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Reputations often go before us and colour how others see us – and, of course, allow us to engineer through gossip how other people see someone of whom we disapprove. Such behaviour can be both a warning to others and a form of social punishment. Social criticism, either directly to the individual concerned or to other members of the community, is one of the main ways we do this.
men tend to resort to physical forms of punishment, whereas women tend to rely more on psychological punishment
More masculine faces were generally seen as being less trustworthy.
Kinship probably remains the single best cue for trustworthiness because it is reinforced by the family community, especially in traditional small-scale societies.
In fact, when the chips are down and everyone else has deserted you, close family are the one group of people that will stand by you.
childhood risk factors predicting convictions for violent behaviour later in life were: high risk-taking, lower than average IQ (especially verbal IQ), a broken family background, harsh parental discipline, hyperactivity (such as ADHD), and large family size.
What we learn from this is that people will resort to violence if they can get away with it when it provides them with benefits. Some may be predisposed to behaving in this way, others probably discover the effectiveness of such behaviour early in life and once they have done so continue to exploit it. We are all familiar with such individuals, the much-to-be-feared thugs and bullies. Though they rarely make good friends and we can never trust them, we often have to learn to live with them.
This demandingness by women advertisers harks back to some very basic biology. The decision at some very early stage in the evolution of placental mammals for one sex to take on the entire burden of gestation and lactation (the two defining features of this animal family) means that males can only ever play a very limited, indirect role in this process.
female mammals will always be more choosy than males. This seems to be as true of humans as of any other species.
women ask for in prospective mates is cues of wealth and status (indexed by good jobs, preferably in the professions, or indicators of a solid bank balance), cues of commitment (‘loving’, ‘romantic’, ‘tolerant’, ‘monogamous’) and cultural interests (music, dancing, reading novels, travel, hobbies, and political and religious views)
men consistently specify, aside from the prospective partner’s age (always young), is cues of physical attractiveness, and women invariably mentioned these in their ads (‘petite’, ‘attractive’, ‘vivacious’, ‘pretty’, ‘wearing well’).
In traditional societies the world over, women who have access to resources have higher offspring-survival rates and do better in the reproductive stakes than women who don’t.
Because wealth is so important for the business of reproduction, men try to accumulate it so that they can use it as an advertising bid in mate choice.
Age is probably the single most important proxy for physical attractiveness in women, and men tended to seek women consistently in the same age range (mid-twenties), whereas women tended to seek males who were three to five years older than they were. Age and physical attractiveness are very straightforward cues of fertility in women; in contrast, men’s fertility is unrelated to their age, but their wealth does increase steadily with age
Risk-taking and sportiness are other cues to which women seem to pay more than just casual attention.
The bottom line here is that women make much more complex decisions about a partner than men do.
There was, however, one factor on which both sexes seemed to agree, and that was the importance of commitment.
In a study that looked at people who had been in a romantic relationship for at least a year, Patrick and Charlotte Markey found that similarity in personality was the best predictor of how satisfied they were with their existing relationship. The highest levels of relationship satisfaction occurred when both partners were similar in their degree of warmth.
However, there was a suggestion that complementarity in dominance (one partner dominant and the other subordinate) also contributed to relationship satisfaction,
relationship satisfaction (measured in terms of willingness to forgive, security of attachment, accommodation, healthy and committed styles of loving, smoothness of daily interactions, absence of conflict and absence of feeling rejected) was best predicted by having similarly high levels of self-control (in other words, inhibition).
our large-scale genetic study confirmed that oxytocin is indeed involved: the genes for the oxytocin receptors correlated strongly with indices of romantic relationship quality,
endorphins give you long-term bonding stability and dopamine creates that sense of excitement provided by the relationship,
Suffice it to say that falling in love, or just becoming besotted with anyone or anything (including your pet dog), seems to switch off the rational capacities of the brain that would normally allow us to evaluate other people and situations more critically and sceptically.
In a word, your rational thinking centres are being deliberately switched off so that you don’t ask too many questions and give up too early.
Being unrealistic about your partner’s shortcomings is not, it seems, a recipe for disaster in a relationship, but a recipe for success.
Somebody has to be willing to risk rejection by declaring their interest, otherwise nothing will ever get started.
Friendships have to be created, and that means someone has to take the plunge and make an opening bid to establish interest. You only know that I am interested in a friendship or a romantic relationship with you because I somehow make it obvious by turning up on your doorstep over and over and over again.
A more surprising index, however, is the relative lengths of the index (second) and ring (fourth) fingers, otherwise known as the 2D4D (D for digit) ratio.
chimpanzees have a ratio that is significantly less than one (index finger much shorter than ring finger).
women tend to have ratios that approximate equality, whereas men tend to have ratios that are less than one (index finger shorter than ring finger).
Romantic relationships are founded on the need for intensely intimate relationships in which sex provides both part of the glue (it triggers the release of oxytocins, endorphins and dopamine in large quantities) and part of the biological function (reproduction).
In a survey of American adults, Heidi Reeder found that 65 per cent of young men’s friends and 80 per cent of young women’s friends were same-sex. In a study of friendships in an American housing project for the elderly, 73 per cent of friends were same-sex.
Same-sex friends scored higher than cross-sex friends on acceptance, effort, communication, common interests and affection. Ominously, cross-sex friendships scored higher on sexual attraction
It’s almost as though sex is a consequence of friendship for women, but a cause of friendship for men.
women treated their same-sex best friend as though they were a sibling, whereas men treated their same-sex best friend as though they were a cousin.
In the face of social stress, males preferred to avoid sympathy and comfort from others, responding with behaviours that promote distancing in order to be left alone; females, in contrast, were more likely to respond with behaviours such as crying that promote sympathy and comforting, and hence approach.
women were more likely to give descriptions emphasising intimate relationships, while men focused on collective aspects of interdependence (e.g. group membership).
women’s friends are focused and intimate (individual relationships are more important than membership of the group), while men’s friendships are casual and involve what is almost an anonymous group (membership of the group is more important than the individual members themselves).
women were often just as aggressive as men, but their aggression was triggered by different circumstances and typically expressed in different ways.
women’s social skills are markedly better than men’s.
there is considerable experimental evidence to suggest that women are much more accurate than men in correctly identifying the emotion being expressed in a face.
In other words, women really can multitask, whereas men do better if they focus on one thing at a time.
In women, the empathy scale interacted rather strongly with the impulsivity scale, suggesting that women considered the implications of their romantic relationships for their wider social networks, allowing them to integrate their love lives with the interests of family and friends in a more effective way than men did.
women were much more generous than men. And they put much more effort into thinking about suitable presents for each person, and spent more time choosing, than men.
For men, best friendships were best predicted by the duration of the friendship, having a shared history, the amount of mutual support exchanged, the number of shared activities and the degree of similarity in financial status (presumably important for sharing rounds at the pub or other social events), outgoingness, dependability and number of social connections.
males had higher tolerances for the stresses and strains that occur within relationships.
Women’s conversations have a distinctively cooperative character, with frequent use of ‘back-channel’ comments (‘Yes!’, ‘Uh-huh!’, ‘You’re so right!’)
In contrast, men’s conversations are more competitive, even combative, in tenor: their conversations have a more bantering style, back-channel is almost unknown, and speech overlaps are considered plain rude.
Half the population won’t be surprised to learn that the women typically adjusted their conversational style to suit the man’s.
One final example is the striking sex difference in the form of speech known as ‘motherese’. This is the very characteristic speech style that women use naturally when talking to babies. It has a high-pitched, very sing-song, melodious quality with exaggerated pitch contours, and is very repetitive. Babies find it calming. A study by Marilee Monnot showed that babies whose mothers spent more time speaking in this way gained weight faster and passed key developmental stages earlier.
