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March 7 - March 25, 2021
The naturalistic fallacy confuses a scientific description of human behavior with a moral prescription for that behavior.
There are no cultures in which men are not sexually jealous. In every supposedly nonjealous culture previously thought to contain no barriers to sexual conduct beyond the incest taboo, evidence for sexual jealousy has now been found.
but if society is ever going to grapple successfully with the serious problem of spousal homicide, it must confront the psychological mechanisms that give rise to it, especially the circumstances that activate violent adaptations and make them especially dangerous.
In one study, 98 men and 102 women watched a ten-minute videotape of a conversation between a male professor and a female student.4 The student visits the professor’s office to ask for a deadline extension for a term paper. The actors in the film are a female drama student and a male drama professor. Neither actor acts flirtatious or provocative, although both have been instructed to behave in a friendly manner. Participants witnessed the tape and then rated the likely intentions of the woman using 7-point scales. Women watching the interaction were more likely to say that the student was
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“monogamy is the Western custom of one wife and hardly any mistresses.”
Some people complain about these differences, or deny that they exist despite the scientific evidence, or wish that they would cease to exist. But wishes and denials will not make psychological gender differences disappear, any more than they will make men’s beard growth or women’s breast development disappear. Harmony between men and women will be approached only when these denials are swept away and we squarely confront the differing desires and strategies of each.
