Do high-income men marry younger wives? What about men with a history of many sex partners?

Evolutionary theory claims that men value physically attractive partners while women desire partners with high status. Normally, we think of status in terms of income, but we can divide men in terms of their sexual success with women. Physical attractiveness is correlated with youth, so I calculated the age difference for married couples. The following is the average number of years that the husband is older than the wife (General Social Survey, sample size = 338):

Mean number of years that the husband is older than the wife by husband's income

Low-income      2.93
Middle-income  2.23
High-income     1.66

This is the opposite of what we predicted: the age gap is smallest for the high-income. Evidently, wealthy men and their wives are more egalitarian, while poor couples are more traditional.

And by number of sex partners since age 18?

Mean number of years that the husband is older than the wife by sex partners since 18

0-3       1.81
4-6       2.86
7-9       2.08
10-19   2.48
20+      4.54

The mean bounces around for the lower numbers, but the men with 20 or more sexual partners have the youngest wives by far.

Sexually successful men seem to be trading their appeal for more youthful wives, but this does not seem to be the case for men with lots of money.

Quick thoughts on polyamory

Evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller wrote a piece for Quillette that sees polyamory becoming a mainstream part of modern society.

Assuming that he is right that openness to polyamory is growing, I suspect this is part of a larger trend toward greater cultural libertarianism: pursue your desires as long as you don't aggress against others. It's another step in the move away from institutions and roles and toward contracts. It's the view that there there is no proper way but your way (as long as you don't harm anyone).

I'm surprised that Miller doesn't see this trend as getting close to as a society that is purely a reflection of biology.  Many traditional institutions seem to be designed to check human nature. "I want all attractive women." "Sorry, you get one." "My old wife isn't sexy anymore. I want to trade in her in for a younger model." "Sorry, you get one, for good."

What does a cultural libertarian society look like?  What does nature look like? Miller should know. Women are picky and want a high-status partner who reliably gives his abundant resources to her. Those men are in short supply. Men want many partners but so do other men, and they find themselves in a competitive situation with limited resources. High mate value men tend to win by getting the most attractive women, and getting the most women. Low mate value men tend to get a partner by devoting resources only to her, but some of these men get no one.

Isn't this what we'll get if polyamory grows? There will be no institutional constraints on alphas. They will focus on being players, and many women will respond to their attention. Men of low mate value will have a harder time winning over a partner, and their offer of monogamy will be worth less in a society that does not value it. Like the alphas, they will long more strongly for multiple partners since there are no dominant institutions telling them monogamy is the right way, but many of them will get no women, forget about many. A large population of young men with no access to partners is not good for the stability of society.

Evolutionary biology teaches that humans tend to follow one of two strategies: high mating effort or high parenting effort. One tends to happen at the expense of the other. Under polyamory, interest will be shifted toward pursuing mates. Parental effort will suffer. That means fewer children--as if we don't already have a problem replacing ourselves--and the care given to children will be of lower quality.

It looks like such a system would select in evolutionary terms for dominant and slick men rather than solid, steady men. Society benefits from more steady men and fewer con artists.

More promiscuity leads to more jealousy which is a major cause of homicide. The US already has the highest rate of homicide among wealthy countries.

From what I can see, we need more monogamy, not less.

UPDATE: This pro-polyamory position taken by Miller seems to be another case of privileged people advocating lifestyles that can work for them but that wreak havoc on vulnerable populations. I suspect that people like Hugh Hefner bear some responsibility for present-day Black America.

Are men funnier than women?

This new meta-analysis of 28 studies finds that men are funnier than women. The gap, however, is not large (Cohen's d = .32).  To get specific, 63% of males get more laughter than the average female. 

The authors explain the difference in evolutionary terms: Women are choosier than men when selecting mates, and humor serves as an indicator of mental fitness that is not easy to fake. You're funny or you're not. This pressure has supposedly selected for men who can make people laugh.

Data shocker: Higher status men tend to have more attractive wives

After blogging recently on sexual inequality among men, I'm surprised that it's so easy for people to be so skeptical about basic ideas that come from evolutionary theory.  I would never question that some men have more sex than others. It's obvious. I don't naturally waste limited mental energy on this type of issue until someone comes along and questions it.

So, it made me wonder: How many people doubt that high status men tend to have better looking wives?  Here's a graph from GSS based on 587 women whose physical attractiveness was rated by interviewers (1-5) and who were asked the educational level of their spouses:

The x-axis is years of school completed by the husband, and the y-axis is the mean of the wives' attractiveness.

You can see that attractiveness tends to rise with the husband's education. To get specific, high school dropouts have wives that are roughly three-fifths of a standard deviation less attractive than the most educated group.

I don't know about you, but I'm shocked.

UPDATE:  I'm overeducated and have a smokin' hot wife, so I'm biased.

ANOTHER UPDATE:  I suspect the status-hotness relationship would be even stronger if men rated the women. Most GSS interviewers are women, and I strongly suspect they tend to be biased toward rating a woman's face, dress, cosmetics, etc., while men tend to focus on curves.

High vs low mating success among never-married men

This graph displays the number of sex partners since age 18 for never-married men ages 30-39.  You can see that this is a very diverse group.  More than 10% have had zero partners ("40 year-old virgins"), and 41% have been with five or fewer.  By contrast, 35% report a dozen or more partners.

If we divide these men into a low (0-5) and high group (12+), the median for the low group is 2, and it's 25 for the high group. That's 12.5 times more women than the low group.

The high group --roughly one-third of never-married men -- looks like it is following the high mating effort strategy that was discussed in the last post, while the low group, with a median of two women, seems to be doing poorly at any strategy.  

Do men with a history of many sex partners avoid marriage?

According to evolutionary theory, there is a tradeoff between mating effort and parental effort. If you put more time and energy into pursuing sexual partners, this is less time and energy to devote to raising children. High mating effort or high parental effort are seen as alternative "strategies."

So, are men with lots of sex partners less likely to be married -- a measure of parental effort? Or is it generally the case that men with many partners follow a combined strategy of marriage plus lots of women? And on the low side, does a man with undesirable traits have few partners and fail to convince a woman to marry him?

The General Social Survey asked men how many sex partners they have had since 18, and they asked about current marital status. Let's focus on men in their 30s. Here are the mean number of partners (I exclude men who say more than 100 because these outliers throw off the mean) by marital status:

Mean number of sex partners since 18 (N = 2,827)

Never Married  14.2
Married  9.0
Widowed  6.6
Separated  14.8
Divorced  17.1

Widowed and married men have had the fewest partners, while never-marrieds and separated/divorced have had the most. Put very roughly, the anti-marriage group has had double the partners compared to the pro-marriage group.

I suppose you could argue that marital status is driving the number of sex partners rather than reverse -- the idea being that marriage reduces promiscuity -- but the average never-married has been with as many women as the typical separated guy. It looks to me like men who are good at getting partners avoid marriage or are weakly attached to it. Many of them do get married, but it's less likely to last. There does seem to be some tradeoff going on here.
 

How to be right about people

If you want to be right about people, taking biology and evolution seriously is a big help.

A few years ago, researchers started telling us how the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin make us more loving and caring toward others; that biologically, we have this kumbaya side to our nature.

I was skeptical because I know that human genes, like those of all animals, have been selected over deep history to produce people who care about themselves and their families at the expense of others. We're not put together to sacrifice for all humanity like we would for a daughter.

So I was not surprised to learn from more recent research that, yes, oxytocin and vasopressin make us more nurturing, but only towards the ingroup; you know, friends and family. Towards outsiders, the hormones cause us to feel more, shall we say, ill-disposed.

It's almost as if you have two kinds of people: 1) those who are selfish and don't care about groups, and 2) those who love and sacrifice for the ingroup, and dislike the outgroup. And the true humanitarian--the man who would lay his life down for a stranger as quickly as he would his mother--is a rare specimen, indeed.

Explanations of rape

Here's new research from Evolution and Human Behavior:

We use data from the National Incident-Based Reporting System to examine the effects of offender and victim age on whether male offenders commit sexual assault while robbing women. Restricting analyses to robberies reveals the offenders' age preferences since it allows one to control for the effects of opportunity. We find that robbers of all ages are most likely to sexually assault women at ages 15–29 years, ages when their reproductive potential is highest. However, in contrast to the idea that rape is a direct adaptation, victims are no more likely to be raped than sexually assaulted at these ages. The age of the offender is also a strong predictor of sexual assault. The likelihood that a robber commits a sexual assault increases from age 12 years until he reaches his early thirties when it begins to decline. This age pattern corresponds, to some extent, to age differences in the male sex drive.

The findings contradict the feminist theory of rape. Given a robbery, criminals are more likely to use the opportunity to sexually assault a female victim if she is young. According to feminists, rape is a way to put a woman in her place. If this were the motivation, I would expect men to target powerful women. A criminal would get a much bigger power rush from raping Hillary Clinton than a little 15 year old nobody. I imagine the feminist would respond that Hillary is a high-risk target--perps target weak victims because they are more likely to get away with it. I would agree with the view that rapists are opportunists, but that just supports a rational choice theory of rape.

That's so primitive

The use of the word "primitive" is revealing. Here is a partial list of things that are labeled primitive as opposed to modern:

Ethnocentrism
Racism
Nativism
Xenophobia
Nepotism
Favoritism
Sexism
Objectification
Patriarchy
Hierarchy
Supernaturalism
Hunting
Violent sports
Fist fighting
Assault
War
Genocide
Anger
Hate
Jealousy

Funny, but you never hear love or compassion or altruism or generosity or cooperation described as primitive even though they are certainly as old as the other items. What people are really saying when they use the word primitive is "old stuff that we don't like but can't seem to get rid of."  All the energy devoted to eradicating these barbarisms, but they never die.  These folks don't know it, but their use of the word primitive is basically making a case for a biological view of man. Show me a behavior dismissed as primitive, and I'll show you a behavior rooted in evolution and biology.    

Men with more friends at work have more kids

In his book Men in Groups, Lionel Tiger (damn, I wish I could have cool animals for my first and last names--Tiger Woods, eat your heart out) hypothesized that men who are attached to male groups will have greater reproductive success than isolated men. Even if a guy is not dominant, being a part of a group will enhance his attractiveness since he is perceived to have greater access to resources and protection.

Men who participated in the GSS were asked: 1) the number of close friends they have at work, and 2) the number of children they have (n = 136). The correlation between the two for guys who are old enough to have completed their families but are not yet retirement age (45-64) is .19. It is small but statistically significant. Men with more friends at work do tend to have more kids. (Work is not generally an all-male group, but it does tend to be dominated by men and is thus "male" in that sense). 

UPDATE: I thought men with many friends at work might earn more due to connections which, in turn, would lead them to have more kids since they could better afford them, but the impact of friends on family size is not reduced when income is entered into an OLS regression model.  

Closeness to ovulation predicted voting for Obama

In a recent study of young white women, researchers found that subjects were more likely to plan to vote for Obama for president if asked around the time when they were ovulating. This was only true, however, if the women perceived Obama to be lighter-skinned than he actually is. If they perceived him to be darker than he is, closeness to ovulation lowered the chance of voting for him.

The authors interpreted this to mean that women become sensitive to men as potential mates around the time when they are most fertile; if a man seems dangerous (in this study blackness is thought to be associated with dangerousness) they are repelled by him out of fear of sexual assault; if a man seems powerful, attractive, and safe, they will be attracted to him. The study also found that these tendencies were particularly strong among conservative women (liberal women planned to vote for Obama, regardless). 

The authors also suggest that, since Obama won the election, many whites do not perceive him as black. They imply that people look at more than skin color when determining race, and Obama's education, career, demeanor, Waspishness, and restraint communicate whiteness.

The message here for Republicans for 2012 is that a few percentage points might be gained among women if the nominee is a powerful, attractive yet safe candidate. Of the current prospective men, I suspect that Romney best fits the description, which is not saying much. Most of the candidates seem weak or unattractive: politics attracts many weasels. 

Marilyn Monroe knew what she was doing: Feminine voices are sexy

In this new study, researchers found that men find feminine female voices more sexually attractive, especially for short-term mating.  Women also perceive femininity in other female voices to be more flirtatious and attractive to men. The authors conclude that women use vocal femininity to track the threat potential of competitors.   

Submissive men are more sensitive to cues of male dominance

According to this 2010 study, less dominant men are more sensitive to physical dominance cues in other men. By dominance cues, the authors mean masculine features like a prominent jaw or brow. They conclude that this sensitivity is adaptive since it is more costly for a submissive man to misperceive the dominance of another man. Their findings are consistent with another study which showed that shorter men notice signs of dominance more than tall men.

Once again, stereotypes turn out to be true

A study published in the current issue of Evolution and Human Behavior shows us, once again, that people should respect stereotypes and the sub-rational gut. 

The authors found that college students could look at photos of sex offenders for only two seconds and then predict whether the person was a violent or non-violent offender. 

Analysis revealed that students were focusing on signs of testosterone and masculinity (e.g., heavy brows, apparent physical strength, youth). 

Women were more likely than men to perceive the the offenders to be violent. The authors concluded that results support the view that humans have evolved the ability to quickly size up the physical threat of another person because heavy costs would accompany the inability to do so, and that women would be particularly likely to perceive a man as a physical threat because of the risk of sexual violence. 

These stereotypes find their way into fiction all the time. Marv in Sin City (shown above), played by Mickey Rourke, might be a good example from the past few years. Someone who looks like Marv might actually be a pussycat, but I'm not going to call him an asshole to his face.  


UPDATE: Two other points: 1) Non-violent sex offenders are typically depicted as small, weak weasels. Think of the pedophile played by Jackie Earle Haley in Little Children. 2) The study deliberately avoids race, stating that research indicates a bias against photos of non-whites. But the study's findings can easily be used to explain the fear that people feel toward blacks. African Americans are perceived as having higher levels of testosterone as indicated by physical traits. Size and apparent physical strength; hard muscle tone; narrow hips and broad shoulders; long limbs--all are masculine characteristics.

John Manning in The Finger Book also claims that dark skin is a sign of testosterone. Men are darker than women, and he presents the case that abundant melanosomes and melanin inhibit the invasion of bacteria and fungi through the outer surface of the skin and are found in people whose immune systems are weakened by high levels of testosterone. 

Nurturists would explain the perceived dangerousness of blacks as a myth taught to kids by prejudiced parents and peers. But Asians are racial outsiders: why don't whites have any fear of them? Why are blacks afraid of blacks? Why are race-virgin immigrants--white or Asian--afraid of blacks?