarily altruistic, in that the punisher incurs a
personal cost not incurred by nonpunishers that benefits the entire group
o Two explanations as to how altruistic punishment may have evolved:
Cultural group selection
Groups with altruistic norms may have a competitive advantage and
thus outlive and outlast groups that dont
Punishers (not truly altruistic) may actually receive personal benefits from
punishing
Several studies point to the reputational benefits that punishers gain
i.e. perceived as more trustworthy, group-focused, and worthy of
respect
Punishers who achieve this reputation may benefit by
o Deterring others from attempting to free-ride

o Being sought out for cooperative coalitions

o Punishing free-riders may not be all that costly to the punishers, as in the simple act of
shunning or ignoring the free-rider
The fact that people experience severe psychological pain when they are
shunned or ostracised points to a possible coevolved adaptation to avoid
committing acts that result in ostracism
Memeplex
o Suggested that the evolution of large-scale societies in which strangers regularly engage
in mutually beneficial transactions (which cannot be readily explained by evolutionary
mechanisms associated with kinship and reciprocity) may have emerged from norms
and institutions that sustain fairness in ephemeral exchanges
Behavioral experiments administered across 15 diverse populations found that
Market integration positively covaries with fairness (in line with
hypothesis that engagement in larger-scale institutions e.g. markets and
world religion, be associated with greater fairness
Community size positively covaries with punishment (in line with
hypothesis that larger communities punish unfairness more)

Chapter 10: Aggression and Warfare

What is aggression?
o From the perspective of evolutionary psychology, aggression is not a singular or a
unitary phenomenon. Rather, it represents a collection of strategies that are manifested
under highly specific contextual conditions to solve a host of distinct adaptive problems
Benefits of aggressive strategy
o Coopting the resources of others
o Defending oneself and ones kin against attack
o Inflicting costs on intrasexual rivals
o Negotiating status and power hierarchies
o Deterring rivals from future aggression
o Deterring long-term mates from infidelity or defection
Costs of aggressive strategy
o Retaliatory aggression (which sometimes cause escalating cycles of aggression and
counteraggression)
o Reputational consequences (depending on cultures and subcultures)
Examples of the context-specificity of aggression (cost-benefit)
o The use of spousal battering to solve the adaptive problem of a partners potential
infidelity is more likely in men who are lower in relative mate value than their wives
o Ability and willingness of victim to retaliate:

Among schoolchildren, bullies typically select victims who cannot or will not
retaliate
Presence of extended kin moderate the manifestation of spousal violence
o In academic circles, physical aggression is shunned and those who engage in it can suffer
ostracism
Why are men more violently aggressive than women?
o Evolved psychological mechanism favouring risky strategy
According to the theory of parental investment and sexual selection, in species
in which females invest more heavily in offspring than males do, females are a
valuable limiting reproductive resource for males.
With minimum obligatory parental investment in males, the ceiling of
reproduction is much higher for males than females, hence the greater variance
in reproduction in males
The greater the variance in reproduction, the more selection favours riskier
strategies (including intrasexual competition) within the sex that shows higher
variance.
Species that show great difference in variance in reproduction tend to
be highly sexually dimorphic (i.e. different in size and shape) across a
variety of physical characteristics
Given a mating system of some degree of polygyny, selection will favour risky
tactics among men both to gain sexual access to more women and to avoid
being excluded from mating entirely.
o Sex difference in manifestation of aggression
Males tend to use violent aggression whereas females tend to use verbal
aggression
Selection may have operate against females using violent aggression
Infants depend on maternal care more than on paternal care, hence
womens evolved psychology should reflect greater fearfulness of
situations that pose a physical threat of bodily injury
Young Male Syndrome (termed by Wilson & Daly)
o Refers to young men being most prone to engage in risky forms of aggression
o Explanation proposed:
Young man constitute the demographic class that faces the most intense mate
competition in an ancestral environment with some degree of polygyny
o Can account for variations in collective aggression (much linked to reputation), the
sudden surge in muscle strength in males from puberty through the mid-twenties etc
Contexts triggering Mens Aggression against Men
o Unemployed and unmarried
o Status and reputation threatened
o Observe or suspect a rival sexually poaching their mate
Contexts triggering Womens Aggression against Women

Intrasexual competition
Less likely to use physical aggression, preferring to derogate their competitors
verbally instead (effective if the man is pursuing long-term mate)
Promiscuous
Physical appearance
Contexts triggering Mens Aggression against Women
o Sexual jealousy (which functions to deter a mate from further infidelity or from
defecting from the relationship entirely)
Younger women who are therefore higher in reproductive value are more
vulnerable to aggression from their partners because ancestral men had a
greater incentive to maintain exclusive sexual access to more desirable women
Contexts triggering Womens Aggression against Men
o Self-defence (against a mate who is enraged about a real or suspected infidelity)
Warfare
o The Evolutionary Theory of Warfare (by Tooby and Cosmides)
The average long-term gain in reproductive resources must be sufficiently large
to outweigh the reproductive costs of engaging in warfare over evolutionary
time
Increase sexual access to females
Members of coalitions must believe that their group will emerge victorious
Not merely the belief that theyll win the battle, but also the belief that
the collective resources of ones coalition will be greater after the
aggressive encounter than before
The risk that each member takes and the importance of each members
contribution to the success must translate into a corresponding share of the
benefits
Need for cheater-detection
Men who go into battle must be cloaked in a veil of ignorance about who will
live or die
Selection would operate strongly against any psychological propensity
to go into battle when death is certain
o Prediction: Warfare will be practiced primarily by men, with the primary reproductive
benefit of increased sexual access to women
o Empirical evidence
Men have engaged in warfare throughout human recorded history
Sexual access to women appears to be a recurrent benefit that flows to victors
of warfare
Men more than women spontaneously assess their fighting ability relative to
other s
Men more than women value coalition members who are strong, are brave in
the face of danger, and have good fighting abilities

Do Humans have evolved Homicide Mechanisms?

o 2 contrasting hypotheses designed to explain the evolution of homicide (but still
controversial)
Slip-up hypothesis
The use of violence and the threat of violence as a means of coercively
controlling others accidentally bubbles over into a homicide
Homicide adaptation theory
Motivation to kill other humans is triggered under specific
circumstances when the benefits outweigh the costs
Supporting evidence:
o High prevalence of homicide fantasies
o Intrasexual rivalry homicides, infanticides, and warfare are
universal phenomenon
o Specialized cognitive and emotional circuits for killing in
particular circumstances (e.g. intrasexual rivals compose the
largest category of homicidal ideation)

Chapter 11: Conflict between the Sexes

Sexual conflict is defined as genetic conflict of interest between individual males and females
o Two important qualifiers:
Conflict is not an adaptation; it is an undesirable by-product of the profoundly
different sexual strategies of men and women
The metaphor battle between the sexes is misleading
The members of the same gender cannot be united as a group
fundamentally because they are primarily in competition with other
members of their own gender
Strategic Interference Theory
o Two main postulates:
Conflict results from member of one sex blocking or impeding member of the
opposite sexs successful enactment of a strategy designed to reach a particular
goal
E.g. women pursuing long-term mating strategy (e.g. seek investment or
signals of investment before consenting to sex) poses a strategic
interference to men pursuing short-term mating strategy (e.g. seek
sexual access with minimum investment)
Negative emotions (generally painful but adaptive experience e.g. anger,
distress, upset) are psychological solutions evolved to solve adaptive problems
posed by strategic interference
Functions:

o
o
o

Alert individuals to strategic interference

Emotions facilitate the storage and retrieval of related
memories
Emotions motivate actions to eliminate or prevent strategic
interference

Conflict over Sexual Access

o Inferences about sexual intent
Men consistently infer greater sexual intent than do women, especially in
response to ambiguous signals such as a smile
This male mechanism is susceptible to manipulation significantly more women
than men reported using smiling and flirting as a means for eliciting special
treatment from members of the opposite sex, even though they have no
intention of having sex with them
o Deception about Commitment
Men sometimes deceive women, notably about their emotional involvement
and long-term intentions, as a strategy for gaining short-term sexual access to
women
Women have evolved strategies to guard against deception (see below)
o Cognitive biases in Sexual Mind Reading
Error management theory
The reproductive costs of making one type of error (e.g. overinferring
sexual interest when it is not present) differ from the costs of making
the other type of error (e.g. failing to perceive sexual interest when it is
really there)
If these cost asymmetries recur over evolutionary time, selection will
favour certain biases in sexual inferences (i.e. these biases reflect
functional adaptations rather than psychological flaws)
Men are predicted to have an evolved sexual overperception bias to minimize
the cost of missed sexual opportunities
Men who view themselves as having high mate value are especially
prone to experience such bias
Women are predicted to have an evolved commitment scepticism bias to
minimize the costs of being sexually deceived by men who feign commitment to
pursue a strategy of casual sex
o Sexual withholding
Serves several functions for women
Preserve their ability to choose men of high quality (men in certain
cultures value chastity)
Increase their value since sexual scarcity drives greater investments
Exploit mens perceptions that highly desirable women are more
sexually inaccessible

Encourage a man to evaluate a woman as a permanent rather than

temporary mate
Conflict of Sexual Aggression
o Sexual harassment in workplace
Men are overwhelmingly the perpetrators of sexual harassment, and women
overwhelmingly the victims, most often with a particular profile: young, single,
and physically attractive
Men have positive emotional reactions to the prospect of casual sex and women
having more negative reactions (e.g. upset) to being treated as sex objects
Supports the strategic interference theory
However, degree of distress in women is sensitive to the perpetrators
status: more distress if low in status (e.g. garbage collector) than if high
in status
o Sexual aggression
Mates infidelity and verbal or physical abuse, were far more upsetting to men
than sexual aggression by women
Men tend to underestimate how upset women get about acts of sexual
aggression
o Do men have evolved rape adaptations?
Controversy over if rape were an adaptation or by-product of other mechanisms
(e.g. male desire for short-term sex combined with a generalized tendency to
use violence to achieve goals); no clear-cut evidence
The finding that rape victims tend to be young (and hence fertile), does not
point to the existence of adaptations to rape, since we know on independent
grounds that men have evolved mate preferences for young women in
consensual mating contexts
One promising line of research has identified a subset of men who are
particularly prone not to just committing rape, but also pursuing a life strategy
of antisocial and criminal activity
Individual differences in sexual aggression
o Mate deprivation hypothesis
Men have evolved a conditional mating strategy when
they cannot secure mates through the means of
attraction, they experience deprivation which prompts
them to use sexually aggressive tactics to avoid being
excluded entirely
o This hypothesis was not supported: men high on self-perceived
mating success tended to be high in sexual aggression; also,
men with higher perceived future earning potential tended to
use more physical coercion
o Do Women have evolved Antirape Adaptations?

Still a new area of research

Womens antirape defences include selection of special friends for protection,
choice of mates who are large and dominant, fear of situations that place
woman at risk of rape, experience psychological pain following sexual violence

Jealous Conflict
o Jealousy may be an evolved solution to problems of mate poaching and mate defection
o Mens jealousy, compared to womens, focus heavily on the sexual infidelity of a partner,
since historically that would have compromised a mans paternity certainty.
o Womens jealousy, compared to mens, is predicted to focus more on the long-term
diversion of a mates investment and commitment
o Supported by a large body of empirical evidence using measures of physiological distress
and highly robust cognitive measures, such as involuntary attention, information search,
decision time, and memory for cues to sexual vs emotional infidelity.
From Vigilance to Violence: Tactics of Mate Retention
o Sex differences in the Use of Mate-Retention Tactics and Contexts influencing Intensity
Men tend to engage in intense mate-retention efforts when they are married to
partners who are young and physically attractive; also they mate guard most
vigorously when their partners are ovulating
Conceal mate
Resort to threats and violence, especially against rivals
Resource display
Use acts of submission and self-abasement
Women tend to engage in intense mate-retention efforts when they are
married to men who have higher incomes and who devote a lot of effort to
status striving
Enhance their appearance
Induce jealousy in their partners (to test/increase partners level of
commitment)
o Violence in partners
According to a hypothesis by Wilson and Daly, violence is used as a coercive
tactic designed to keep a mate faithful, prevent future infidelity, and prevent
defection from the relationship
Men lacking the economic resources that might otherwise keep a woman in a
relationship voluntarily are more prone to using violence
Women who are young, and hence high in reproductive value and attractive to
other men, appear to be especially vulnerable to violent victimization by their
partners
Womans risk of violence can be reduced by 2 factors:
Selecting a mate who has reliable source of economic resources
Having a kin living in close proximity to her
Conflict over Access to Resources

o
o

Men tend to control economic resources worldwide (i.e. patriarchy)

This sex difference may be due to the coevolution of womens preferences (for men
with resources) and mens competitive mating strategies (i.e. intrasexual competition
for resources)
(refer to textbook pg 351 a possible question: The metaphor of the battle between the sexes
can be misleading. Evaluate)

Chapter 12: Status, Prestige, and Social Dominance

Dominance hierarchy
o Refers to the fact that some individuals within a group reliably gain greater access than
other individuals to key resources resources that contribute to survival or
reproduction
o This poses adaptive problems and solutions that have functions for the individual has
evolved: strategies of dominance and submissiveness
Key features of primate dominance hierarchies
o Increased sexual access to females by dominant males
o Increased sexual access to females by dominant males, especially when females enter
estrus (i.e. most likely to conceive)
o Hierarchies are not static
o Social skills (notably the ability to enlist allies) are stronger determinants of status than
physical size
An evolutionary theory of status must
o Specify the adaptive problems solved by strategies of dominance and why individuals
accept subordinate positions
o Predict tactics used to negotiate hierarchies
o Account for why status striving appears more prevalent among males than females
o Explain why people often strive for equality among members of the group
o Differentiate between dominance hierarchies (which determine the allocation of
resources) and production hierarchies (which involve coordination and division of labour
to achieve group goal)
o Identify the different route to elevated status: Dominance (involving force or threat of
force instill fear) and prestige (freely conferred deference; domain-specific e.g.
superior hunting skills evoke admiration)
An evolutionary theory of sex differences in status striving
o Selection has likely favoured the evolution of greater motivation for status striving in
men than in women
o The more polygynous the mating system, the stronger the selection pressure on males
to ascend the status hierarchy so as to attain reproductive success
o Elevated status can give males greater sexual access along two paths:

Dominant men may be preferred as mates by women (offering greater

protection, increased access to resources)
Intrasexual domination (i.e. poach the mates of subordinate men)
o Empirical evidence supporting hypothesis that men are higher in social dominance
orientation (i.e. the belief that it is justified that some people or some groups are
superior to others)
Boys more likely than girls to engage in rough-and-tumble play, aggressive acts,
displays of egoistic dominance; Girls tended to display nurturance and
pleasing sociability
Women tend to be more egalitarian, men more hierarchical
Women tend to express dominance through prosocial actions (e.g. settling
disputes among others in the group), men tend to express dominance for
personal gain and ascension (e.g. getting others to do menial tasks rather than
doing them themselves)
When given a choice of roles to take, dominant women tend to appoint men as
leaders, whereas dominant men take the leadership role for themselves
Dominance theory (Cummins)
o Two key propositions
Humans have evolved domain-specific strategies for reasoning social norms
involving dominance hierarchies
Permissions (e.g. who is allowed to mate with whom)
Obligations (e.g. who must support whom in a social contest)
Prohibitions (e.g. who is forbidden to mate with whom)
These cognitive strategies are predicted to emerge prior to, and separately from,
other types of reasoning strategies
o Empirical evidence
Early emergence of reasoning about dominance hierarchies
Two different reasoning strategies
o Deontic reasoning
Reasoning about what a person is permitted, obligated,
or forbidden to do (e.g. am I old enough to be allowed
to drink alcohol?)
o Indicative reasoning
Reasoning about what is true or false (e.g. is there really
a tiger hiding behind that tree?)
When reasoning deontic rules, people spontaneously adopt a strategy
of seeking rule violators (e.g. when evaluating the deontic rule all those
who drink alcohol must be 21 years old or older, people spontaneously
look for other with alcoholic drinks in their hands who might be
underage)

In marked contrast, when people evaluate indicative rules, they

spontaneously look for confirming instances of the rule (e.g. when
evaluating the indicative rule all polar bears have white fur, people
spontaneously look for instances of white-furred polar bears rather than
instances of bears that might not have white fur)
Moreover, young children can reason about transitive dominance
hierarchies earlier in life than they can reason transitively about other
stimuli
Human reasoning strongly influenced by rank
Participants were showed male pictures with biological information
about their social status (high vs low) and character (history of cheating,
irrelevant information, or history of trustworthiness); recall task after 1
week
Results:
o cheaters were remembered far more frequently than
noncheaters
o Memory for cheaters was especially enhanced if the cheaters
were low in status, but diminished if cheaters were high in
status
o Memory bias for cheaters was stronger for men than for
women participants
Supports cheater-detection module and Cumminss dominance theory
When angered or frustrated people are given a chance to aggress back, their
blood pressure returns to normal only if the target of the aggression is lower in
status; blood pressure remains high is the target is higher in status
People tend to look for violations of rules among lower-status individuals when
they are asked to assume the perspective of a higher-status individual
Social Attention-Holding Potential (SAHP) Theory
o Dominance theory emphasizes the reasoning mechanisms underlying dominance,
whereas SAHP theory emphasizes the emotional mechanisms underlying dominance
o According to this theory, humans compete with each other to be attended to, and
valued by, others in the group. Hence, differences in rank stem from differences in
attention conferred by others
o These emotional mechanisms include
elation after a rise in status
social anxiety in contexts in which status could be gained or lost (to motivate
efforts to avoid status loss or failure to gain status)
shame as a consequence of status loss to motivate individual to avoid being the
object of scorn, either at present or in future
rage as a consequence of status loss, to motivate an individual to seek revenge
on the person who caused the status loss

envy to motivate the acquisition of what others have

depression to facilitate submissive posturing to avoid further attacks from
superiors
Self-esteem as a status-tracking device (i.e. sociometer)
o Functions of self-esteem
Motivate us to curry favour or repair social relations when respect from other
wanes
To guide us to making appropriate decisions about whom to challenge and to
whom to submit
Track our desirability in the mating market
Strategies of Submission
o Deceiving down
Lowering ones self-esteem to avoid confrontation and to better carry out the
subordinate role without incurring the wrath from the dominant
o Derogating tall poppies
Occupying a subordinate position carries costs (e.g. often left with the scraps of
resources required to enhance survival and reproduction)
Disparaging a successful competitor might make a person feel better
More when the high status of the tall poppy was made salient
More when the success of the tall poppy was not perceived to be
deserved
More when the person has low self-esteem