Miscellany
Some interesting
things.
Mahmood Mamdani's
reviews
in Foreign Affairs of Gilles Kepel's and Olivier Roy's new books on Political
Islam.
Maureen Dowd
today,
citing numbers and studies:
"As Dr. Stephanie Brown, the lead author of the study, summed it up for
reporters: "Powerful women are at a disadvantage in the marriage market because
men may prefer to marry less-accomplished women." Men think that women with
important jobs are more likely to cheat on
them.
"The hypothesis," Dr.
Brown said, "is that there are evolutionary pressures on males to take steps to
minimize the risk of raising offspring that are not their own." Women, by
contrast, did not show a marked difference in their attraction to men who might
work above or below them. And men did not show a preference when it came to
one-night stands.
A second
study, which was by researchers at four British universities and reported last
week, suggested that smart men with demanding jobs would rather have
old-fashioned wives, like their mums, than equals. The study found that a high
I.Q. hampers a woman's chance to get married, while it is a plus for men. The
prospect for marriage increased by 35 percent for guys for each 16-point
increase in I.Q.; for women, there is a 40 percent drop for each 16-point rise."
More on this later, although read on for
the Schwartz article Dowd mentions. It's fascinating.
In the meantime, Howard Dean for DNC
Chairman! If the Democrats choose anyone else, they'll be shooting themselves in
the foot. And brain.
A Frist run for
presidency in '08 worries me.
December 14,
2004.
Glass Ceilings at Altar As Well as
Boardroom
By JOHN
SCHWARTZ
Men would rather marry their
secretaries than their bosses, and evolution may be to blame, psychology
researchers at the University of Michigan reported last week.
The study, in which college
undergraduates were asked to make hypothetical choices, suggests that men in
search of long-term relationships prefer to marry women in subordinate jobs
rather than women who are supervisors, said Dr. Stephanie Brown, a social
psychologist at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research and
the report's lead author.
Dr. Brown said
the findings, reported in the current issue of the journal Evolution and Human
Behavior, could have far-reaching implications. ''These findings provide
empirical support for the widespread belief that powerful women are at a
disadvantage in the marriage market because men may prefer to marry less
accomplished women,'' she said.
The
researchers asked 120 men and 208 women, all undergraduates, to rate their
hypothetical attraction to people they might know from work. The men, for
example, were shown pictures and asked, ''Imagine that you have just taken a job
and that Jennifer is your immediate supervisor,'' or peer, or assistant. The
participants were then asked to rate, on one-to-nine scale, how much they would
like to go to a party, date or marry the person.
Women in the study, which was financed
in part by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health, did not show a
marked difference in their attraction to men who might work above or below them
on the corporate ladder. And men did not show a preference when it came to the
possibility of a one-night stand.
But
when asked about long-term relationships, the men showed a marked preference for
the subordinates as opposed to the bosses.
The findings, which seem to confirm an
uncomfortable number of male stereotypes and many mothers' admonitions to their
daughters, reflect more than male vanity and insecurity, the researchers argue.
Dr. Brown and her co-author, Brian Lewis of the University of California, Los
Angeles, wrote that ''pressures associated with the threat of paternal
uncertainty'' shaped the men's
decisions.
In other words, a subordinate
woman might be less likely to fool around, and ''female infidelity is a severe
reproductive threat to males'' in long-term relationships, the researchers
wrote.
In fact, the evolutionary
interpretation of human mating behavior is controversial. In an e-mail
interview, Dr. Ellen Berscheid, a professor of psychology at the University of
Minnesota, took a slight jab at ''these florid psychoevolutionary
interpretations of human behavior that wholly ignore the influence of
contemporary, mundane social institutional
forces."
Relational dominance, she said,
could mean different things in a different study -- like one that created
hypothetical mates who were richer or poorer than the research subjects. With a
money comparison, she said, ''the results may well have been quite
different.''
So, Dr. Berscheid wrote,
while ''the results may be interesting in terms of assessing probability of
workplace romantic relationships'' under some circumstances, ''I think they
probably say little about evolution and human
behavior.''
In an interview, Dr. Brown
acknowledged that the work was likely to stir dispute.
''It bothers people to think about this
in terms of evolution that males could be programmed in any way, or have a
predisposition to control another person or member of the opposite sex,'' she
said. "I think it's something we wouldn't like to say about males; it's
something males wouldn't like to say about
themselves.''
In fact, she said, ''I
lost a lot of collaborators on this
piece.''
She conceded that evolutionary
causes could not always be teased out of behavior, saying, ''I don't think it's
ever possible to really separate out what proportion of a behavior is shaped by
evolutionary history and which parts are shaped by our environment or culture.''
Posted: Thursday - January 13, 2005 at 08:41 PM
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