A woman will indeed experience fight-or-flight if faced by a grizzly bear, just as a man will; but Taylor thinks that a woman’s natural reaction to threat, at least within the social situations that are today our normal environment, is what she calls the “tend-and-befriend” reaction, an urge to affiliation. She reasons that if you have children to care for, tend-and-befriend makes more sense than launching into a fist fight or running away.
