MY ROOMMATE DESTROYED THIS BOOK, SO I'M GOING TO CHECK IT OUT THIS WEEK AND USE IT TO EDIT THE WRITING BELOW. I HAVEN'T INCLUDED TWEETS THAT CORRESPOND WITH THE PASSAGES IN THIS FIRST VERSION. I'LL DO SO LATER!
Before trying to answer the question of which sex is more sociable, it is worth asking another one. Why should women and men differ in their social behaviors, or in any other way? This is a critical question, and one that evolutionary biologists ask. It is important because it requires thinking about what benefits and costs come with specific social behaviors. It is also important because it requires thinking about whether one sex benefits more from a specific behavior in preventing the ultimate cost: dying too early to reproduce successfully.
What I suggest here is that throughout most of human history, men and women have specialized in different behaviors necessary to ensure the survival of their children to adulthood. Thus, women who have genes that result in their dying before they have successfully raised their children will not pass on these genes. Over time, behaviors allowing women to survive long enough to reproduce and raise adult children will be preferentially represented in women's genomes. Behaviors, such as paying close attention to the state of one's body, avoiding conflicts, finding a reliable mate while excluding competitors, and investing a lot in children likely have been specifically useful in keeping women alive. The same process will have happened with men and the behaviors critical to their survival. Behaviors that likely have been particularly useful in keeping men alive include physical fighting, selecting friends who are strong and skilled, and competing in groups. These patterns of sex differences appear across diverse cultures and are found even in young children. It is these behaviors that I will focus on here.
How are genes for these specific behaviors passed from human parents to children? Obviously, and of particular interest to males, sexual intercourse is required. Most postpubertal males happily assume the initial responsibility for ensuring that their genes are transmitted. Females like to have sex too, but not as freely, frequently, or with as many partners as males do.
Sexual intercourse without ensuring care of the resulting baby accomplishes nothing however in terms of passing on genes. A dead baby doesn't help one's genes survive into the next generation. Of particular interest to women, therefore, is that sex can lead to nine months of gestation, followed generally by many years of primary responsibility for feeding and caring for children, care that sometimes lasts a lifetime. Most postpubertal females, with strong encouragement from their parents, therefore wisely exercise caution before they have sex and get stuck feeding and caring for the baby that emerges from their body. Males like to take care of babies and children too, of course, but not as freely, frequently, or intensely as females do.
Evolutionary biologists examining evidence from hundreds of mammalian species created parental investment theory to explain these sex differences in behavior. In almost all mammalian species, males invest more in competing for females and initiating sex, whereas females spend more time, energy, and resources in making sure the resulting baby stays alive. In most mammalian species, including humans, children are cared for much more by females than by males.
Mammalian males focus on finding a fertile female, then figuring out how to have sex with her. A typical male mammal's strategy involves attempting to have sex whenever and with whomever he can, potentially producing more and more offspring, whose survival will depend entirely on the females he impregnates. In between matings, he must fight off other males and attract females, which can entail great risk and perhaps a little charm. Even if a male dies while fighting off other males, provided he has impregnated a few responsible females, he will have successfully transmitted his genes.
Female mammals, on the other hand, must be more careful than males, since they will bear the burden of gestating, breastfeeding, and raising any babies produced after sex. In particular, they must be selective about their mating partners and their environments. They must protect themselves. In most species, and even in humans until very recently, if a mother died, then her baby or young child died too. Thus, a mother absolutely must not die. Should she die, then she is killing not only herself but also all of her dependent children. Even in modern societies, a mother who dies leaves a huge psychological mark on the children she leaves, particularly those who have not yet reached puberty.
A mother's first priority, then, is to stay alive long enough to care for her children. Like other female mammals, human mothers must avoid risks and take care of themselves as much as possible. She must be healthy, and stay healthy, for a long time.
In some ways, however, humans are not just like any other mammalian species. Human babies and children require more time, energy, and resources to raise than any other mammalian offspring. Human babies arrive unusually helpless at birth and remain children for a far longer time than in any other species. It is only when a child is capable of having his or her own children that the mission of gene transmission has been successfully accomplished.
A human mother therefore confronts a huge task. Not only must she scrupulously take care of herself, she must do so while gestating, then breastfeeding, procuring food for, protecting, and educating each one of her children. This will help ensure that all her children can live to reproduce themselves. For human mothers, taking care of children requires a long time period, lots of near misses, and often some tragedies. UNICEF estimates that close to 9 million children under 5 years of age still die annually in the world today. Millions of others live but struggle to grow up, some with serious disabilities that require lifelong care.
Human infants are so vulnerable for so long that mothers alone are not sufficient. They need help. Who is most likely to help a mother? Those who share genes with her children. This means that maintaining ties to her own mother and other members of the older generation as well as bonding with a man are invaluable to helping a human mother keep her children alive. In very few mammalian species does a nonhuman mother receive assistance with child care. For human mothers, however, assistance makes a huge difference to the survival and success of their children.
A human mother therefore has to do some things very differently than most female mammals. She must, if she can, maintain strong ties to her husband and to her mother or her husband's mother. Hunter-gatherer communities, which are considered the best living example of the type of environment in which humans evolved around 200,000 years ago, illustrate what happens. In these small communities, a mother depends strongly on others for help in raising her children. She marries the father of a new child. She raises her children with the help of her husband as long as he remains loyal to her. She lives with her own mother or her husband's mother, and any other relatives who happen to be in the community at that time. Although divorce and moving to a new community happen all the time, a mother depends heavily on her current husband and the grandmothers of her children to help her.
A woman who devotes a lot of her time to thinking about who can best assist her in bringing up her children benefits enormously. The consequences of this choice could not be greater for her life and the lives of her children. Should her assistants slack off or disappear, she is stuck holding the baby and caring for the rest of her children too. Relying on her own mother or choosing a good mate to start with is not enough, however, given the long time it takes to bring children to reproductive age. A woman must continuously keep tabs on others, for example, defending her mate from any other woman who might contemplate stealing him. Thus, whereas females of many species compete over food and territory and resources, human females must compete over mates too. Human fathers often invest more than most other mammalian males in caring for their children, but they are a variable lot. Around the world, fathers usually provide some resources or food or protection to the mother of their children, especially if they care about her. In almost every society, however, some fathers have more than one wife at a time; some fathers change partners frequently; and some fathers have lots of sexual partners simultaneously. At the extreme, some fathers vanish completely. Even in the most modern societies, most divorced fathers eventually lose contact with their children after a few years. Further, it is not easy for a modern woman to find a replacement. Men aren't so keen on caring for another man's child. This makes it critical that a woman select her mate carefully - and keep an eye on him afterward to make sure he pays attention to her.
Other female competitors must be kept away. An unrelated woman, kind and reassuring and similar as she may be, nonetheless is a competitor. A mother must weigh the benefit of having a close relationship with an unrelated woman who has a lot in common with her against the cost that this other woman might steal her food or run off with her husband. As much as mother's might wish for company, to share their lives with someone who experiences the same joys and heartbreaks, this requires a complicated calculation.
Because life is so difficult for a human mother, she must carefully select not only her mate and her friends but in many societies also her children. Many mothers around the world kill their babies when they cannot take care of them, especially when caring for a baby would make them unable to take care of their own children. Mothers who are not healthy themselves, who have many other children, who have little assistance from others, and who have few resources must figure out how to protect themselves and their children. Sometimes, this leads to killing, abusing or neglecting a child. This does not mean that mothers haven't tried everything else first. Compared with other species, human mothers have a lot to think about when it comes to their relationships, and they make tough choices to change them when they have to.
Meanwhile, what is a man up to? Unlike the basic tenets of parental investment theory, generally human males are not as free as most other males to devote time to having sex with fertile females, while totally ignoring the well-being of their children. In many hunter-gatherer societies men often help with child care. They never do as much as mothers do, though, especially when children are most in need. They are not bound to children the way mothers are. Biologists' parental investment theory still applies: Compared with their wives, husbands spend a lot more time thinking about sex, though less so than before they had children.
What makes men unique compared with other species is that they like to fight and compete as a group. No example demonstrates this better than war. Unlike most other species, men band together in solidarity to risk their lives to defeat another group. For many thousands of years, human males have engaged in intergroup warfare. Archaeologists provide powerful evidence from every part of the globe: mass graves filled with piles of skulls, and bones pierced with arrowheads or other projectiles; shields and body armor, gates, mud-brick walls, and eventually fortresses constructed high on mountaintops with narrow slits for windows; rooms filled with every type of weapon, made from stone, bronze, and iron; vehicles designed to carry weapons, and ancient roadways constructed to carry the vehicles carrying the weapons; cave paintings depicting battles. From simple hunter-gather societies, horticultural and agricultural societies, complex societies headed by big men to modern states, war has been found in abundance. Thousands of years ago, weapons and and their transportation became a major focus of men's lives, and this continues to be the case. While the percentage of men dying in conflicts has decreased over recorded history, a lot of time, energy, and resources remain devoted to intergroup conflicts, even in the most modern of societies. As a result, human males stand out with respect to how much time, energy, and resources they invest in one another. They share their interest in enemies and weapons. They compete over everything. Later in life, they continue to enjoy their competitions.
Yet compared with other species, human males are far less aggressive. They also relish one another's competitive company. With remarkable flexibility, human males who compete for sexual partners and status turn around and cooperate in battle with those same individuals when an enemy appears. A man protects his community with the help of his fellow man. Throughout human history, unrelated men have risked their individual lives to fight off other groups of men. Together, the men ensured that their genes triumphed over the enemy's genes.
Why would a man do this? If a man wanted to stay alive, his inclinations - and genes - should keep him away from war. What would possibly push him to risk his life for his immediate competitors? The answer is that otherwise he, and all the members of his community, would die. If too many men decided not to fight, they would all end up killed by other groups. Men in communities whose genes programmed them to fight cooperatively would likely triumph over uncooperative men in other communities. They might also gain the uncooperative men's territory, wives, and children and ultimately eliminate the other men's uncooperative genetic material. Meanwhile, the victors would preserve their own territory, wives, children, and their cooperative genes, even if a few men from the victorious coalition died in the process (sometimes up to 25% of the male community members in ancient days). In fact, mathematical modeling based on ancient warfare supports the contention that enough men perished in battles to tilt the advantage toward the evolution of cooperative men who occasionally sacrificed themselves for the other men and their community in warfare.
Interestingly, although men are relatively unique in engaging in warfare, they are not the only species that does so. Of the two species currently alive that share the most genetic material with humans, one of them, chimpanzees, is the only other living primate species that engages in what looks like warfare. As in many other mammalian species, chimpanzee males fight viciously for high rank. The highest-ranked alpha male then obtains the most mating opportunities. What makes chimpanzee males' fights for status so intriguing is that after a vicious fight, chimpanzee males turn around and reconcile their conflicts, settle their grievances, and join together in a coalition. These coalitions then proceed to engage in carefully orchestrated defensive and offensive operations against neighboring communities.
Human males behave in a similar fashion. Men of course do not cooperate only in times of war. They have created for themselves a host of institutions, including governments, businesses, and religions, through which they also cooperate and sometimes defeat other institutions.
What this suggests is that for thousands of years, human females and males have faced different sorts of major problems and found different types of solutions. Women have taken primary responsibility for the long-term survival of vulnerable children. This happens early, and around the world. In Uganda, I frequently saw preschool-age girls carrying their baby brothers and sisters. They paid close attention. They kept their little siblings alive while they were in charge. Sometimes a young boy did the same, but not often.
In contrast, around the world, men have taken primary responsibility for fighting wars. This starts early too. In Uganda, 28,500 boys from 7 to 18 years of age helped the men of their side fight the civil war started by Idi Amin, which led to 300,000 deaths initially and another 100,000 not long after. The Lord's Resistance Army continues to fight in Uganda. Very few women join.
The different problems that males and females face require different strategies to solve. It makes sense to suppose that over thousands of years, genes have guided men and women to behave in ways that have helped them to cope with their individual problems. These genes programmed each sex to specialize in surviving different forms of death. What I am specifically suggesting in this book is that human males are programmed to develop traits that are associated with becoming a warrior, and that human females are programmed to develop characteristics that are related to becoming a worrier.
Warriors and Worriers
Psychologist Carolyn Zahn-Waxler was the first to describe boys who suffer from emotional or behavioral problems as warriors, and girls with problems as worriers. This does not imply that girls are not mean or aggressive or that boys never worry. What it means literally is that when boys and girls in Western societies develop serious emotional and behavioral problems, boys are more likely than girls to strike out violently while girls feel a lot more anxious and depressed and withdraw more from others. These differences in the sexes become even more pronounced after puberty, just when each sex becomes able to reproduce. What I will try to demonstrate here is that emotional and behavioral problems merely make basic differences between boys and girls more noticeable. Underneath, even boys and men without obvious problems have warrior attributes. Underneath, girls and women worry continually about their own and their family members' health.
These patterns of warriors and worriers fit what I and a number of other researchers have found through our observations, interviews, and experiments around the world. To be clear, I am not claiming that all boys or men display all the behaviors that are necessary to become a successful warrior, only that these behaviors are much more frequent in males of all ages. Even more critically, having warrior traits does not require killing anyone, unless this becomes necessary. Many of the traits that accompany interest in war, such as enjoyment of fighting, pleasure in competition, preference for allies who are strong and competent, and undying loyalty to one's own group, are useful in government, business, and other peacetime institutions. In contrast to boys and men, girls and women for the most part exhibit little interest in these behaviors. This does not prevent some women from being soldiers or showing the traits associated with being a successful warrior. However, not nearly as many women as men become warriors, and a warrior woman learns to fight the enemy differently than a man does.
Likewise, a few girls or women display all the behaviors that are necessary to become a successful worrier. Further, having worrier traits is useful in contexts other than child rearing. The traits that accompany caring for vulnerable individuals over the long haul, including staying healthy and avoiding risks, maintaining relationships with families and a mate, getting rid of interfering competitors, and investing in close kin and others who can help a mother raise her children, can be used in other helping professions as well. Boys and men for the most part exhibit less interest in perpetual worrying about themselves and other individuals; many find it a waste of time. Some men do become primary caregivers to children and exhibit the traits associated with being a successful worrier. However, not nearly as many fathers as mothers care for children, especially when the children are really vulnerable. Further, a worrier father likely learns to care for children differently than a mother does.
Defending against an enemy attack and caring for a vulnerable child for years require different skills. When there are no wars or babies, men and women behave much more similarly to each other. Nevertheless, even without wars or babies, men and women must be genetically prepared in case either comes along. Thus, these two sex-typed patterns should produce different kinds of fears, interests, choices of social partners, organization of relationships, preferences for environments, and ultimately different decisions geared to prevent early death, even in young children, across diverse cultures.
We are not conscious of being warriors or worriers. Rather, being a warrior or a worrier is like having a special program continually running in the background of one's mind. It is through my observations of the behaviors of boys and girls over several decades that I have concluded that these different programs exist. I will start first by looking at the development of boys because that is where I began my research career.
The Survival of the Sexes: Warriors and Worriers. Benson, p. 6-14.
Male Friends: Recruiting a Fighting Force
What could be more sociable than war? Living for months with unrelated men, many of whom exhibit unfamiliar, unpredictable, and often unpleasant behaviors and emotions, all of whom reek from not having washed for weeks on end, requires an extremely high level of social tolerance. Embedment in a fighting unit demands levels of loyalty, trust, self-sacrifice, and tolerance unknown in other spheres and in other species. At the extreme, a fighting man will die to save the lives of his brothers in arms. They are an army of one: united to vanquish the enemy and to preserve their community and nation. In pursuit of victory, a man must care more about his unit than his own life.
No better allies exist than other young men. Between 18 and 25 years of age, men are at the height of their physical strength and athletic prowess. They run faster, jump longer and higher, and throw farther. They can think and react faster. Their ability to identify new spatial patterns formations is at its peak. While having a mother or father or child fighting by a young man's side might sound reassuring, they wouldn't be very effective. Not to mention that a man fights in part to preserve his genetic material, which would be safer the farther it was from the battlefield. While a few young women of the same age might overlap with men in terms of their physical skills, generally women are not as physically powerful or skilled as men. In the heat of an actual battle, other young men provide the greatest support.
This places a premium on getting along with other young men - but how do men come to depend on unrelated men for their survival? I believe that growing up male requires making the transition from reliance on families to dependence on unrelated peers.
All children need adults to keep them alive. Parents usually are the adults willing to invest most heavily in a child. Biology ensures that the child responds by forming strong emotional attachments to the people who give the child the most help. This attachment ensures that young children stay physically close to the person most likely to keep them alive.
But as boys develop and become more self-sufficient, they need to move away from their parents emotionally and physically. From the perspective of warfare, it makes sense to head toward other males of the same age, leaving parents, siblings, and relatives of a different age and sex behind.
In my research and observation, I have found that young boys' biology propels them toward other young boys. They learn to trust other young males more than any other members of their community, including parents. Together, they will grow up and reach the height of their physical strength and skills. Together, they will make the most effective fighting force and maximize not only their own but also their families' and their whole community's chances of survival.
If a boy is genetically programmed to practice behaviors that will help him fight wars, he will need to begin early to identify and cultivate effective allies. He should favor male peers over anyone else. This is what the evidence shows.
Informally, one of the easiest ways to see the way boys break away from adults is to visit a school just before outdoor play time. Large clumps of boys will begin emerging from the doors. As fast as possible, they distance themselves from the school and the teachers and the girls. Then, they start play fighting, enemy enactments, or group-based competitive sports and games. In contrast, girls often linger in the classroom talking with the teachers, female relatives of different ages, or one or two selected friends. Western schools force girls into age-segregated classes, with often preoccupied adults abandoning girls. Many girls are stuck figuring out who will be their social partners for the day.
Meanwhile, the boys are off having a great time playing with other boys. Despite stereotypes to the contrary, my observations suggest that it is the boys who invest more time, effort, and energy in their relations with one another, while girls are trying to figure out their roles. From early in life, boys possess highly social tendencies that permit rapid formation of relationships with other boys.
My students and I tested this. We created three identical circular houses. Each house contained identical gift-wrapped boxes arrayed in identical positions containing the identical puppets, stickers, paper and markers and crayons, funny hats, sunglasses, and other fun materials in each box. The only difference between the three houses was that one also contained a randomly chosen same-sex peer from the child's classroom, a second contained a friendly adult, and the third contained only the boxes and play materials. A new child then was brought to the center of these three houses, shown the inside of each one, and told to play wherever she or he wanted. Sure enough, the 3-, 4-, and 5 year-old boys spent more time with the same-sex peer than the girls did. One genetic ingredient of successful warfare is the intuitive attractiveness and loyalty among boys in any organization.
Early in life, the existence of male peers will incite conflict for a boy. Families, particularly mothers and other caregivers, promote order and peace. But boys want to play fight and compete against enemies. Vivian Gussin Paley's book Boys and Girls: Superheroes in the Doll House vividly describes this conflict. She points out the mayhem that the smallest of boys inflict on girls and teachers alike in the confined space of Western preschool classes. Boys spend their time chasing and wrestling one another; fighting predators, villains, and aliens; and competing against each other. They invariably trample the girls who are cooking, caring for babies, dressing up as princesses, and following teachers' directives.
Traditional agricultural societies deal with this conflict by allowing boys to roam far from home, while girls help their mothers with housework and childcare. In larger hunter-gatherer communities with enough boys of the same age, boys roam farther from their families. Boys are less likely than girls to follow adult rules. They are more likely to disrupt the lives of the keepers of the ordered family world, such as mothers, teachers, and even female peers. But they delight in one another's company.
Young boys thus inhabit a dual world. In one world are mothers and other caregivers, who ensure their survival and restrain tendencies to aggression. In the other world are male peers, who share a very different agenda. As Eleanor Maccoby pointed out, the more boys there are, the more the conflict grows between the civilian world of mothers and other caregivers, and the military world of play fighting, enemies, and competition.
This was probably Freud's most famous insight: Boys must break away from their mothers if they want to become traditional men and practice warfare-like behaviors. When boys spend more time with their mothers, they are restrained in their play fighting, enemy targeting, and intergroup competitions. To gain the freedom to practice fighting, targeting enemies, and competing, they have to spend time with each other. This requires physically and psychologically separating themselves from caregivers, particularly mothers and other women. The farther a boy distances himself from adults, the more experience he has with male activities.
The socialization of a young boy therefore must play a critical role in determining where a boy positions himself between his mother and his male peers. In safe communities, a mother of a young boy can keep him close and protect him from danger. Where an enemy threatens, however, a boy's community needs to ensure he spends time with his male peers practicing the skills needed for war. In the end, a young man will sacrifice his life, most immediately for other young men in his group who are standing right next to him in battle. That is what his emotions tell him. That is what I believe allows his genes to survive. If he survives, his genes will be more likely to be passed down to his children. If he dies, but his community survives, then at least some of his genes, those residing in his closest family members, will be passed down to his nieces and nephews. Those genes are safe, far away from the battlefield. In the short term however, he is fighting for the genes standing next to him on the battlefield that do not belong to him. It's an incredible shared sacrifice between fictive brothers in arms.
A problem can arise however when sons separate from mothers and spend lots of time with other boys. They can start fights inside the community. Unrestrained groups of young men practiced in group competition and without a real enemy can wreak havoc.
It is likely that socialization from the community sends signals to mothers, who relay these to their sons regarding the presence of an enemy. When things are going well for a community, adults, especially mothers, will have more time and resources to devote to their children. Life will be less stressful, and family structures will remain more intact. When an enemy looms, everything changes. Life becomes more stressful for everyone. Time and resources must be rerouted. Children are left more on their own. As a result, boys have more access to other boys and fewer constraints on their play fighting, enemy targeting, and intergroup competitive play.
“Male groups are formed initially because male peers are so drawn to one another, and away from everyone else...boys who cannot follow any adult authority’s directions, group together, through graffiti writing, skateboarding, or gang fights.” city-journal.org/family-instabi
Boys seem highly sensitive to these different environmental cues. For example, an isolated, single mother generally cannot invest as much time and energy in her son as can a mother with more social support. Boys raised by single mothers become especially aggressive. Poverty works the same way. A stressed mother without resources and support invests less in her son by definition. Impoverished boys accordingly exhibit much higher rates and intensities of aggressive behavior than their richer counterparts. Male child soldiers constitute an extreme case; they fight far away from their families. Across the world, boys with fewer resources are far more likely to join fighting forces. While this may be due partially to their greater availability; it is likely that these boys are better prepared physically and psychologically for the life of the fighter.
This suggests that a human male's brain comes prewired to exhibit behaviors critical to victory in battle that can be modified by the environment depending on the community's needs. Just as man's testosterone levels diminish when he marries a woman and diminish even further when he has children, the same process may occur with young boys. Testosterone predisposes males to respond to challenges with physical aggression. When men spend time with women and children, and away from other males, this predisposition to violence decreases. Although this has not been studied with young boys, who have much lower levels of testosterone, I venture something similar happens. With a strong maternal presence, possible when the level of environmental stress is low, testosterone levels are reduced. Remove maternal protection and add male peers, and testosterone activates the male brain. In extreme circumstances where the mother plays no role in her son's life, her son will gravitate to the ubiquitous male peer-militaristic world. He will then join this world as a child soldier, gang member, mercenary, member of a militia, or, if he is lucky, a well-resourced military unit.
In other words, boys will practice play fighting, enemy detection, and one-on-one competition with their male peers unless they are restrained by the presence of caring and relatively stress-free mothers or other relatives or caring adults. Both socialization and biology likely together determine to what extent a boy becomes a part of the civilian versus military life. Nonetheless, some boys seem more ready to join their male peers in play fighting, enemy targeting, and intergroup competitions regardless of the environment. Levels of testosterone almost surely play a role. Young girls born with unusually high levels of testosterone display many of the same behaviors as young boys.
In Western cultures, it is no surprise that boys sent to day care behave more aggressively than those under the watchful eye of female relatives. This is a primary finding of an extensive project examining the effects of day care on children. The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (NICHD SECCYD) was begun in 1991 in 10 cities around the United States. It was designed to respond to many adults' fears that putting young children into day care could harm their development. Results from this study indicated that children who were put into a center-based day care had higher rates of aggression and disruptiveness when they started primary school. As they progress through primary school, however, children who attended day care become indistinguishable from children who were raised in more maternal environments.
This seems reassuring initially, but the real story is more complicated. What happens is that when children who have been in day care enter primary school, the other children in the class become more aggressive. In fact, the more children there are in a primary school classroom who have been in center-based day care, the more aggressive everyone in the classroom becomes. While aggression increases in both boys and girls, boys are so much more physically aggressive than girls by the end of infancy that their aggression is far more noticeable and disruptive. By 24 months, it is easy to see that boys are more aggressive than girls with same-sex peers.
Even boys from very stable families become more aggressive if they go to preschool. The same effect occurs with older boys. When well-intentioned psychologists attempted to reduce aggression by partnering aggressive boys with nonaggressive boys, the study backfired: All the boys came out more aggressive. Male aggression blossoms around male peers if no adult counters the influence.
The idea of a male brain being genetically prepared to become activate by other males, and potentially deactivated by a strong maternal presence, helps to explain why boys raised in Israeli group homes (kibbutzim) are such effect fighters. In former times, Israeli children in kibbutzim were raised from infancy through adolescence in a group home with other children, away from their parents. A female nurse cared for all the children. Boys raised on kibbutzim were more likely to participate in the riskiest and most violent aspects of military service. A full 54% of them volunteered for units with fighting requirements, whereas only 16% of boys raised with their own families did so. Boys raised on kibbutzim also displayed the most valor in battle. It is no accident that these were boys who were raised with other boys and away from their mothers.
Anthropologists have similarly found that separation from mothers and closeness to male peers are key ingredients for warfare across diverse cultures. In several cultures, the conflict between maternal care and preparation for fighting is patently obvious. In some societies mothers remain close to their sons throughout childhood, often sleeping with them at night. In these societies, boys are subject to severe hazing and other initiation rituals at adolescence. This is not an accident. These rituals serve to loosen the control that mothers have over their sons and free the sons to become aggressive young men. This would be absolutely critical when societies were engaged in warfare. In fact, the most brutal male rituals, including cutting, tattooing, and scarification, are performed on male adolescents in societies where warfare is most frequent. Hazing produces physical marks that identify a young man as a reliable ally to other members of his community. More important, hazing allows boys to escape the protective world of maternal care and enter the world of male peers and warriors.
I propose that over the course of evolution, human genes have been selected to create males who are efficient cooperative fighters. Genes accomplish this by instilling intuitive interactive styles in boys and men that girls and women don't have. Boys and men like interacting in ways that will allow them to quickly form a group of fighters.
What kinds of social intuitions might these be? Three core tendencies stand out. The first is that a boy should separate himself from parents and other adult caretakers. The second pushes a boy to select male over female peers. The third promotes interaction with boys who would make valuable fighting allies and rejection of boys who would not. Parents in societies where warfare seems distant often bemoan the faithfulness with which most boys follow these three principles. But these social preferences allow the formation of efficient bonds between boys who will be most able to cooperate successfully to defeat an enemy. I believe that in the past, and even now, this has meant the difference between survival and death of a community.
Principle 1: Escape with Your Peers
Literature, as is often the case, provides a colorful window into this first principle. What happens to boys and girls when their parents are missing? Books that describe the lives of young orphaned boys are much more lively and interesting than books that describe the lives of young orphaned boys are much more lively and interesting than books that describe orphaned girls. An orphaned girl is a lonely individual confronting tough times. Madeline, in Ludwig Bemelmans's charming French stories, is probably the most famous orphaned girl. She lives in an orphanage run by nuns with rigid rules and almost no social interaction. In Bemelmans's first classic book, Madeline has her appendix removed. In the second, she is rescued from drowning by a dog. These are frightening stories about a vulnerable girl.
Contrast that with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Tom lives with his aunt, half-brother, and cousin. He goes from one exciting episode to another with his closest friend, Huckleberry Finn. In doing so, he meets a host of other boys and one wicked murderer. The stories are about an enterprising and courageous boy.
There are many books like this. In James and the Giant Peach, James escapes his horrid aunts in a giant peach. The peach fills with exotic and friendly characters who fight off angry sharks and men in the clouds and eventually winds up as a beautiful mansion in New York City. Harry Potter finds himself at Hogwarts surrounded by close friends and one unspeakably evil enemy. Orphaned boys live the ideal life: no parents, just other boys, a distant caregiver, and one or more unmistakably evil enemies. At the end of these books, no one feels sorry for the orphan. Quite the contrary, many wish they too could live his life. Surrounded by friends, with clear enemies, life sounds idyllic. No one is worried about rupturing an appendix or drowning - or being lonely.
What literature suggests, anthropology has confirmed around the world. Universally, boys prefer to remain with boys of the same age and away from others, especially adult caregivers. In many traditional societies, boys herd animals, hunt small game, or simply play together in fields, forests, or playgrounds, while girls are typically found helping their mothers with child minding and household responsibilities. Adolescent boys often create their own separate games and activities. In some societies, they live in separate houses.
Even married men in some traditional societies up until recently lived apart from their wives in the men's house, the center of the community. Women were forbidden from entering. Not surprisingly, men's houses were more common in cultures where warfare occurred frequently. Girls and women don't have the same desire to escape their families. Margaret Mead reported in Samoa and New Guinea that even when girls play with a close friend, they play near adults, frequently inside their homes, a neighbor's house, or a school.
Even where gender roles are quite egalitarian, such as in Western societies, the same pattern arises. School-age boys play farther away from the school and its teachers than girls do, and boys roam farther from their homes than girls do.
This desire to escape one's family begins early. In the study I described previously with the three identical houses, even boys who had just turned 3 spent more time with another boy compared with girls, who preferred to play near the adult or alone. In a more naturalistic study of 3- to 5-year-old children in preschools, observers found that the more peers who were present, the more the boys moved farther away from the adults. The opposite was true for the girls. Likewise, when 4- and 5-year-old children were placed in a room with their mothers and some toys, the boys moved farther away from their mothers than the girls did. Even at summer camp, boys spend their time farther away from their counselors, whereas girls jockey to get closer.
The preference that boys show for escaping their families and other adults has been observed around the world. This occurs in the simplest of hunter-gatherer societies in Tanzania. In agricultural communities in Kenya, Guatemala, Japan, Mexico, the Philippines, Liberia, India, and Peru, boys move farther away from home than girls. Girls stay close to adults, especially their mothers and other female relatives. This sex difference is not confined to childhood. Cross-cultural research shows that young adult men also go farther from home than young women do, that is, unless a woman is marrying into her husband's family's home, which then becomes her new home. That young boys display this preference so early suggests that genes may have programmed boys more than girls to escape their families. The environment of course can change genes' directives, but the initial push for boys to break away may be biologically based.
Part of the reason may be that boys rely on peers more than girls do. To determine whether they do, my colleagues and I asked Belgian children, adolescents, and adults whether family or friends are better sources of help. At every age, compared with girls and women, boys and men thought that friends would be more useful than parents. In contrast, girls and women thought that parents would be just as helpful as friends.
We next wanted to learn what kind of help males receive. So we asked young men and women from Montreal to describe personal experiences of when they actually needed help. Again, compared with women, the young men reported that their same-sex friends had been more helpful than their parents both with specific tasks and with meeting their social and emotional needs. In contrast, the young women reported that parents had been at least as helpful as their same-sex friends.
From early in life through at least young adulthood, boys and young men are comfortable relying on same-sex friends, as much as or more than parents. This brings them together, which furthers their learning to trust in one another, If they have to work together, they know whom to trust. If they need to fight, they have gained invaluable knowledge about one another's strengths and limitations.
This makes it particularly important for boys to fit in with their peer group. In fact, a boy who has trouble following the rules of his peer group is likely to have real problems. Since the 1980s, many researchers have tried to figure out why some children cannot get along well with their peers. No one knows for sure. Some early findings suggest, however, that for many troubled boys, their problems stem from difficulties following the rules of their peers.
In an intriguing study, 164 boys from Minnesota who as children had had problems severe enough to have been treated at a child guidance clinic were followed up by researchers. These boys all fought in World War II as adults. The researchers first identified a subset of these boys who had engaged in bad conduct during during their military service. They then identified another subset of those boys who had attained a grade of sergeant or higher without any disciplinary or mental health troubles. Both of these groups of men had been treated in the clinic as children, so all had fairly serious problems as children.
What distinguished those who engaged in bad conduct in the military from those who did well? It turned out that the key differences was how well they got along with the other boys in school. Those boys who later engaged in bad conduct in the military were described as not listening to their peers, being mean and hurtful, and showing explosive behavior toward other boys. Whether they behaved respectfully toward teachers didn't make a difference. In contrast, those boys who as men served with honor in the military had gotten along well with the other boys in school, despite their other problems. In fact, how well a boy gets along with his male peers even predicts other types of severe psychological problems that develop in the military.
Separating himself from his family is a prerequisite for successful military engagement. If young men are responsible for fighting the enemy, they need to do so far away from their families. Seeking out male peers and learning to rely on one another is an important facet of boys' social lives that predict success in the military and likely in other organizations too. Boys rely on peers more than family members, but they also rely on same-sex peers more than other-sex peers compared with girls. This leads to the second principle of boys' social interactions.
Principle 2: No Girls Allowed
Most young primates, when they are capable of play with others, prefer to spend time with others of the same sex. Humans are no exception: Segregation by sex starts very early in life. In traditional societies like those in Liberia, Kenya, India, Mexico, the Philippines, and Okinawa, where little formal schooling exists, young boys spend more time with other boys than with girls. In Japan, China, and Bali, among Australian Aborigines and the Navajo and Hopi in Arizona, and even in a school for the blind in the United States, children segregate themselves by sex as early as age 2. The same occurs in hunter-gatherer societies, like the !Kung bushmen or the Hadza, as long as enough play partners of the same sex are available.
Girls also end up playing with girls. But sex segregation is much stronger for boys. Boys really want to play with other boys; girls like to play with both girls and boys. The same asymmetry holds for men and women, unless sexual relations are involved. Men share more leisure activities with one another than women do, just as they always have played sports together more than women have.
What drives the difference? One of the most immediate causes is simply that boys get so much pleasure from playing with other boys. This is much less so for girls. To look at this objectively, my students and I went to preschool and kindergarten classrooms and created groups of six children of the same sex. All the children in each group told us they were friends with each other. The children were free to play however they wished. Later, we asked some neutral observers to watch the videotapes of the children's play and rate how much pleasure each group seemed to have. The observers' rated the boys' groups as enjoying themselves more than the girls' groups. They pointed out the spontaneity, enthusiasm, and sheer delight in one another's company exhibited by the boys. The girls, in contrast, appeared nervous and uncomfortable, seemingly waiting for an adult to appear to organize a structured task.
I believe that girls need to be really close friends, almost like family, in order to relax in one another's company. Boys enjoy themselves more easily, even when they are not close friends. Thus, in my study with the three identical houses, when we chose a random same-sex peer from the classroom, boys were more likely than girls to play with the peer.
In modern, technologically based societies, women bear fewer children and are able to take part in many activities previously reserved for men. Nonetheless, the asymmetry in same-sex preferences persists. This can be difficult to see in Western schools because all the children are forced into the same age-graded classrooms. But during free time, girls are far more likely than boys to offer to help the teacher erase the board or grade papers or run an errand. They are much more likely to volunteer to remain inside and forego recess or gym altogether. The boys have disappeared out the door before the girls even have a chance to excuse themselves from activities with other girls.
Unfortunately, many boys go further than simply preferring the company of other boys over girls. Across the world, starting at about 5 years of age, boys start consciously insulting and physically assaulting girls simply because they are girls. This same form of harassment often continues throughout adulthood. As an example, in Western societies, boys often accuse girls of harboring polluting diseases such as cooties, a disease that, according to their male classmates, afflicts many American girls. Cooties fortunately can be combated with a cooties' shot (often a dot in the middle of a forearm), but its effects wear off rapidly. In many cultures around the world, women's menstruation serves the same function as cooties. It too is considered a disease that can contaminate men who come too close.
Boys and men not only stay away from girls and women, and often insult and assault them, but also dominate them. In fact, in most species of mammals, males generally outrank females. This is true for humans also. The difference in status begins in toddlerhood, even in the most modern of cultures. In one study, two unfamiliar toddlers together dressed in gender-neutral clothing came to a psychology laboratory with their mothers. Right from the start, the young boys were rough and paid little attention to young girls. Often, a male toddler literally ran over a female toddler in his rush to get a toy. Boys didn't pay attention, even when asked something by a young girl. The female toddlers actually ran away from the male toddlers. By age 4, in another study, groups of two boys and two girls playing with the same attractive movie viewer encountered very different experiences depending on their sex. The movie viewer, designed by psychologists William Charlesworth and Peter Lafreniere, is operated by having one child turn a crank and a second child push a light, so that a third child can watch movies through a peephole. The forth child is simply a bystander. To watch the movies, a child has to persuade the other three peers to not only forgo watching the movies themselves but also work to ensure that the child can see the movies. The result was that boys got to see a lot more movies than girls did.
Boys remain dominant as they grow older, even when physical force is not an issue. Strikingly, there is evidence that boys will outperform girls in competitive athletic and academic activities - even when girls are more talented. In a classic study of 9- to 11 - year-old African American children from Chicago playing in a dodgeball tournament, the researchers divided the children into four teams based on their dodgeball skills: highly skilled boys, highly skilled girls, low-skilled boys, and low-skilled girls. The boys always beat the girls. Even the least-skilled boys beat the most-skilled girls. Because the researchers thought that highly skilled female dodgeball players may simply have been afraid of the boys' physical strength, they repeated the study with another set of girls and boys and had them compete in a spelling bee. The results were identical. When the highly skilled girls faced the poor-spelling boys, the boys still won. In modern societies with laws protecting girls, girls now outperform boys in schoolwork. Nonetheless, it remains difficult for a female to beat a male in a head-to-head competition.
Recent studies on bullying show the same pattern of intimidation of girls by boys. A study in the U.S. Midwest found that bullying followed a predictable pattern. High-status boys bullied low-status boys. In turn, low-status boys bullied high-status girls. This pattern continued into adolescence.
Dan Olweus began the study of bullying in primary and secondary schools across Norway. He estimated that one out of seven students were involved in a bullying episode, as either the bully or the victim. Overall, boys were more likely to be bullied than girls, but when girls were bullied, they were much more likely to be bullied by boys than by other girls. The reverse was not true, however. No matter how it was measured, girls rarely bully boys. This same pattern of bullying was found in Sweden, Finland, England, the Netherlands, Japan, Ireland, Spain, and Australia.
In adulthood, men are higher-ranked than women in virtually every society that has been studied. This is true for the most egalitarian hunter-gatherers, the Hadza of Tanzania, where the women are highly independent. It is even true for societies with matrilineal inheritance, where property gets passed down from mother to daughter, not from father to son as is usually the case. In these matrilineal societies, it is not the women who have the highest status in the community, however, but their brothers. Men generally hold higher status occupations, hold higher-status positions within the same occupation, and receive more pay for the same position.
Adult males not only outrank females but they continue the same pattern of abuse found in young children. When they get older, husbands regularly physically attack their wives. Only in the most egalitarian societies with strict laws protecting women do wives retaliate against their husbands. In a study of almost 25,000 women from Bangladesh, Brazil, Ethiopia, Japan, Namibia, Peru, Samoa, Serbia, Thailand, and Tanzania, the World Health Organization (WHO) found that the proportion of husbands who physically hurt their wives ranged from a low of 15% in Japan to a high of 71% in Ethiopia. In the European Union and United States, estimates are that 20% to 25% of husbands physically abuse their wives (www.nytimes.com/2006/10/06/world/06violence).
The higher rank and power of men around the world does not play out only in direct physical intimidation. It also is codified in many nations' formal and traditional laws. Women confront discrimination through marital laws that give more power to husbands than to wives. Workplaces pay women lower salaries than men receive the same job and promote women more slowly than men in nations that prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex. Even in the most modern of media, such as video games for young people, women are portrayed in inferior positions to men. While this is slowly changing, it requires muscular laws that are enforced, and men are needed to enforce these laws. Thus, male dominance begins at age 2 years and continues throughout adulthood in every society.
Boys will accept girls under a few conditions. First, girls who can pass for boys are tolerated. Boys will accept tomboys. These girls often prefer the company of boys over girls, enjoy direct competition, and might even fight physically. While they are still likely to be relegated to inferior roles, they can take part in boys' activities.
Second, boys will also play with girls when they have little other choice. This often happens in sparsely populated neighborhoods or in small communities with few children, such as hunter-gatherer bands. The same holds for men. A woman who is willing to play by men's rules can work closely with men or even run a company. Likewise in the military, when few male recruits are available, as in Israel with its small population or the United States after compulsory military service ended, women can join.
Third, in very rich and liberal Western classrooms where teachers may demand that children of both sexes engage in the same activities, boys show greater tolerance of girls. I suggest this is because the adults in these communities don't expect their sons to need to fight a war. In such a case, it is probably true for men as well. When military service is unlikely, and wives demand that their husbands share child care and household responsibilities, men almost certainly show greater tolerance of women. When the possibility of serving in the military looms, however, I would guess that the basic pattern reappears.
As problematic as this is, if boys who will grow into young men want to form the most effective fighting force, exclusion of girls, and later young women, makes sense. A military unit composed of all young men will be physically stronger than one that contains women too. There are reasons for including women in military roles, but from a purely physical standpoint, men are far bigger, stronger, more athletic and more energetic. Further, the intuitive camaraderie that brings boys together early allows them to build experience negotiating with and relying on another for support. Unless a girl is a tomboy and has been allowed to practice with the boys, not only will she almost certainly be less physically strong, but she also will have much more difficulty learning how to get along with others. This would be detrimental to success. A military unit must be cohesive or it will lose.
One puzzle remains. Why do high-ranked boys bully lower-ranked ones, and lower-ranked boys bully girls? This leads me to one final principle that I believe underlies boys' social interaction.
Principle 3: Military Material Only, Please
It's not enough to assemble a group of like-minded boys, far from their families and girls, in order to create an efficient fighting force. The fighting force must be the best it can be. Some discrimination is necessary to maximize the chances of success. What characteristics in a boy make him a good fighter? It is precisely those characteristics that should appeal most to boys when they select their male friends.
Physical Toughness
Few traits are more valuable in a physical fight than being big, strong, athletic, and energetic. Even before they are born, boys are bigger and more energetic than girls. Still, sex differences in size, strength, and athletic skill are relatively small before adolescence, with one huge exception: throwing. After adolescence, adolescent boys are superior to girls across a wide range of physical skills that require strength, coordination, and energy.
Boys and young men are attracted most to boys who exhibit just the skills that would be invaluable in a fighter. Little boys, older boys in middle childhood, and adolescent boys prefer to be friends with the physically strongest, tallest, and most athletic boys around. This preference continues throughout life and across the world. As anyone who has attended Western elementary, junior high, and senior high school knows, the tallest, strongest, most athletic boys are respected not only by the girls but also by the other boys. Tall, strong men are admired most by other men even in the simplest of hunter-gatherer societies. In the most modern societies, men are more likely to employ physically taller and more energetic male peers over shorter and less energetic ones. As education increases and the need for physical skills decreases, the value of physical strength diminishes, but even then it doesn't disappear.
What makes boys' and men's preference for physically strong male peers so fascinating is that these are just the peers who provide the most competition. Why should boys and men be so attracted to peers who might be superior to them? Don't boys and men want to dominate everyone else? The only answer that makes sense to me is that boys and men desire to form the physically strongest group possible. One physically strong and nimble group member can determine the outcome for the whole group.
This desire to associate with the physically toughest males make human males unique compared with males of other species, and compared with human females. Few girls or women care how physically strong their female friend is. Yet, a boy or man, given the chance, will stick closely to the strongest and most athletically talented male around.
Emotional Toughness
What other traits might aid in the war effort? Emotions have been studied around the world. And, around the world, men express emotions less often and with less intensity than women do. This is especially true for fear and sadness. The only exception is anger, which is typically associated with aggression. However, there is no evidence that boys or men actually feel angrier than girls or women.
Why should men be so emotionally cool? Emotions communicate feelings to others. They also affect our own behavior. If you're fighting an enemy, communicating evaluations about progress to oneself or others are both potential weaknesses when things are not going well. Fearing death or mourning a lost comrade during an attack can be lethal emotions to transmit, or even to feel. A person who loses control of his emotions cannot think clearly about what is happening around him. Revealing to the enemy that one feels scared or sad would be even worse. A man cannot change the course of war through his emotions, only through his motivation to win and his behavior. While anger likely helps provide a shot of adrenaline, emotional cool is critical to fighting well.
Fear is the worst emotion to feel when fighting. Fear makes people shy away from dangerous situations, such as war. Unsurprisingly, around the world men experience less fear than women. Who is more likely to pick up a poisonous snake and get bitten? Who is more likely to be strangled by their pet python? Who enjoys riding motorcycles most? Who is more likely to fall off the edge of a cliff? Who is more likely to hit a tree during a skiing accident? Whose bungee cord is more likely to break? Who is more likely to shoot themselves with a handgun they found in a secret hiding place? Who is more likely to be swept away during a hurricane that was predicted by the weather service? The statistics are clear. At every age, males take many more risks than females do. And they are much more likely than girls or women to die from risky behaviors. Insurance companies know this and charge men higher premiums. Males take greater risks than females because they are less afraid.
This sex difference in fearfulness begins in the first few weeks of life. Infant girls show fear earlier than infant boys do. Later in infancy, when faced with long, dark tunnels, robots that activate themselves spontaneously, or a stranger unexpectedly entering a room, young boys approach much faster than young girls. By adulthood, men continue to express fear less frequently and with less intensity than women, and this is true across diverse cultures.
The same sex differences occur with sadness. If an infant in a newborn nursery begins crying, newborn boys show less distress than newborn girls. By 14 months of age, when infants see an adult have an accident, infant boys show less concern than infant girls. Men exhibit less sadness than women around the world.
Authors know the importance of being cool when battling the enemy. James Bond embodies the British battle against the enemy. Of all his positive qualities, his cool stands out. From my many observations, even the youngest male toddlers do not like their male peers to become upset. Emotional "cool" is a big draw even before a boy can explain what type of peer he most respects.
Boys and men greatly prefer other boys and men who don't let their emotions show. They don't expect the same of girls and women, from whom uncool displays of emotion are tolerated. But boys naturally show less emotion than girls. Ross Buck showed this in an ingenious way. He asked 4- to 6-year-old to view slides showing pleasant and unpleasant pictures. Observers who were in another room and who could not see the slides tried to guess just from the children's facial expressions which kind of slide a child was watching. This was relatively easy with the girls. But the observers found it very hard to read the boys' facial expressions. The older boys showed even less emotion than the younger ones. When the study was replicated with adults, the sex difference was even stronger. Men's expressions were much more difficult to read than women's. Men actually moved their facial muscles less than women did.
Boys expect each other to be emotionally muted. By age 6, they value other boys who are emotionally cool. Even in early childhood, boys who cannot control strong emotions are often insulted by being called girls or gay - two inferior types of boys minds'. Being cool is an important part of boys' intuitive measuring stick for manliness. I suggest that "manliness" means the type of individual one would want next to you when the enemy attacks.
Certainly, emotional cool is highly valued by boys living in difficult environments. But this intuition is so strong that it is even shared by advantaged boys who live far from the possibility of war. This was brought home clearly by a recent study that looked at adolescent boys in a private school in the liberal, generally antiwar northeastern United States who were interviewed about how they dealt with personal difficulties. They all agreed that openly expressing their feelings was just not a useful way of coping with problems. Expressing emotions decreased their status with the other boys. Their preferred response was being stoic, not showing emotion, even when dealing with something as painful as the death of another person. If a boy did show his emotions, his male friends would react by making fun of him, telling jokes, or ignoring or distracting him. The victim of these attacks appreciated this: Being made fun of helped him to calm down. According to these boys, this type of reaction showed that their friends cared about them. Many boys taunt one another not to bully each other but to help each other out, to teach each other how to deal with the world most beneficially. The only exception these boys made was when a relative died. Only then was some expression of pain permissible.
A little boy needs to express fear and sadness when he is in danger. This signals to caregivers that he needs help and may keep him alive. But as he grows older and more able to take care of himself, emotions are less helpful. This is especially so in the context of battle.
On the surface, the one exception would appear to be anger. Anger makes people more aggressive and can make other people back down. However, too much anger is detrimental. An enraged man, wildly gesticulating and shouting at his target, might prove effective in the civilian world. In the military however, real anger can produce bad decisions in the heat of the moment that can endanger the whole unit. An angry man is erratic and undependable.
It is thus not surprising that when girls and women become angry, they stay that way longer, and they often experience more intense anger than males do. The reason that everyone thought women didn't get angry is that anger is the one emotion that girls and women hide better than boys and men. Thus, boys and men look angrier than girls and women and also act on their anger more frequently; careful analysis shows, however, that in general, they become angered much less easily.
Physical and emotional toughness are important traits in a fellow fighter. So is self-confidence.
Self-Confidence
I am always impressed by the style of boys or men when they are speaking to an audience. They make confident, clear, and indisputable declarations. They present themselves in the most positive manner possible, speaking loudly with a stern intonation accompanied by forceful gestures. Their self-assured posture is guaranteed to persuade listeners of the brilliance of the speaker's accomplishments and the truth of his message. Male presentation styles surely inspire more confidence than the way many women communicate. A women's talk often comes peppered with self-deprecatory descriptions and gestures. She often begins her talk apologizing for some failing. Her posture indicates uncertainty and subordination. She speaks with wavering, halting rhythms, and with so many qualifications that the listener questions not only the women's message but her whole character, even when her talk is brilliant.
The advantages of communicating self-confidence to oneself, one's group, and the enemy cannot be overestimated. Fighting is not just physical force. A critical part of being an effective fighter is feeling and projecting confidence. This works in two ways. People who feel confident are in fact more effective. Projecting confidence to the enemy signals that maybe you are stronger than he thought. In contrast, any hint of insecurity or vulnerability could be fatal. Supreme self-confidence can take individuals in any endeavor much further than they would have gone otherwise. The very definition of masculinity in fact rests heavily on projected self-assurance. According to the most well-established assessment of gender identity, men who exhibit signs of self-doubt, lack of certainty, low self-esteem, or indecisiveness are not fully masculine. Self-confidence is critical to winning any contest, and winning competitions is critical to being a man. I suggest that being a man means knowing deep down that you will be able to defeat the enemy. No doubt is allowed.
Men score higher than women on even the simplest measures of self-esteem. For example, Rosenberg's elf-esteem scale asks respondents to indicate whether they agree or disagree with 10 statements rating their evaluations of themselves. Men repeatedly and universally score higher than women on this scale. Men appear to be born believing that they are of high ability, whereas women do not easily assimilate the idea that they are as good as others. Hundreds of studies show this effect and suggest that men just feel better about themselves in domains such as athletic ability, appraisal of their personality, and overall satisfaction or happiness with themselves. Women in contrast rate their behavioral and moral conduct as more socially acceptable to their societies than men do. In other words, men just feel good about who they are, whereas women feel good about being moral. This starts very early in life. Even 7-year-old boys have more self-confidence than 7-year-old girls.
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Boys and men value self-confidence in their friends. They are attracted to other boys who perform well. Girls actually prefer other girls who share their own problems and don't have high levels of self-esteem. To test this systematically, my students and I asked some adolescents and young adults what they thought their closest same-sex friends would think if they did something really well (got good grades, performed well in a sport, made a good friend, or found a loving romantic partner). The males responded that their friends would think more positively of them. The females didn't. In fact, many females even described being afraid that if they were too successful, their friends would abandon them.
I believe that males value high self-esteem in themselves and their male peers because it increases the probability of beating the enemy. High self-esteem can make someone with poor abilities do well; low self-esteem can make someone with excellent abilities do poorly. In warfare, where getting the best out of everyone is critical, having allies with high self-esteem is invaluable. The more one's allies have high self-confidence, the more intimidating they are; the greater the likelihood the enemy will retreat. This seems to be an excellent strategy for winning. Of course, this may occasionally incite wars based on overconfidence. Better to be overconfident than underconfident and surrender before you even begin.
Physical and emotional toughness and self-confidence in a male peer are highly attractive to boys and men. Those with high levels of these traits would strengthen any fighting force. But a war is not won by an individual. Boys and men need to know that individual is dependable and worth including in a group.
Obedience to Rules
From early in life, boys drive teachers crazy. Many cannot sit still; they talk out of turn; they run around the school building; they shout and curse and laugh and shriek incessantly; they injure themselves frequently; they fight openly; they spend as much time away from adults as possible; they perpetually require excitement and movement to stave off boredom. In traditional societies without formal schools, mothers attempt to force their sons to help with household chores but eventually end up letting them roam as far from home as they will go. Boys so easily forget or overtly disobey their mothers' directives that their mothers turn instead to their more reliable daughters for assistance.
Amazingly, these same boys show an incredible reverence for rules: not rules created by women or other authorities but rules created by the boys themselves. From an early childhood, boys begin to generate rules, to negotiate changes in rules, to argue over broken rules and appropriate penalties. They ignore the rules of women and girls but follow their own rules to the letter. Men playing informal sports spend money to hire a male referee, just to ensure that the rules are followed. Some female teams in modern societies also hire referees - but these are mostly male. As one frustrated coach of a female sports teams patiently explained to me, female referees sometimes feel so sorry for a player, that they don't apply the rules fairly.
Rules are critically important to humans. No group can exist without them. Rules create a social system. They generate scripts that permit a disparate group of individuals to function as a whole. They allow people who are physically distant to coordinate their activities. They ensure that the same standards are applied to everyone, so that fairness reigns and individuals choose to remain rather than jump ship. To some, rules form the essence of morality. Jean Piaget, one of the founders of developmental psychology, declared, "All morality consists in a system of rules, and the essence of all morality is to be sought for in the respect which the individual acquires for those rules" (Piaget, 1932, p. 13).
Most social primate species instinctively follow many rules. These regulate vital aspects of life, including who ranks highest, holds territory, mates with whom, forms an alliance, begins and ends conflicts, or can join the community and must leave, to name just a few. These rules are not written down but are followed because primates' genes have created biological instincts that lead them to behave in certain ways. Primate rules remain fairly static and nonnegotiable throughout animals' lives. Although individuals' roles may change from infancy through old age, the basic rules of life don't change.
Humans, on the other hand, continually generate new rules, revise old ones, and attempt to circumvent those they deem unfair. They rebel against rules they dislike and sacrifice their lives to uphold rules they consider superior. This may be one of the most distinctive aspects of being human. Rules, however, have been a primarily male occupation. For thousands of years, males have constructed the rules that underlie religions, governments, economic systems, businesses, educational structures, and of course judicial courts and the military. Since ancient times, games with rules created by boys and men have predominated all over the world. Even men who break established rules often end up adhering to an alternate set of rules such as those found in criminal gangs and militias. Men and boys who join rule-bound systems prosper when they follow the rules of other boys and men.
What is fascinating is that even young boys play games with complex rules. Jean Piaget studied Swiss boys as young as 4 years of age who were playing marbles. Every aspect of the game, from who made the first move to how to determine whether to play again, was codified by the boys. Tens or even hundreds of rules governed every game. According to Piaget, "The game of marbles, for instance, as played by boys, contains an extremely complex system of rules, that is to say, a code of laws, a jurisprudence of its own" (Piaget, 1932, p.13). Girls show no interest.
Typically, young boys learn the rules of a game from older boys. They then negotiate local revisions and demand respect for their version of the "sacred" laws. Marble games contain infinite variants, local customs, and generational changes. These function in the same way as the rules for today's more popular Yu-Gi-Oh! and Pokemon card games, or any board game or physical sport. Individual marbles or cards differ in their roles and power. Adherence to these rules allows fair competition. Breaking the rules invites social ostracism and expulsion from the game. Obedience to the rules elicits honor and respect. Gallantry is much admired as victors offer to play again to provide losers a chance to redeem themselves. Players can modify rules at any moment, if they can get the others to agree. An individual player must always be ready to contribute to rule making, or the other players will leave him out in the cold.
Janet Lever, a sociologist who spent a lot of time on the playgrounds of American elementary schools, described the critical part that rules play in boys' games in middle childhood in Western societies. When boys are left to roam freely on the playgrounds, they choose to engage in activities that contain many rules. When a dispute regarding the rules arises, boys will negotiate new rules or will call on respected peers to settle disputes. All of this effort is made simply to maintain the rules. The many sports played around the world from ancient to modern times, in traditional and advanced societies, contain rules for boys and men but seldom for girls and women. According to Lever's observations, the few games that girls play, typically turn-taking games, do not involve many rules. If an individual girl does not follow the rules of the game, such as continuing to jump rope or play hopscotch after having tripped, the girls simply end the game. Negotiations are rare. Even when boys and girls play together in the same game, boys stick much more closely to the rules than the girls. Girls often shake their heads at what seems to them a bizarre emphasis on enforcing the rules at the expense of other more important concerns, such as someone's feelings.
You might think that paying attention to other players' feelings would make it easier to play together than sticking to a set of fairly rigid rules. But you would be wrong. One of the more interesting things noted by Lever was that boys' games lasted much longer than girls' games. Lever reported, "Boy's games lasting the entire period of 25 minutes were common, but in a whole year in the field, I did not observe a single girls' activity that lasted longer than 15 minutes". Although boys quarreled more frequently than girls, the boys enjoyed the conflict, especially those over the rules. According to the physical education teacher at Lever's school, "His boys seemed to enjoy the legal debates every bit as much as the game itself. Even players who were marginal because of lesser skill or size took equal part in these recurring squabbles." In fact, much of modern Western education until recently was based on the idea that physical sports with rules prepared boys to fight wars as men. In contrast, girls often prefer practicing gymnastics and dance, which contain few rules and often require little cooperation with others.
Of course, following rules should not be confused with moral behavior. Carol Gilligan, a well-known psychologist, quite reasonably claimed that women have a moral sense that does not depend on following rules. Before that, men were considered more moral simply because they were more rule oriented. Gilligan's research shows that when people are given hypothetical scenarios and asked to make moral judgements about them, males refer rules more often females, who emphasize responsiveness to personal relationships. Kay Johnson, a colleague of Gilligan's, used the following Aesop's fable to explore boys' and girls' solutions to moral challenges:
It was growing cold, and a porcupine was looking for a home. He found a most desirable cave but saw it was occupied by a family of moles. "Would you mind if I shared your home for the winter?" the porcupine asked the moles. The generous moles consented and the porcupine moved in. But the cave was small and every time the moles moved around they were scratched by the porcupine's sharp quills. The moles endured this discomfort as long as they could. Then at last they gathered courage to approach their visitor. "Pray leave," they said, "and let us have our cave to ourselves once again." "Oh no!" said the porcupine. "This place suits me very well." (Johnston, 1988, p. 71)
Adolescents from the Boston area then were asked to describe the problem presented in the fable and to offer a solution. Boys were much more likely to respond with a rule rather than a reference to maintaining harmony, whereas girls were more evenly divided. Examples of rule-based solutions included "The porcupine has to go definitely. It's the mole's house." "Send the porcupine out since he was the last one there." Girls were more likely to attempt to maintain a harmonious relationship with responses such as "Wrap the porcupine in a towel" or "The both of them should try to get together and make the hole bigger". The differences illustrate clearly the use of impersonal rules versus the desire to respond to one individual's personal problem.
According to Gilligan, rules ensure fairness, equality, and justice, a major concern of boys who are less invested in one particular individual's plight. Because every individual's situation is unique, however, general rules apply to interpersonal conflicts. No one would maintain a relationship with another person who responded to all interpersonal conflicts by citing a rule. Gilligan's keen clinical skills allowed her to uncover a basic difference in the concerns of the two sexes. Each form of responsiveness, rules that ensure justice for as many as possible as well as responsiveness to unique individual needs, has its place.
Boys' and mens' concern with rules nevertheless serves a critical function for coordinating a community. One cannot provide extra investment in one individual at the expense of others without some recourse to rules, or everyone else in the group will rebel. If too many people get special breaks, the whole community will breakdown. In fact, large scale organizations, such as businesses and governments, use much the same tactics that boys learn on the playing fields in childhood. Adherence to fixed rules, revision of outdated ones, and adoption of new ones are necessary. Learning to negotiate rules is invaluable for running a group. If there is no group, however, then rules downright interfere. Girls and women do not benefit from practicing negotiating impersonal rules in their interpersonal relationships.
Athletic ability, emotional cool, and self-confidence in a fellow fighter provide an individual advantage to that person and his group. Rules serve the groups' interests. Rules permit allies to coordinate their efforts. Rules permit distinguishing friends from the enemy. Rules increase the impact of learning. Rules permit synchronization of attacks from distant posts. Rules are essential to group fighting. Males' love of rules suggests that boys and men are not simply interested in beating their individual competitors, as in most other primate species. They want to beat them according to the rules. They want to cooperate too.
This love of rules is so strong that rules are applied even in one-on-one competition. The strange notion of fighting fair requires following rules. Otherwise, a man loses the respect of other men. Duels fought by gladiators and bullfighters, wrestlers, and boxers occur according to specified man-made rules. On the surface, this seems bizarre. Why should two men fighting to the death follow any rules at all? Yet, throughout history men have generated rules for the most brutal of conflicts. Girls and women don't follow any rules in their fights, and this often makes female fights all the more interesting because the drama is so much less predictable.
Expertise
There is one more trait that boys and men especially value in their peers: expertise. Human males specialize. They recognize and respect individual expertise, and they organize their groups in order to capitalize on the abilities of each of their allies. Expertise comes in many forms: physical prowess, emotional cool, self-confidence, leadership skills, social savvy, as well as a host of physical, engineering and other skills that might benefit the group. In fact, men value proficiency in just about any activity that could potentially contribute to a war effort. It is worth remarking again just how extraordinary this is. Organizing groups in this way involves getting highly competitive individuals to acknowledge that other individuals have more skills in specific areas than they do. Not only that, but the same competitive individuals will defer to the opinion of the more skilled one.
I suggest that valuing another's superior expertise so highly occurs because the inferior individual feels that he too will benefit from his ally's skill. In war, the most effective fighting force should maximize each member's potential. But it is a two-way street. A male who is inferior one way has to be good in another way. Otherwise, the group won't value him. That means that whether he is skilled at throwing a ball, leading a company, or making his peers laugh, his peers respect him. Males will suffer great hardship, sometimes in the form of extreme hazing in their groups, to prove that they are worthy of a group's respect. Obtaining the respect of the group is a great feeling. The result is that males defer to those who are more skilled and expect others to respect their own area of expertise. The whole group benefits.
Males' reverence of other males' skills begins early. During the year and a half she spent in a working-class African American neighborhood in southwest Philadelphia in the 1970s, Marjorie Harkness Goodwin recorded the conversations of the neighborhood children. Her recordings confirm the respect that boys accord expertise, regardless of its content. For example, Goodwin describes an episode in which the boys have constructed a go-cart, then proceed to argue about who is the best driver. All agree that the best driver is Malcolm; they then go on to discuss others' levels of driving expertise in terms of rank order:
Malcolm: I'm the driver.
Tony: He's the driver.// You know he drives it.
Malcolm: I know what//that - Ossie cant drive that good.
Ossie: See - I'm number three driver. I'm number three driver.
Malcolm: And Dave can't drive that good,=
Tony: I'm number//two driver.
Ossie: I'm number three driver.
(Goodwin, 1990, p.41 // signifies overlapping speech with the next person; = signifies that the next turn begins immediately after the prior one finished; bold italics indicates emphasis.)
Other forms of expertise also merit admiration among these same boys. Goodwin provides examples of the type of skills on which these boys rank themselves:
While playing with yo-yos
Carl: I do it experience! I do it better than Ossie. Watch. I'll win again!
Discussing whose slings are better
Vincent: All mines is better than y'alls.
William: I could walk on my hand better than anybody out here. Except him. And Freddie. Thomas can't walk.
Practicing original dance steps
Jimmy: I'm the best what you call, best step maker out here.
While making paper model airplanes
Freddie: Ossie I'm a show you a bad plane boy. Bad plane. Bad plane. It go - it glides anywhere. It's better than any airplane you know. (Godwin, 1990, p.40)
These boys acknowledge when others are better than they are. Meanwhile, the girls in this neighborhood were not discussing their skills but rather who was friends with whom.
Boys respect their peers' expertise in a way that girls don't. This became clear to me after individually interviewing 9- to 11-year-old working-class children from the Boston area. I brought each child one at a time to a quiet room and asked them to describe every one of his or her same-sex classmates. Boys made more refined judgments than girls did. Many of these boys' judgments reflected candid appraisals of other boys' expertise and willingness to work hard. Boys described the other boys in their class in terms of their academic ability, their athletic ability and their class interests and hobbies. They mentioned how hard the other boys worked, how willing they were to abide by or break the rules of authority figures, how much they made fun of others, how goofy they were, as well as how strange and good or bad they were. Girls rarely did so. The only two characteristics used more often by girls than boys were whether the classmate was nice and whether she reciprocated nice actions.
Other studies have found this same difference. For example, one researcher interviewed college students in Missouri about the ideal traits they would wish for in same-sex friends. Young men wanted their friends to be intelligent, athletic, creative, socially connected, capable of financial success, and imbued with a sense of humor, much more than young women did. Young women did not mention specific areas of expertise. It is a testament to the sociable nature of boys and young men that they so value a male peer's expertise.
Expertise is critical from early in life because across diverse cultures, boys' and men's friendships are based on shared activities. Even very young boys are attracted to one another because they both enjoy wielding weapons, racing trucks, constructing fortifications, or chasing aliens around the room. By early childhood, boys fight happily with other boys who share their fantasies regarding potential invasion by enemies. In middle childhood, the importance of a boy's competitive team begins to take precedence over most other activities in his life. By adulthood, much of men's interactions with one another occur during work or leisure time and revolve around concrete activities. According to Swain, 75% of men report common activities such as the most important part of their relationship with same-sex friends and that men's friendships mostly consist in providing assistance to one another during an activity. In contrast, women spent their time talking with friends about relationships they have (or had) with third parties.
The Strange Case of Males' Attitude Toward Homosexuality
The desire to have peers who are potential allies in a group targeting the enemy may increase understanding of one of the more difficult parts of males' social behavior - their instinctive aversion to feminine boys, and by extension to homosexuality. Many nonhuman male primates will scapegoat or displace their aggression onto the weakest males, but there is no evidence that weak males are excluded as long as they defer to stronger ones. But boys taunt and even bully their less masculine peers. Even in the most politically correct environments, boys will often insult or attack boys who behave like girls. What is it about a boy who behaves like a girl that males don't like? A boy who behaves like a girl does not like play fighting, targeting enemies, or one-on-one competition. He might even enjoy domestic activities.
Babies can differentiate male from female faces by 3 months of age. By 17 months, boys and girls begin to use language to label their own and others' gender. Between 2 and 3 years of age, children become increasingly conscious that there are two sexes. By 5 or 6 years, they become confident that their gender identity will remain constant forever. If you ask children who are younger than 5 or 6 whether a person can change from one sex into the other, they will respond affirmatively. After this age, they think the question is ridiculous. No researcher has managed to persuade a child older than 5 or 6 years that simply changing the length of one's hair or one's clothing will transform a child of one sex into the other sex.
But that's not how boys, or men, actually behave. They seem to believe that some boys (or men) can indeed turn into girls. If a boy in Western society grows waist-length hair and wears frilly dresses to school, most boys believe that he has essentially become a girl, no matter how old they are when you ask them. Most men do too. Feminine boys can readily be identified by males of any age. Feminine boys may not enjoy play fighting, enemy detection, or engaging in direct competition. They may prefer to cook in the kitchen, care for baby dolls, or dress up as attractive young women.
Most boys do not like feminine boys and tease them or try hard to change them into "real" boys. Around the world, boys expend much more effort and time than girls in assessing the extent to which a boy is a "real boy". just like being manly seems to mean being ready to join a fighting force, being a real boy does too. Early in life, long before boys understand what homosexuality or transgender categories are, boys seem to share a picture of what it takes to be a boy. No such thing as a "tomgirl" exists; feminine boys are sissies or fake boys. What makes this so striking is the contrast with girls, who do not have a "real girl" or a womanly scale. Girls are much more tolerant in their definition of a girl or woman. For the most part, girls exhibit little interest in the degree to which a girl believes she is a girl, in whether a girl plays exclusively with girls, or in the activities a girl prefers. The only attribute by which a girl measures another girl is in terms of her attractiveness to boys, and this concern does not emerge strongly until adolescence. Boys and men seem to come equipped with a universal boy-measuring stick that they use to measure degree of boyishness and manliness, whereas girls don't have a female equivalent.
These intuitive male scales might explain the reason that between three and six times as many boys as girls in Western societies find themselves visiting a gender identity disorder (GID) clinic. Boys with GID experience many more difficulties getting along with their peers. They receive more teasing and are less liked than girls with GID, and this holds true across a number of societies including both Canada and the Netherlands, which are highly tolerant of transgendered individuals and homosexuality in adults.
The definition of a boy is much narrower than that of a girl. The characteristic that towers above the others in defining a male is that of enemy fighter. A man who cannot fight is by definition not a man. According to military historians, a man's prime fear when entering the military is that he will not be able to fight and will be revealed as not truly a man. While there are gradations in boyishness and manliness, the prototypical male cannot be mistaken, and boys understand this before they turn 5. While pretty girls may embody the ideal girl, other girls are real girls too. A girl is accepted as a girl regardless of her feelings about being a girl, her play partners, or her sex-role behaviors; even a boy can be a girl if he wants to be. To be a boy requires fitting through a much narrower filter.
Men in many countries treat effeminate men the same way that preschool-age boys treat feminine boys. One of the chief ways that this plays out is in attitudes toward homosexuality. Men dislike homosexuality much more than women do, especially homosexual men. Why is this? There is evidence that men's dislike of homosexuality is more about fear of effeminate male behavior than fear of actual homoerotic behavior.
Homoerotic behavior is commonplace among males. Many of the most prototypical boys from toddlerhood through adolescence engage in quasi-sexual behavior with one another, as they continually make physical contact. Being jumped on, hit, sat on, rolled over, run into, slapped, hugged and pushed all the time occur in every known culture between young boys. Sexual relations between males in other primate species occur routinely in the juvenile period. In cultures with frequent warfare such as ancient Greece or Rome, men regularly practiced homosexuality. In fact, in some cultures homosexual relations between boys are encouraged as a means of cementing male bonds. As a dramatic example, in Melanesian cultures, young boys are required to commit fellatio on young men who then go off to fight wars. Likewise, in ancient Greece, boys practiced homosexuality with men until the boys were ready to go off to war. Although there are no reliable figures for modern societies, given the general social stigma associated with sex between males, there is some evidence that the proportion of males who are not self-identified as gay who nevertheless have had sexual relations with men, especially in adolescence, is not insignificant.
Because manliness seems defined by warfare, homosexuality may be fine as long as it does not interfere with men's roles in fighting enemies. Many homosexual men are excellent warriors. For example, Julius Caesar is believed to have had many homosexual lovers, but he was a great general, so no one minded.
Only some homosexual men dislike warfare and instead like activities that are more typically associated with women. It probably is not really homosexuality, therefore, that young boys fear but femininity or "girlieness." Specifically feminine boys' willingness to share most boys' favorite activities and cooperate with them likely constitutes the basic problem.
The primary reason soldiers give their willingness to sacrifice their lives is their allegiance to their "band of brothers". Should a man prove disloyal because of his lack of commitment to the band, to being a warrior, then the whole enterprise of warfare if jeopardized. Fighting boys and men cannot accept someone who won't get with the program. If they did, their side would lose. No wonder the American military has tied itself up in knots trying to figure out how not to discriminate against homosexual men.
Little boys' brains are wired to identify and eliminate boys who could not perform as trusted allies in times of war. The key problem with homosexuality from the male perspective lies in the subset of homosexual males who do not enjoy play fighting, targeting enemies, and one-on-one competition. Boys who display blatantly feminine behavior in early childhood by wishing to be girls, by preferring to associate with girls, and by engaging in girls' activities generally do not enjoy male activities. Thus, I suggest that it is not homosexuality per se that threatens boys and men; rather, it is deep concern about some boys' lack of commitment to the cooperative venture of fighting enemies.
I believe that young boys follow the principles of distancing themselves from caregivers, from girls, and from boys who would not be good allies in a war instinctively. They do it because there is a partial genetic basis for their likes and dislikes. That their social preferences appear so early in life, and across so many diverse cultures, strongly suggests that genes may be guiding these preferences. Certainly, such preferences would combine in young adulthood to maximize the chances young men could form an effective fighting force. Critically, when no enemy looms, these same social preferences would facilitate success in many other pursuits. What boys may be programmed to learn easily does not have to be used to fight the enemy. Successful cooperation in any activity would result. The key is that young boys prepare early to function as part of a group of allies.
The Survival of the Sexes: Warriors and Worriers. Benson, p. 56-87.
Rob Henderson on X: "“If you’re an attractive girl and you’re the new kid at school, god help you because there’s a chance the girls at school are going to eat you alive. If you’re an athletic boy, you’ll probably be ok because boys tend to be more tolerant of hierarchies.” https://t.co/oyzx06fM1e" / X
4th grade is like a soap opera: opera”tune in next week to see if the feud is over between the two best friends and if they finally decide to squash their beef and sit next to each other at lunch”smdh!
what’s even funnier is I told lai, the fights adults have are just as dumb!
what’s even funnier is I told lai, the fights adults have are just as dumb!Each day I line up at car pool like the next episode is about to come on just waiting to hear the latest gossip!
“she pushed her in line and so they aren’t ever going to be friends again” *cue dramatic music*
“she pushed her in line and so they aren’t ever going to be friends again” *cue dramatic music*
