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Commitments and Grudges

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2016

Frans B. M. de Waal
Frans B. M. de Waal*
Affiliation:
Wisconsin Regional Primate Research Center, 1223 Capitol Court, Madison, WI 53715-1299
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Extract

One of the gender differences reported here, women's commitment to particular political figures and men's sensitivity to competitive situations, has my particular interest inasmuch as it appears to match behavioral sex differences in chimpanzees. While the author is aware of this similarity, I intend to explore it further, in the meantime correcting point by point a misleading dichotomy underlying much of the author's discussion. Females are said to emphasize social bonding and positive emotions, seeking political solutions based on informal agreement, whereas males are considered to be more confrontational and dominance-oriented. Yet, aggressive and cohesive tendencies are not as antithetical as they appear, and less sex-linked than suggested. In fact, one could argue that human males owe their success in the political arena to their ability to combine both tendencies.

Type
Articles and Commentaries
Information
Politics and the Life Sciences , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , August 1989 , pp. 27 - 30
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Politics and the Life Sciences 

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References

Notes

1. One methodological criticism could be made. Since subjects were tested exclusively on images of male politicians, it cannot be excluded that, instead of being absolute gender characteristics, the observed differences reflect differences in people's responses to leaders of their own versus the opposite gender. Does the stronger response of women to Gary Hart's displays of happiness, for example, really mean that women are more sensitive than men to “hedonic” gestures? Hart is not a gender-neutral object. My own cheek muscles may twitch more in response to an attractive female's smile than to a male's. It is possible that female viewers pay more attention to the message of a female politician, even if this message is rather abstract, than to that of a male politician. This is not to say that the interaction between object gender and stimulus gender explains all or even most of the results; only that this factor needs to be brought under control before firm conclusions can be drawn.Google Scholar