Pod Insights Modern Wisdom The Hidden Motives Behind Female Friendships - Dr Tania Reynolds About this episode Tania Reynolds is an Assistant Professor in Psychology at the University of New Mexico whose research focuses on women's intrasexual competition, biases in moral evaluations and social and sexual selection.
Ancestrally, men needed to go to war and hunt. Given this, it would be rather useful to be friends with the spear-wielding bloke next to you so that you know he's got your back. Women's use case for friends is much more subtle and difficult to determine however, and today we try to decipher the underpinnings of female friendships.
Expect to learn why women dislike working underneath a female boss, the painful social existence that very attractive women have to endure, why both men and women bias seeing women as victims and men as perpetrators, why women develop opposite-sex friendships, the most common ways women derogate their rivals, why sexual gossip is a ruthless precision engineered tool and much more...
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#evolutionarypsychology #female #competition
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00:00 Intro
00:26 Why Women Don’t Like Female Bosses
09:06 Are Female Friendships More Vicious?
19:04 How People Respond to Male Suffering
28:22 What Women Get From Friendships
32:02 Why Women Develop Opposite-Sex Friendships
45:18 The Useful Weapon of Gossip
55:50 Tania’s Research into Slut-Shaming
1:02:09 The ‘Bless Her Heart’ Effect
1:08:00 How Female Competition Impacts Self-Image & Diet
1:13:22 What is Driving the Increasing Sexualisation of Society?
1:16:40 Where to Find Dr Reynolds
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Transcript 13,167 words · 5 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 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.
0:23 Chris Williamson? 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?
0:41 Speaker 00 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 are 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?
1:22 Speaker 00 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 levels of power and resources. And so I think one way to think about this might be, what would it look like if, say,
2:06 Speaker 00 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 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...
2:29 Speaker 00 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 mathematical find is that when partners diverge in power and resources, the cooperative bonds kind of, um, 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,
3:11 Speaker 00 such that they preferred contexts where they were of equal power and equal resources and too strong of deviations would have led to conflict and kind of corroded their relationship. And so I think that this can become problematic in modern contexts where there are clear demarcations in status and resources or in context, say, where we have social media and we could observe the lives of people who deviate strongly from us and 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.
3:54 Chris Williamson? Why is that not the same case for men?
3:57 Speaker 00 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.
4:42 Speaker 00 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... 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.
5:23 Speaker 00 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 the 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.
6:08 Speaker 00 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.
6:52 Speaker 00 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.
7:04 Chris Williamson? There's a trickle down effect of his, 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 have had women presumably competing some, a little bit of polygyny perhaps going on. So you'd have had co-wives of one particular person. You would have had all of the concerns you have around child rearing. Joyce Bennison was on the show a little while ago, and obviously she's done that great work to do with 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. And she's
7:47 Chris Williamson? looking at what happens after a match between male, male and female, female tennis players. The amount of physical contact that they have, the sort of body language, the kind of words that they use presumably to describe how the match went. And you'll be familiar with the work that she's done. But for the people that aren't, it seems like in sports teams, men who compete against other 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's over, they're more happy to be physically and sort of verbally collaborative and complimentary with their opponents. Females during sports games seem to show both more
8:31 Chris Williamson? 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 intersexual competition for me has been such a, like an obsessively interesting topic. It's so much more, female competition and friendships is way more interesting than male competition and friendships. I think 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 trying to navigate the world of female friendships to me seems unbelievably difficult. Is that right to say? Is it right to say that female friendships are more complex than male friendships, do you think?
9:12 Speaker 00 I think so. Um, I've, I've become increasingly interested in how women form cooperative relationships. Because I, 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, you know, tying into Joyce Bennetson'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.
9:56 Speaker 00 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 in male same-sex relationships. Whereas for women, 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.
10:40 Speaker 00 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 patriarchal 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.
11:11 Chris Williamson? I was gonna say, what, what's kind mean?
11:14 Speaker 00 Kind, meaning altruistic, pro-social, generous, supportive. Yeah, kind in that sense, nice. And the ethnographic data support it too. So if you look at 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 that's what they find in these ethnographies among female adolescents. You have to display strong cues of niceness. And indeed, that's the trait that women report as most important in a friend. Men value it too, but just not to the same degree.
12:00 Speaker 00 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, 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. 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
12:43 Speaker 00 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 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
13:23 Speaker 00 harm. 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 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
14:02 Speaker 00 or commit treason. And so there's an asymmetry here in kind of the importance of interpersonal loyalty.
14:10 Chris Williamson? Joyce also taught me about this sort of veneer of egalitarianism that happens among women, and the reason for that being that any one girl that 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.
14:43 Speaker 00 Right. And it makes sense that women would care about niceness and kind of popularity and status driving, because you could imagine that if there were, if you were trying to form a relationship with a woman who was very status-driving 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 risks to forming cooperative relationships with women who were really status-driving and competitive. And so it would make sense that in these modern contexts, we see kind
15:23 Speaker 00 of disdain for those patterns. There's some evidence, I believe it's Rudman'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 receive a compliment, you have to kind of undermine it. So somewhat, 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. They poke fun at this in the movie Mean Girls,
16:08 Speaker 00 which I think just got female interactions pretty spot on. 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. It's really focusing on vulnerabilities and your setbacks. You're reanalyzing, 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
16:53 Speaker 00 status-driven, 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
17:36 Speaker 00 dirt that I told you about myself. And so I suspect that women respond
17:42 Speaker 00 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.
17:54 Chris 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. And I suppose, who is it that did the work about venting? Is that, it's not Candace Blake?
18:17 Speaker 00 Is it Jamie Krems?
18:18 Chris Williamson? Jamie Krems, thank you very much. So she did that. I also got, the thing that it's made me think about is 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 auditory aggressive sound, I guess, this sort of competition
19:03 Chris Williamson? they've 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. What was that?
19:13 Speaker 00 Yeah, so that was, the theoretical framework was based on Kurt 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?
19:53 Speaker 00 And so across a series of studies, what we found was that we more instinctively classify women as victims and men as perpetrators.
20:04 Speaker 00 And so Kurt 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 type casting, we found that people more easily blame men than women, and they more easily feel sympathy for women than men.
20:37 Chris Williamson? Is that both men and women feel that?
20:40 Speaker 00 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. 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.
21:03 Chris Williamson? They're more valuable.
21:04 Speaker 00 Exactly. And so if you have a group with very few women, you're not going to have many babies being produced compared to if you have a group with a lot of women. You really only need a couple of men to still produce many babies.
21:17 Chris Williamson? A couple of men having an absolutely fantastic time.
21:21 Speaker 00 Yeah, I'm sure they would be very delighted until an enemy group comes in and then they have to.
21:26 Chris Williamson? Having a bad time.
21:27 Speaker 00 Yep, yep. 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 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, less often world leaders. This is certainly true. But when you look at the bottom end of the distribution,
22:07 Speaker 00 men are more often homeless, more often imprisoned, more often 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.
22:32 Chris 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 is it that said, it might have been David Buss that said, uh, men are evolution's playthings. 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 procreation.
22:59 Chris Williamson? So I understand why it would be the case that we're more prepared to see men 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, that we don't have the same 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?
23:31 Speaker 00 Mm hmm. Yeah, it is problematic in a modern environment. And I mean, for both, for multiple reasons. So not only that we can't recognize men 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 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, you know, unilaterally positive to see women as like the patient.
24:03 Chris Williamson? That's very interesting. Yes.
24:06 Speaker 00 Yeah. And so it's like, it can be harmful when you want to, you know, in the voting booth, you're not going to be recognized as an agent and maybe not as a CEO. But in the context of moral harm, you're not going to be blamed to the same degree.
24:20 Chris Williamson? Did you see, speaking about the, in the voting booth thing, Christina Geranti taught me that in a political race between two women, the woman who loses is the one that has better marital outcomes long term. Like her relationship is the one that ends up being better long term.
24:41 Speaker 00 Oh, for her relationship.
24:43 Chris Williamson? Yes, yeah, for her private relationship. I just thought that was so funny. I just, everything gets folded into this. I remember seeing a tweet from you as well about Steve Stuart Williams study. Steve Stuart Williams found that people respond more favorably to scientific findings showing women outperform men versus the converse. People wrongly assumed men prefer male favoring findings may suggest gender biases in reviews slash publishing of research. What do you think's going on there?
25:11 Speaker 00 Yeah, so I think that because we tend to, you know, see women, we want, we want women to, to have beneficial, beneficial outcomes. We put them in this like, let's help the victim category. It can make them more appealing and, and easier to support compared to men. If we, if we view men as perpetrators and agents, it's easier to see what they're doing is malicious. And so if we're kind of encountering information that women are, have some positive trait, we're like, oh, good, let's help them.
25:48 Chris Williamson? I suppose as well, what would be the social signal that would give you some reflected glory of championing the underdog if you're championing the one that in terms of a cliche archetype is already the one that used to do this thing, that used to overperform?
26:04 Speaker 00 Exactly. Yeah. So you look more beneficial or you look more pro-social by championing, you know, women's success because we assume women are doing worse across the board, which is true at the top end of the distribution, not at the bottom. And so, yeah, I think that that can, I think that's interesting. It'd be fun to look at like, what moral credits do people get for, you know, helping women or promoting these things that help women versus men? We did actually conduct a study, we haven't submitted it yet, but it was, it was a politician talking about men's afflictions in the world. And we didn't say what the politician's gender was. So it was them giving a speech, talking about all the ways
26:47 Speaker 00 that men are suffering in the world. And then in the other condition, we just. Changed men to women. And so in that condition, it was the statements were no longer true. And because it was about women and women are actually in those contexts doing better. So they're like, you know, not dropping out of school to the same degree as men are. And so what we found is that people liked the politician talking about the female disadvantages, even though their statements were not true. So they liked that politician more, were more likely to vote for that politician, wanted to donate more, perceive them as more moral, even though the statements weren't true. And so
27:25 Speaker 00 it was interesting because our male participants identified correctly identified that the statements were less true, but I don't think our female participants did. And so I think their support, some of that bias that I was telling you about where our female participants tended to show more favoritism towards women across the board, which I think makes sense if we think about our female ancestors. They needed to recruit female allies. So one way to do that might be to signal, hey, I'm on team women, which probably throughout human history was pretty consequential because say your, you know, male partner was being really violent towards you, you would want a female ally that was team women because she might be more likely to recruit social support on your behalf.
28:08 Speaker 00 But if that occurred enough throughout human history that other women preferred the females that had the female bias, then that might contribute to why we see, you know, modern women today showing this pro female bias.
28:22 Chris 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. What is it that women want?
28:35 Speaker 00 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 they're, you know, have these other admirable attributes, but attractiveness seem to be one where women are like, she doesn't need to be prettier than I am, which makes sense because then she's more of a mating rival. And so, yeah, it's.
29:01 Chris Williamson? But what use, what use are these female friends? Like what, what, you've got someone who is caring and loyal and not that hot. What is it that you want them to do? What are you doing with them?
29:14 Speaker 00 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 allo care, 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 allo care. So when I look at these non-industrialized groups, what I tend to find is that the 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
29:59 Speaker 00 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. And so it's not like they're providing additional food aid. And if they're not providing allo care, 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 Hessen-Hagen have cool data showing that
30:42 Speaker 00 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 can 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
31:05 Speaker 00 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, ten female friends to spread the information, it's now distributed much more widely and people are going to 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.
31:46 Chris Williamson? But in a social, pro-social, antisocial, reputational gossip way?
31:51 Speaker 00 Uh huh, uh huh. Yeah, not physical fights, but...
31:54 Chris Williamson? I'm so glad. Every single day I'm reminded of being glad that I'm a male. Um, all right, what about opposite-sex friends? Why is it that women would want non-kin, non-partner, male compatriots?
32:12 Speaker 00 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, that 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 unconsciously, but still espousing similar preferences.
32:54 Speaker 00 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.
33:06 Chris Williamson? Especially if you're patro local, 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 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,
33:51 Chris Williamson? 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 overperception and the female underperception 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 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.
34:30 Speaker 00 And I mean, even just that 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 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, oh, we just need to adjust to these new conditions.
35:09 Chris Williamson? Do you remember when Peterson said on an interview?
35:14 Chris Williamson? 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 that's a genuinely interesting question. And it also, I've been on this thing for a little while that the current framing around 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.
35:56 Chris Williamson? I don't know what it is, resources or positions within companies or status or victimhood position, 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 men 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, we're 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 grounds to be able to do it. And it causes people
36:39 Chris Williamson? 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 from men is with other men, I know, 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 the intrasexual competition thing, in my opinion, is going to be a very important area of research to publicize, to like, really, really get out there, because it's this beautiful, calming balm antidote to kind of the cultural milieu that we've seen at the moment.
37:25 Speaker 00 I totally agree, and the argument that now we're portrayed as, you know, men and women are portrayed as antagonistic, I think is true, and I have some data with some colleagues, my colleague Carl Aquino and Simon, and so what we find is this, when you, when people encounter 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 risks of an accusation are very high, what we find is that corrodes opposite sex
38:07 Speaker 00 benevolence. So people are less willing to work with opposite sex peers, they feel less benevolence towards opposite sex peers, they have less motivation to engage in romantic and sexual relationships with them, and we even did the 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 harassment. And sexual harassment is a problem, but when we emphasize it, we
38:46 Speaker 00 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.
39:02 Chris Williamson? Who's Marina Gertsberg? Do you know her?
39:06 Speaker 00 Oh, I think I might have found one of her papers.
39:11 Chris Williamson? So this is from my newsletter a little while ago. #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 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 Me Too is associated with an increased cost of collaboration
39:56 Chris Williamson? that disadvantaged the career opportunities of women. Me Too was important to raise awareness, but the intent was not to impose costs on women's careers.
40:06 Speaker 00 Totally, yeah. I think 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 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 want to hold one-on-one meetings with women. And so it's a similar-
40:34 Chris Williamson? That's in that strange that that's that's men, right? That's male mentors that you meant there, yeah, but-
40:39 Speaker 00 So it was both ways, both the-
40:41 Chris Williamson? Yeah, but the point being that we're about to get on to it. Women also don't like attractive women. If men are fearful now, in a post Me Too 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.
41:06 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's not great. It's so it's creating the very thing we'd like to prevent, you know, that this hyper focus on everything that could go wrong is creating less mentorship for women. If we want to 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's tough because they do want attention. But it's worth considering how our attention has also created problems.
41:47 Chris 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 overegging, overemphasizing any issue that as yet hasn't been fixed is- 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 significance.
42:32 Chris Williamson? 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?
43:02 Speaker 00 Yeah, so it was 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.
43:43 Speaker 00 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. Again, similar to like what Joyce Benenson is finding with the athletes,
44:26 Speaker 00 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 or 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,
45:11 Speaker 00 one defection or maybe one or two defections, and then it derails the cooperation.
45:16 Chris Williamson? You mentioned about how same-sex friendships for women are kind of troopers within this reputational army, almost. Gossip is kind of the bullets that get fired, or it's the weapon of choice, I suppose. What's the what's the use of gossip?
45:35 Speaker 00 So gossip, 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 Anne 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 Anne Campbell has argued
46:16 Speaker 00 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. 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,
46:58 Speaker 00 or, 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 can 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.
47:19 Chris Williamson? It seems like women's wellbeing is a lot more on a knife edge than men's is, both reputationally and physically as well. I know that they've got a lower threshold for pain, they've got a lower threshold for infection and other sorts of things, like just generally physically are more wired to be vulnerable and emotionally presumably the same as well.
47:43 Speaker 00 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 Anne 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 their one way to stay alive is to be very sensitive to threats, both physical and social. So women are more responsive to cues in their bodies, 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
48:25 Speaker 00 to any threat that could harm your wellbeing. Um, but yes, as you're saying, you know, the social vulnerability, that is particularly strong because, so what, 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.
49:05 Chris Williamson? Look at all of this sex that I'm not having.
49:08 Speaker 00 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 jeopardize.
49:53 Chris Williamson? So steering clear of accusations of sexual indiscretion in the past is a big driver of all of the different social setups that women have got that we've gone through so far.
50:09 Speaker 00 Yeah, it's a huge contributor because that is kind of, that's like the Achilles heel 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, that was probably, 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 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. And I've also found that sexual information tends to pretty strongly harm
50:53 Speaker 00 women's reputation and their desirability as friends, romantic partners. So other women tend to dislike promiscuous women. Partially, 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 going to harm your desirability to other women, but also to men, at least as a long-term partner, if men are prioritizing sexual chastity in their long-term mating decisions.
51:29 Chris 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?
51:40 Speaker 00 No, that's interesting.
51:42 Chris Williamson? Wouldn't that be cool?
51:44 Speaker 00 Mm-hmm.
51:44 Chris Williamson? If you were in an environment where there was tons of men and women started to become more open about their sexual past?
51:51 Speaker 00 Yeah. I mean, there are, so yeah, Dave Schmidt has data that women become more unrestricted in their sexuality when they are in...
52:02 Speaker 00 Actually more female biased.
52:04 Chris Williamson? Correct, yeah, they need to play by the rules of the men.
52:06 Speaker 00 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 going to do that, you know, and I'm going to be so pure. So then at least I get selected for the long term.
52:41 Chris Williamson? Oh, very interesting. 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 Hall kind of paradox or whatever it's called, where positioning a woman in one particular bucket as easy or whatever. And I, 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. It's
53:25 Chris Williamson? 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 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 going to get in the relationship with for 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.
53:55 Chris Williamson? Double pronged assault, but what you would actually want to have as a woman is to show sexual chastity publicly, no matter what is happening.
54:06 Chris Williamson? Because there is no real advantage to showing that you are easy. And then privately, that's when the different strategy would come through.
54:14 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah, I like your gameplay because it is challenging to navigate because it's like, okay, well, there's so much competition and they've done studies, at least in like these female skewed environments and universities, women feel pressured to have sex sooner. And so there is this feeling of like, well, okay, if everybody else is doing it, you know, who's going to be willing to wait for those four dates or however long you would normally want to wait? And so women do feel pressured to have sex sooner than they would otherwise. But then you also get this pattern of this like purity concern. So maybe one strategy would be I'm going to signal that I'm, you know, so high mate value that I'm not going to have sex.
54:58 Speaker 00 But I think that different women are going to have different abilities to leverage that.
55:04 Chris Williamson? Based on their mate value.
55:07 Speaker 00 Yeah, so you probably would find that that would be correlated with which strategy they're going to use. If you can afford to wait longer, you should. But of course, that's not easy, you know, that's not going to be true for everyone.
55:20 Chris Williamson? Yeah, so it's not just going to be your mate value, it's going to be your mate value in relation to the man that you are with. So you could imagine a situation in a high female skewed sex ratio ecology, where a high mate value woman and a moderate mate value man, the woman may play still by her own sort of slightly more chastity rules in order to get more investment from the man in advance of, and then also kind of bypass that Madonna, Madonna whore complex thing. 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
56:03 Chris Williamson? in an attempt to raise the supposed price of sex. Have you done much research about slut shaming?
56:10 Speaker 00 So, yeah, so I've I've 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 provocatively dressed, or if she flirts with their romantic partner. So it's more and there 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
56:54 Speaker 00 female promiscuity when they have more male sons. So I believe this is Candace Blake's work where it was kind of like support for female veiling.
57:06 Chris Williamson? I've got her on the show, I've got her on the show next week, so I'll ask her about this.
57:09 Speaker 00 Oh, her stuff is the best.
57:10 Chris Williamson? Yeah.
57:11 Speaker 00 Yeah, and so, yeah, that women condemn, they they more strongly supported restrictions on female promiscuity when they had more sons. So basically, when they had more interest in their sons' paternity certainty. And so I think that is one ecological factor is like, when does paternity certainty matter? And that's when you're going to see more clamping down on female promiscuity. So they've done some work finding that when women in the environment depend more on men's provisioning, that's when you see more strong, more intense condemnation of women's sexual promiscuity.
57:52 Speaker 00 And so you 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 going to see fewer and fewer restrictions on women's sexuality.
58:05 Chris 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 socially in terms of how you grandstand and 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.
58:50 Speaker 00 Mm hmm, mm hmm.
58:52 Chris Williamson? Fuck, that's cool.
58:53 Speaker 00 Yeah, and it makes sense that like, society 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 going to see in those contexts that men should value women's chastity because then they can be more certain, I am provisioning resources to my genetic offspring. 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 men's being confident and therefore investing these resources.
59:32 Chris Williamson? That is cool. Okay, so other than sex, what else do women gossip about?
59:37 Speaker 00 They tend to derogate, well, so they share information about women's, 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. 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
1:00:19 Speaker 00 comment about how I've gained weight and that like really hurt my feelings.
1:00:25 Speaker 00 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 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. Then you don't recognize me as a gossiper. And I've shared that same information, that Mary's probably a bit cruel.
1:00:47 Speaker 00 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. But they don't recognize it if it's your personal story.
1:01:30 Speaker 00 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 reputation. So what we found is these types of statements, like, Mary was mean to Susan, or made this mean comment about her. People disliked the female perpetrators more than they disliked the male perpetrators. So if a guy's 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.
1:02:08 Chris Williamson? What's the bless her heart effect?
1:02:12 Speaker 00 Oh, this is kind of another version of that where I looked at kind of what are the indirect ways that women spread information? 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
1:02:57 Speaker 00 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.
1:03:25 Chris Williamson? You've, you've taken the mask off around this flagrant status removal.
1:03:29 Speaker 00 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 rival's reputations without incurring social penalties.
1:03:59 Chris Williamson? Who are the most common victims, or who are the, who, which sorts of women are the most common targets of gossip?
1:04:08 Speaker 00 So they tend to be women who are attractive.
1:04:15 Speaker 00 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.
1:04:46 Chris Williamson? Hmm, 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, 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. I could imagine a world in which it would be better to be 90th percentile good looking, because at least there would be a small number of women above and below you that you would
1:05:31 Chris Williamson? be able, you said, most women want to have friends that are kind of around about their attractiveness level. At least you would be able to have a coalition of friends like that. Whereas if you're 99 out of 100, who are you going to be friends with?
1:05:44 Speaker 00 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.
1:05:53 Chris Williamson? Self derogation.
1:05:54 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:05:55 Chris Williamson? Overly nice.
1:05:57 Speaker 00 Yeah, overly nice, not trying to steal anyone else's mates, but I mean, people have eyes, so I don't know how far that would, that would go.
1:06:06 Chris Williamson? 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? 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. And he's, I think he's maybe like five, six, five, seven, 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.
1:06:39 Chris Williamson? Being seen as less of a potential threat, especially for men physically, right? Look at what he's said. It's not about his attraction. He didn't change his attraction. He changed his threat level, his formidability. And yeah, if I was three inches taller, I wouldn't be able to say half of the shit that I do.
1:06:55 Speaker 00 Yeah, no, that's interesting. I think I think height is probably one of the domains. It'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, 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.
1:07:35 Chris Williamson? How are you, Mary? You're looking particularly full today. You must have had a lot of gluten last night.
1:07:40 Speaker 00 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 so harsh to each other. It's just like night, it feels like night and day when you observe like within sex interactions.
1:07:59 Chris Williamson? What was that study that you did about how female competition changes approaches to diet and self-image?
1:08:06 Speaker 00 Oh, yeah. So I've done a few studies related to that. So one study was looking within married couples. We found that when women were the more, excuse me, the less attractive partner and their husbands were really attractive, they tended to feel worse about themselves and feel more motivated to diet 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.
1:08:44 Chris Williamson? You mean if, if the men were of lower mate value?
1:08:47 Speaker 00 Or at least we looked at attractiveness.
1:08:49 Chris Williamson? Right, okay.
1:08:50 Speaker 00 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 the 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 mate ships. But women also use their appearance to attract mate ships 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 perceive there to be more women in the environment,
1:09:33 Speaker 00 they perceive 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.
1:10:03 Chris Williamson? Yeah, you're ninety-nine out of a hundred, but only nine-hundred-and-ninety out of a thousand.
1:10:08 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah. So, 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. 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-
1:10:47 Chris Williamson? Desperately dieting because there's loads of hot women around them.
1:10:50 Speaker 00 Yeah, and I think it's it is worth noting that there's, you know, we are designed to make relative comparisons. So throughout human history, we were in relatively small groups, like fifty to two hundred. 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,
1:11:32 Speaker 00 even though in really large populations, we probably shouldn't be doing that as much.
1:11:37 Chris Williamson? Almost impossible to be one of the most attractive people.
1:11:40 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:11:41 Chris Williamson? And then if you, if, sorry, 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.
1:11:54 Speaker 00 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 groups. So if we're interpreting them as peers, they might be, you know, particularly problematic.
1:12:33 Chris Williamson? Didn't Candace do something about sexy selfies as well in areas of particularly high female uh sex ratio split?
1:12:41 Speaker 00 So I believe what she found with the sexy selfies was that they were more prevalent in contexts where there was greater income inequality.
1:12:49 Chris Williamson? Oh shit, yes, it was. You're right. It was. Yes. Why, why, why is that the case?
1:12:57 Speaker 00 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 not going to 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.
1:13:21 Chris 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 ever decreasing group of high performing men? Do you think that that is motivating an increasingly sexualized culture for women to step into?
1:13:45 Speaker 00 Yeah, it's a good question. 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 they going to mate with? There's going to 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 going to 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.
1:14:30 Chris Williamson? You go full sigma female mode.
1:14:34 Speaker 00 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.
1:14:42 Chris Williamson? I've got a couple of friends that are the same, both of them are female millionaires, yeah.
1:14:46 Speaker 00 Yeah, and 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.
1:14:59 Chris Williamson? It's more useful than. Going like that with a test tube, isn't it? Yeah, so I wonder whether a genuine polarized counterculture to a hyper-sexualized world in which women are being more sexually promiscuous, at least online, doing more sexy selfies, etc. I would have said that the opposite of that would have been like a trad culture. It would have been conservatism. What I think the boss bitch lean-in lifestyle that you're talking about 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.
1:15:40 Chris Williamson? I think that it is high-achieving women outright realizing, shit, I have managed to rise to the top of my own dominance hierarchy or competence hierarchy. I'm looking across and above and there's no one there. I'm not going to let go of the things that I've got. I can't go back, so I'm just going to go on my own. I think that 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.
1:16:15 Speaker 00 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-chase route, one's going the sexually uninhibited, you know, men are, you know, disposable, or rejecting men.
1:16:36 Chris Williamson? Altogether, those are the three main strategies. I think that I genuinely think that. Look, Tanya, you are absolutely fantastic. I very, very much appreciate your time today. Where should people go? What are you doing next? When are you going to write a book? Rob Henderson wants to know when you're going to write a book.
1:16:51 Speaker 00 I would love to. I think it'd be so much fun. I do want to write a new, I want to write a new theory paper about women's strategy to evoke care. Like if you even look at women's, like their faces, they're, they're more Neotanist, like women tend to have like, like larger eyes, like they're more, their body structure is literally more like children. 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 survive throughout human history.
1:17:26 Chris Williamson? There was a Rutger Bregman wrote a book called Humankind. And in that he talked about the pupification of humans. And that was the same thing, that evoking of some sort of sense of, of care.
1:17:40 Speaker 00 I love that, the pupification.
1:17:42 Chris Williamson? Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's not the, not the slickest word in the world. 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?
1:17:52 Speaker 00 Uh, you can find some of my work on ResearchGate and then I'm on Twitter as Tanya Arlene. But yeah, not super active on it because I think it might be bad for mental health. So I'm trying to be productive instead.
1:18:07 Chris Williamson? I like it. Tanya, I appreciate the hell out of you. Thank you so much.
1:18:10 Speaker 00 Thank you. This is fun.
1:18:12 Speaker 02 Mr. President, my company formed me of the explosion on our rear on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. Do y'all keep the blame on me? Tom Cruise is.
1:18:23 Speaker 03 Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.
1:18:29 Speaker 04 What would happen if I stopped going? You're stalled, you're freezing there. That's what?
1:18:33 Speaker 03 With great power comes great deniability.
1:18:36 Speaker 04 I'm not the first then.
1:18:38 Speaker 03 Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a middle without parent.
Previous The Mindset Secrets Of Elite Performers - Peter Diamandis Next Discovering The Wonders Of Science - Neil deGrasse Tyson Page updated October 7, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
