Who gets aggressive at the late-night bar and why?

The exhaustive analysis in Steven Pinker's latest book shows that we are living in the most peaceable age for thousands of years. To anyone who spends time in late-night bars, this might come as a surprise. In these temples to hedonism, spilled drinks and unwelcome gropes all too often provoke violent brawls.

Kathryn Graham and her colleagues trained 148 observers and sent them out to 118 bars in early-hours Toronto where they recorded 1,057 instances of aggression from 1,334 visits. Where the majority of psychology research on aggression is based on laboratory simulations (often involving participants zapping each other with loud noise or spiking each other's food with chilli sauce), Graham's team collected real-life observational data to find out who gets aggressive and why.

The researchers followed the Theory of Coercive Actions, according to which aggressive acts have one or more motives: compliance (getting someone to do something, or stop doing something); grievance; social identity (to prove one's status and power); and thrill-seeking.

Unsurprisingly, the vast majority (77.5 per cent) of aggressive acts were instigated by men. Men more than women were driven to aggression by identity and thrill-seeking motives; by contrast female aggression was more often motivated by compliance and grievance. This often had a defensive intent, as a reaction against unwanted sexual advances.

As well as being particularly severe, aggression that was ignited by patrons who felt threats to their identity was also particularly likely to escalate, "because," the researchers said, "their strong identity motivation reflects a situation where the person is already invested in winning or besting the other person." Aggressive acts motivated by grievance were also likely to escalate, because of people feeling their actions were justified.

The researchers found that greater intoxication led to more serious aggression in women, but not men - perhaps because the latter were emboldened enough already. Younger men and bigger men also tended to engage in more serious aggressive acts, replicating past research showing that larger, intoxicated men are more likely to get aggressive than their smaller counterparts.

Graham and her colleagues said their findings could help contribute to preventative policies in late-night bars. For example, given the incendiary role of identity motives in aggressive incidents, efforts could be made to challenge traditional cultural norms that say masculine identity is about power and strength. Because of the escalating effect of grievance motives, security staff could be trained to diffuse situations early - for example, by replacing spilled drinks free of charge. And because so much female aggression was provoked by sexual harassment, the researchers advised establishments to create an atmosphere that discourages "invasive and aggressive sexual overtures whilst still maintaining an exciting venue where young people can explore their sexuality and meet potential partners."

These recommendations sound well-intentioned and supported by the new evidence, but are they really achievable? What do you think?

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Kathryn Graham, Sharon Bernards, D. Wayne Osgood, Michael Parks, Antonia Abbey, Richard B. Felson, Robert F. Saltz, and Samantha Wells (2012). Apparent motives for aggression in the social context of the bar. Psychology of Violence DOI: 10.1037/a0029677

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Threaten a man's masculinity and he becomes a short-sighted risk taker

With Britain embroiled in yet another banking scandal, commentators are once again pointing their fingers at the macho culture of the City. "Put a bunch of confident, aggressive men in the same room and reward them for taking risks," Ian Leslie wrote, "and you create a pressure cooker, from which probity and prudence evaporate like steam."

Now a study has cast new light on the role that masculinity may have played in past and present financial crises. Jonathan Weaver and his colleagues at the University of South Florida report that threatening a man's sense of manhood makes him myopic and more prone to take risks, particularly in a public situation. The findings suggest that being surrounded by their sweaty, swaggering alpha-male peers may have provided just the kind of threatening environment to encourage bankers to become short-sighted risk-takers.  

For an initial study, the masculinity of 19 heterosexual male university students was threatened by having them product test a pink bottle of "Sweet Pea" fruit-scented hand lotion; 19 others acted as a comparison group and tested a power drill. Ostensibly as part of a separate study, all the men were then filmed playing a gambling game. They started with $5 and had five chances to bet between $0 and $1 on whether a die roll would turn up odds or evens, with the potential to win or lose the amount they gambled. Over the course of the first four bets, the men who'd had their masculinity challenged tended to bet larger amounts; they also bet the maximum possible amount more often.

A second study was similar but this time the masculinity of half of 73 more men was threatened by having them recall 10 examples of times they'd behaved like a "real man". Chuck Norris aside, because it's difficult for most men to think of 10 examples off the cuff, this challenge has an undermining effect on their sense of masculinity. By contrast, thinking of 2 examples (as the remainder of the participants did) is easy for most men, and has the opposite, manhood enhancing effect. Next, all the men made a series of choices between smaller financial rewards now or larger rewards later. Half of the men in both groups thought they'd have to justify their choices publicly. The take-home finding here was that men who'd had their masculinity challenged, and thought their decisions would be public, tended to make more short-term choices, forfeiting about three times the amount of money available, as compared with men in the other conditions. Presumably acting impetuously in front of a crowd helped the men feel more manly.  

Weaver and his colleagues acknowledged that the way they threatened the manhood of their participants was not a close simulation of the way that masculinity is threatened in a macho banking environment. However, they said that both their interventions had "the psychological consequence of reminding men that manhood is a precarious social status."

"Whether manhood threats were directly implicated in the recent financial crises that continue to plague the US [and UK] economy, the current findings are at least consistent with such an interpretation," they said. "Certainly, they are suggestive enough to warrant further investigation into this critically important question."

A weakness of the studies was the lack of a genuine control group, in which masculinity was neither threatened nor strengthened. As mentioned by the researchers, it would also be useful for further investigations to observe the effect of gender threats on women's risk-taking behaviour.

This new paper builds on several related findings that are pertinent to the role of a macho culture in the recent banking crises; for example: it's been shown that men, but not women, take higher-risk financial bets when surrounded by same-sex peers of similar status; men make more myopic decisions in competitive all-male situations; and male stock traders in London made higher gains on days that their testosterone levels were higher (probably because they took more risks).

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Jonathan R. Weaver, Joseph A. Vandello, & Jennifer K. Bosson (2012). Intrepid, Imprudent, or Impetuous?: The Effects of Gender Threats on Men's Financial Decisions. Psychology of Men &; Masculinity DOI: 10.1037/a0027087

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Girlie scientist role models could do more harm than good

The lack of women in science, maths and engineering (STEM) careers continues to raise concerns. One cause of the anomaly is thought to be beliefs among schoolchildren that these subjects are somehow inherently "masculine" and not for girls.

So what's needed to inspire schoolgirls, you might think, is sciencey female role models who show that you can be successful in STEM subjects and at the same time be feminine. Some attempts have already been made in that direction - the toy company Mattel brought out a "Computer Engineer Barbie" (complete with pink laptop) and mathematician Danica McKellar (pictured, right) has written a book aimed at inspiring girls: "Math Doesn't Suck: How To Survive Middle School Math Without Losing Your Mind Or Breaking A Nail". (Update: And the EU have just launched a new initiative "Science: it's a girl thing").

The trouble, according to a pair of new studies by Diana Betz and Denise Sekaquaptewa at the University of Michigan, is that girlie science role models can backfire, actually putting off girls who have little existing interest in science and maths subjects.

The first study involved 144 girls (average age 11.5 years) reading about female undergrad role models in a magazine-style interview. Some of the girls read about three female students who were successful in STEM subjects and were also overtly "girlie" (e.g. they wore make up and pink clothes, and liked reading fashion magazines). For schoolgirls who said they had little interest in science subjects, reading about these kind of role models actually diminished their plans to study maths in the future, reduced their maths interest, and lowered their belief in their own abilities and their chances of short-term success (as compared with outcomes for their like-minded peers who read about three successful STEM role-models who weren't overtly girlie - for example, they wore dark-coloured clothes).

Betz and Sekaquaptewa think this ironic effect could be because girlie female scientists seem extra-difficult to emulate. To test this, 42 more schoolgirls (average age 11.4 years) read interviews with more role models. Afterwards, girls who were uninterested in science subjects rated the success of girlie female scientists as less attainable than the success of female scientists who weren't overtly girlie. Girls not interested in science also tended to say that being good at maths and being girlie don't go together.

What does all this mean? Although there's plenty of evidence that stereotype-busting role models can be beneficial, these new results suggest that role models that take on too many stereotypic beliefs at once can actually backfire. "Young girls may see [the success of such role models] as particularly difficult to emulate," the researchers said, "given their rigid stereotypes about gender and scientists."

This research focused on girls at middle-school and it's important to note that the same findings may not apply to older teens or college students. No doubt some readers will also smart at the way femininity or girlieness was conceived in this study, potentially perpetuating unhelpful gender stereotypes. For now, Betz and Sekaquaptewa cautioned: "Submitting STEM role models to Pygmalion-style feminine makeovers may do more harm than good."

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Betz, D., and Sekaquaptewa, D. (2012). My Fair Physicist? Feminine Math and Science Role Models Demotivate Young Girls. Social Psychological and Personality Science DOI: 10.1177/1948550612440735

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Male-to-female transsexuals have "male" brains

People with "gender dysphoria" feel as though their sexual identity doesn't match their biological sex. A popular theory is that such people have a brain with physical characteristics that match the sex they identify with. So, for a man who feels like he is a woman - a male-to-female transsexual - the proposal is that he has a female brain "trapped" in a male body. Now in one of the first studies of its kind, Ivanak Savic and Stefan Arver have scanned the brains of 24 heterosexual, pre-operative male-to-female transsexuals and compared their structure to the brains of 24 heterosexual male and 24 heterosexual female controls. Homosexual transsexuals were omitted to help avoid the complicating influence of sexuality on the results. None of the transsexual participants had taken any hormone treatments, which is another factor that could have skewed the findings.

The scans threw up several of the structural brain differences associated with biological sex that have been reported before. For example, the men's brains had more grey matter in the cerebellum (involved in motor control) and lingual gyrus (involved in vision) and less gray matter and white matter in the precentral sulcus (part of the frontal lobe), compared with the women's brains. The men also had smaller hippocampi (involved in memory) than the women. In all these respects the brains of the male-to-female transexuals resembled the brains of the male control group. Likewise, the male-to-female transsexuals, like the male controls, had more asymmetric brains than the female controls. "The present study does not support the dogma that male-to-female transsexuals have atypical sex dimorphism in the brain but confirms the previously reported sex differences in structural volumes, gray, and white matter fractions," the researchers said. In other words, the male-to-female transsexuals may have felt like women, but their brains had structural characteristics typical of men.

But that's not to say that the male-to-female transsexual participants had brains that were unremarkable. Compared with the male and female controls, they had a smaller thalamus (the brain's relay centre) and putamen (an area involved in motor control) and increased gray matter in the right insula and inferior frontal cortex (regions involved in representing the body, among other functions). Savic and Arver advised treating these differences with caution. They've never been found before so need to be replicated with a larger sample. And even if confirmed, it's not clear what these differences mean, or whether they are a cause or consequence of gender dysphoria. "One highly speculative thought is that the enlargement of the ... insular and inferior frontal cortex ... could derive from a constant rumination about one's own body," the researchers said.

More research is needed, with larger samples and including studies of homosexual transsexuals and female-to-male transsexuals. "Any interpretation must, therefore, proceed cautiously and can at this point only be highly speculative," the researchers said.
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Savic, I., and Arver, S. (2011). Sex Dimorphism of the Brain in Male-to-Female Transsexuals. Cerebral Cortex, 21 (11), 2525-2533 DOI: 10.1093/cercor/bhr032

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Are women's career choices influenced by hormones in the womb?

The paucity of women in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) professions continues to cause concern and controversy. There are no doubt social reasons for the situation: in many cultures, girls are brought up with the expectation that they will eventually enter stereotypically "female" professions. A pertinent 2009 study by Brian Nosek and colleagues found that girls tend to perform worse on science tests in those countries where gender stereotypes are more strongly endorsed.

But that's not to say that biological factors don't also play a role. In a new study, Adriene Beltz and her team have studied males and females with congenital adrenal hyperplesia (CAH): a genetic condition, which for women involves exposure to higher-than-usual levels of testosterone and other androgens in the womb. The researchers say their results show that biological factors related to sex have a real influence on occupational interest, and that by acknowledging this, we'll be more successful in encouraging more women into science and maths careers.

Forty-six females with CAH; 21 of their unaffected sisters; 27 males with CAH; and 31 of their unaffected brothers (aged 9 to 26 years) all rated their interest in 61 jobs from astronomer to social worker.

Females with CAH are raised as girls and identify as girls, even though their genitalia may, to varying degrees, resemble that of a man. For psychologists interested in gender and career choice, the condition allows the usual sex and socialisation confound to be disentangled. Females with CAH, though treated by society largely like other girls, have been exposed to biological factors associated with the male sex.

The listed jobs were analysed according to how much they pertained to "things" or to "people". The unaffected male and female participants showed the divergence in interests that you'd expect, with the males on average showing more of a bias than females towards "things" jobs like mechanic or biologist than "people" jobs such as high school teacher or dancer. The key finding is that female participants with CAH also differed from unaffected female participants, rating jobs that pertain to "things" more favourably (whilst rating "people" jobs just the same as unaffected females). Moreover, the more androgen they were exposed to in the womb, based on their type of CAH and their genital development, the stronger their interest in thing-related jobs. Male participants with CAH did not answer differently from unaffected male participants.

"Our findings indicate that career choices are influenced by prenatal androgens through a psychological orientation to objects versus people that manifests in gender-typed occupational interests," the researchers said. They also acknowledged the large amount of within-sex variation in interests, and the role played by socio-cultural factors. "Our results are relevant to efforts to increase participation of girls and women in STEM careers. It is important to recognise that career choices have roots in early-developing and biologically-influenced interests. Girls and women might be encouraged to pursue STEM careers by focusing on the ways in which an orientation to people is compatible with those careers."

These conclusions chime with a 2006 study that tested the effects of a programme designed to teach girls about the altruistic value of science. The programme actually failed in this objective, but girls who believed in the altruistic value of science were found to be more interested in it, thus reinforcing the idea science could be made more appealing to women by highlighting its human importance.
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Beltz, A., Swanson, J., and Berenbaum, S. (2011). Gendered occupational interests: Prenatal androgen effects on psychological orientation to Things versus People. Hormones and Behavior, 60 (4), 313-317 DOI: 10.1016/j.yhbeh.2011.06.002

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At what age do girls prefer pink?

Crudely speaking, the psychological field of gender development is split between those who see gender differences as learned via socially constructed ideas about gender, and those who believe many gender differences are actually “sex differences”, innate and biologically driven.

In Western cultures, girls consistently prefer pink, boys prefer blue. Which academic camp lays claim to this difference? Past research has made a case, in terms of the evolutionary advantage of finding fruit, for why females might be biologically predisposed to prefer pink and other bright colours. But a new study purports to show that girls only acquire their preference for pink, and boys their aversion to it, at around the age of two to three, just as they’re beginning to talk about and become aware of gender. Vannessa LoBue and Judy DeLoache say their finding undermines the notion of innate sex differences in colour preference. “If females have a biological predisposition to favour colours such as pink, this preference should be evident regardless of experience of the acquisition of gender concepts,” they said.

LoBue and DeLoache presented 192 boys and girls aged between seven months and five years with pairs of small objects (e.g. coasters and plastic clips) and invited them to reach for one. Each item in a pair was identical to the other except for its colour: one was always pink, the other either green, blue, yellow or orange. The key test was whether boys and girls would show a preference for choosing pink objects and at what age such a bias might arise.

At the age of two, but not before, girls chose pink objects more often than boys did, and by age two and a half they demonstrated a clear preference for pink, picking the pink-coloured object more often than you’d expect based on random choice. By the age of four, this was just under 80 per cent of the time – however there was evidence of this bias falling away at age five.

Boys showed the opposite pattern to girls. At the ages of two, four and five, they chose pink less often than you’d expect based on random choices. In fact, their selection of the pink object became progressively more rare, reaching about 20 per cent at age five.

A second experiment zoomed in on the age period of two to three years, to see how colour preferences changed during this crucial year. The same procedure as before was repeated with 64 boys and girls in this age group. Among the children aged under two and a half, both boys and girls chose pink objects around 50 per cent of the time, just as you’d expect if they were choosing randomly and had no real colour preference. Among those aged between two and a half to three years, by contrast, the boys showed a bias against choosing pink and the girls showed a bias in favour of pink.

“This research lends important information to when children develop gender-stereotyped colour preferences …” the researchers said. “Knowing exactly when children begin to demonstrate these tendencies can help lead to fuller understanding of the development of gender-stereotyped behaviour more generally and can be an important marker for future research in this domain.”
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LoBue, V., and DeLoache, J. (2011). Pretty in pink: The early development of gender-stereotyped colour preferences. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 29 (3), 656-667 DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-835X.2011.02027.x

If you're interested in gender development and the way it's studied and talked about, I recommend Cordelia Fine's book Delusions of Gender.

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Let me help you with that ... How women suffer from benevolent sexism

What could be wrong with a gentleman opening a door for a lady? According to some social psychologists, such acts endorse gender stereotypes: the idea that women are weak and need help; that men are powerful patriarchs. Now a study has looked at how women are perceived when they accept or reject an act of so-called "benevolent sexism"* and it finds that they're caught in a double-bind. Women who accept help from a man are seen as warmer, but less competent. Women who reject help are seen as more competent, but cold.

Across three studies Julia Becker and her colleagues presented dozens of German students with a vignette (either in prose or as a comic strip) in which a male office worker offers to help a female colleague set up a computer server. As he makes his offer, he says: "Oh, the network server, that's so difficult and frustrating for a woman to grapple with. Let me do it for you." Some students read a version in which the woman accepts the offer; others read a version in which she rejected it, saying "I can do it. It's not a problem for a woman".

If the woman rejected the offer she was rated as more competent, but less warm (compared to a story version in which her reply wasn't revealed). If she accepted the offer, she was judged as more warm, but less competent. These effects also influenced the participants' decisions over her job suitability. If she rejected the offer of help she was judged less suitable for a care-home job that depends on emotional skills. If she accepted the offer then she was judged less suitable for a managerial position.

By contrast, men aren't caught in the same double-bind. Other participants read a different version of the story in which a woman offered technical help to a man. In this case, participants judged the man as more competent, but no less warm, if he rejected the offer.

An important caveat was identified once the researchers began measuring the participants' endorsement of benevolent sexism, as revealed by their agreement with statements like "Women should be cherished and protected by men". The perception of an independent woman as competent but cold was only formed by those participants who endorsed benevolent sexism.

Another aspect the researchers looked at was perceptions of the help-giver. Here they found that advocates of benevolent sexism perceived a male help-giver as particularly warm and competent when his offer of help was accepted.

"Nowadays, sexist behaviour has become more subtle because of changing social norms, and patronising offers come in subtle guises," the researchers said. "This exacerbates a woman's dilemma about how to respond and increases the likelihood that she will be viewed as 'cold' if she declines paternalistic help."
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Becker, J., Glick, P., Ilic, M., and Bohner, G. (2011). Damned if she does, damned if she doesn't: Consequences of accepting versus confronting patronizing help for the female target and male actor. European Journal of Social Psychology DOI: 10.1002/ejsp.823

*There's a lot of resistance to the idea of benevolent sexism. Find out what happened when lead author of this research, Julia Becker, appeared on BBC Radio Five (the column originally appeared in The Psychologist, the monthly magazine of the British Psychological Society).

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Men are as motivated by cute baby faces as women

Cuteness as an evolutionary adaptation

Both Charles Darwin and Konrad Lorenz, the pioneering ethologist, wrote about the appeal of baby faces as a possible adaptive mechanism. They surmised that babies' perceived cuteness could be nature's way of ensuring the little terrors get looked after. Now a team led by Morten Kringelbach and Christine Parsons has shown that men are as motivated by baby faces as women. Kringelbach is the same researcher who a few years ago showed that looking at baby faces, as opposed to adult faces, is associated with a distinct pattern of brain activity in the orbitofrontal cortex - a kind of neural "cuteness response".

For the new study, 31 men and 37 women (average age 20 years), all with limited experience of babies, looked at photographs of the faces of 70 babies (aged 3 to 12 months), each shown for five seconds, and rated their attractiveness. These results conformed to cultural stereotypes about gender differences, with the women tending to rate the babies as more attractive than the men (no such gender difference emerged for the rating of adult faces). A desire to conform to gender roles could have played a role here. However, both men and women rated as more attractive those baby faces that most closely conformed to the cute ideal: a large rounded forehead, large low-set eyes, a short and narrow nose and a small chin.

In another part of the experiment, performed either before or after the attractiveness ratings, the participants were able to press a button repeatedly to control how long each baby face remained on the screen. This was taken as a measure of how much the participants were motivated to look at the faces. In this case the men scored just the same as the women. Moreover, for both men and women it was those faces that most closely conformed to the cute ideal that they made the effort to look at for longer.

"Our findings indicate that both men and women appraise what is colloquially described as a 'cute' unfamiliar infant positively, and they will work to see that infant for longer than an infant with less 'cute' features," the researchers said. "This is in line with previous studies showing that 'cuter' infants are rated as more friendly, cheerful, and likeable and are rated as more 'adoptable'."
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Parsons, C., Young, K., Kumari, N., Stein, A., and Kringelbach, M. (2011). The Motivational Salience of Infant Faces Is Similar for Men and Women. PLoS ONE, 6 (5) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0020632

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