One particular study found no statistical difference in the number of women or men “marrying-up” in a sample of 1109 first-time married couples in the United States.
For citizens of rural India, hypergamy is an opportunity to modernize. Marriages in rural India are increasingly examples of hypergamy.
Seems pretty obvious that hypergamy is what poor women do in societies that only let them gain control of resources through marriage. It’s a rational adjustment to a sexist, unequal society, not some sort of instinct.
Polyamory, especially the “open mesh” kind, dissolves the question of whether there exists a better match, or (most of) the fear of losing a partner to someone better. It’s no longer necessary to consider whether this match outranks alternatives you haven’t yet encountered, for both of you. It’s sufficient to consider whether it works in itself.
Seems pretty obvious that hypergamy is what poor women do in societies that only let them gain control of resources through marriage. It’s a rational adjustment to a sexist, unequal society, not some sort of instinct.
This is a hypothesis worth investigating, but how much data seems to support it? The research I’ve read supports the existence of hypergamy in both modern societies, and in pre-agricultural societies without high levels of gender inequality.
The Dalmia study cited on Wikipedia supposedly doesn’t find women “marrying up,” but since I can’t read the full text I’m not sure how they were operationalizing “marries up.” For instance, perhaps the study found that women don’t marry up in wealth. But that doesn’t mean they don’t marry up in education, which is what this study found:
Contrary to popular beliefs, the increased concentration of women at the top of the education distribution has not resulted in a worsening of the marriage market prospects of more educated women. The “success gap” declined substantially in the 1980’s and 1990’s. The marriage market accommodated the shift through a decline in hypergamy at the upper end of the education distribution.
On the other hand, the declining economic prospects of men at the bottom of the education distribution have rendered many below the threshold of marriagiability. The likelihood of a 40-44 year old man with 11 years of education being married fell by over 20 percentage points over the 20-year period, a greater decline than that for women of the same education level. There was no decline in hypergamy at this end of the spectrum; in fact, some measures indicate an increase in hypergamy for this group, as women have increasingly been reaching upward in the education distribution for husbands.
In short, education hypergamy exists, but it’s getting weaker at the top (presumably because there is a shortage of higher-education men to date up to), and may be getting stronger at the bottom.
For women of high socioeconomic status, hypergamy does appear to decrease. For instance, women in some college samples tend to not care about men’s wealth very much. Though this could also be partly because those women are more oriented towards short-term mating.
Even in a modern, short-term mating context, it’s not clear that hypergamy disappears. In a speed dating study, Asendorpf & Penke found
The key finding for popularity was that both men and women’s popularity was largely based on easily perceivable physical attributes such as facial and vocal attractiveness, height and weight. This was already the full story for women’s popularity in speed-dating, that is, men used only physical cues for their choices. In contrast, women included more criteria, namely men’s sociosexuality and shyness as well as cues for current or future resource providing potential, such as education, income, and openness to experience (but not cues of steady resource striving like conscientiousness).
Note how eduction and income mattered to women, but not to men. Those are elements of hypergamy. Avoiding shy men is also hypergamy because shyness is low-status in Western men.
For another example of modern hypergamy, observe the attraction of women to rockstars and actors. Yet do women become groupies of rockstars merely in hope of gaining their resources through marriage, as a rational adjustment to a sexist society? I doubt it.
Is modern hypergamy merely a hold-over due to outdated norms? No. In pre-agricultural societies where women don’t economically depend on men, hypergamy still exists. Anthropologists used to be bamboozled by the discovery that the lioness’ share of calories in some cultures is supplied by the women. So why were the men hunting, if it was so inefficient? Anthroplogists eventually came up with the hypothesis that male hunting isn’t (just) about providing meat.
Hawkes and Bird argue that a large function of men’s hunting isn’t putting food on the table for their families, but rather showing off to gain social status and mating success. The researchers observe that competent male Ache hunters have greater mating success:
The families of better hunters end up with no more meat than other families. Hill and Hurtado’s demographic data show little difference in survival risk for the children of better hunters. But men rated as better hunters had much higher fertility. In a smaller data set, better Ache hunters were more often named by women as lovers and as secondary fathers of more children. (Secondary fathers are men other than a mother’s husband who were sexually involved with her at the time of her pregnancy). Ache women did not nominate hunting skill as a criterion for choosing a mate, but men emphasized its importance for success with women.
Since the hunter’s skill doesn’t translate into more provisioning for his family, the it’s difficult to explain women’s preference for hunters as a response to economic deprivation. Women don’t have to date good hunters to feed their children, but they do anyway.
In other ethnographic cases, hunting success is also associated with advantages in male competition. Hadza men foraging in northern Tanzania are big game specialists (Fig. 1). As among the Ache, hunters do not control the distribution of meat. In this case, the wives and children of better hunters do have more positive weight gains, and those wives have surviving children faster. But these differences are directly associated with the foraging effort of the women themselves. , As with the Ache, the wide sharing of meat means that Hadza women and children receive little of their meat from kills by their husband and father. Consistent with this, a father’s death or parental divorce has no effect on child survival. However, better Hadza hunters tend to be married to harder-working wives. Older men who are better hunters have younger wives, suggesting they are more likely to leave an older wife to raise a second family—another way they have increased success in competing for paternity. Meriam turtle hunters also have higher age-specific reproductive success than do nonhunters and, as with the Hadza, this seems due to assortative mating: hunters claim more fertile wives than do nonhunters.
Successful hunters gain high status, have more partners, and experience greater reproductive success. That’s hypergamy.
The “economic inequality” hypothesis does not explain this pattern of women “dating up” in terms of . It does seem plausible that women start caring less about men’s economic status in prosperous societies, but that doesn’t mean that women have stopped being hypergamous.
Without the need to mate with good providers to put roofs over their heads, women are free to go after the men they are attracted to, which seems to mean dating up on other dimensions they care about such as personality traits, education, status, intelligence, and accomplishments (some of these traits have been discussed in this comment, and others will have to wait for another time). This appears to be a generalized phenomenon; for instance, women care more about humor in their partners than men do, another culturally-valued trait.
As far as I can tell, this pattern of evidence looks a lot more like some sort of instinct on the part of women than merely a response to economic inequality (those as I’ve mentioned above, economic inequality is a factor in how hypergamy is expressed). The other problem with the sociocultural inequality hypothesis is that it can’t explain how gender inequality came about in the first place: clearly there are some pre-cultural forces in play. It’s difficult to make any sense out of this data without invoking evolutionary theories like sexual selection.
I’m not necessarily talking about marriage or women seeking material comfort here. I’m referring to the mechanisms of female and male sexual desire and how they on average differ in more than just the parameters of the physical attributes the sexes seek in mates.
For most women their sexual attraction is in itself partially dependant on how desirable she thinks other women find the male in question. It also depends heavily on his status. And status as we know is basically zero sum.
Evidence that I suspect says more about Tina Fey’s past insecurities than about scarcity bias. She is hot enough that she would have been seen as such even in school. Unless American high schools really are like they appear in movies. The hot girl isn’t hot until she has a makeover involving taking off her glasses and letting her hair down!
When I was in high school, most of the girls around me seemed to me to be as beautiful as anyone I ever saw on television or in the movies. Most high school girls are significantly hotter than the woman of median hotness in the population as a whole (getting older tends to make women less beautiful), so they would have to be even hotter than that in order to stand out.
It’s plausible that people weren’t talking about in public where she could hear it about how good she looked until she became famous.
Also, excuse me if I’m mistaken about this, but there’s something about your phrasing which leaves me thinking that there’s something weird about a woman who’s attractive to you being insecure about her looks. There seems to be huge cultural pressure in the US for women to think they don’t look good enough, and what’s surprising to me is immunity to it.
but there’s something about your phrasing which leaves me thinking that there’s something weird about a woman who’s attractive to you being insecure about her looks.
No. I’ve met enough people who fit that category that I don’t find it weird at all. A little annoying and something to be discouraged if convenient but not particularly weird.
The ‘hot’ evaluation is not a matter of who I find attractive but of who I evaluate as being considered attractive in general (or possibly what I think other people with think other people find attractive). She isn’t exactly what I find attractive even though her general purpose hotness overflows into the wedrifid specific evaluation at least in part.
I was referring to an indication of the verbal behaviour of people encountering Tina Fey (people saying that she is hot) rather than whether Tina Fey personally considers herself hot. Sure, personal insecurity can bias recollections about what people say and do but that certainly isn’t covered in my phrasing—that’s all in your reading!
Status is zero sum? I highly doubt it. I am certain that it’s not something you can simply wave at with an “as we know”.
It is, more or less by the practical meaning of being a ranking of all individuals in the group in question. You really can’t all come first in a (rat) race. Encouragement awards don’t count.
The more interesting thing to consider is how our internal measures of status and outward indicators of status can be manipulated such that we can get better results from those instincts in a positive sum way. This is definitely possible, at least to some degree.
Before you posted that I’d have said it was a pretty obvious idea. Can you develop your objection more?
The reason it seems obvious to me is that status is measured relative to the rest of the tribe. If you climb up the social ladder, that means someone got bumped down. Zero net change.
Imagine two islands, each with some tiny population—let’s say, 10 each. Nobody ever interacts with anyone off-island, and the resources and living standards are the same. Now if I told you that people on island 1 are higher-status than people on island 2, does that strike you as a nonsensical statement? To me, it does not; it means that there is more mutual respect on island 1. I think that parsing that as “status” is justified, because it’s not synonymous with how nice they are to each other, how much they like each other, or any other such variable (though of course it would tend to correlate with those).
You may disagree, but you should consider whether a definition of status which is tautologically zero-sum is likely to be blinding you to positive-sum interactions that are best interpreted as status-related (as opposed to friendship- or kindness-related).
“Mutual respect” could stand to be more rigorously defined.
Here’s how I would imagine it: island 1 has specialists who divide the tasks of survival among themselves according to comparative advantage; everyone can say “I’m the best there is (on the island) at what I do” and does what they’re best at most of the time. Island 2 has a king and nine cringing slaves.
To me; it would, in principle, be nonsensical. However, in actuality, for this problem to be proposed, there must exist at least one person who knows of both island 1 and island 2, and it is that persons ranking that is being referred to. So they rank the people of island 1 higher than those of island 2. Perhaps because there’s more mutual respect on island 1.
You may disagree, but you should consider whether a definition of status which is tautologically zero-sum is likely to be blinding you to positive-sum interactions that are best interpreted as status-related (as opposed to friendship- or kindness-related).
Those are entirely understandable in a zero-sum model. Put simply: those people are co-operating to increase their status, yes, but by doing so they are decreasing the status of those they overtake.
Note that I’m not sure which description of status is more useful yet, I just thought I’d chime in with some “thoughts so far”
The first half is part of my original model. Status only ever exists relative to a particular community.
Imagine the two islands, island 1 and island 2 came into contact; but the people of each island were extremely patriotic.
On island 1, the people of island 2 would be low status. BUT on island 2, the people of island 1 would be low status.
In the same way one can lose status in one community (ie. a church-based community) while gaining it in another (ie. the rationalist community) through a single action (ie. abandoning their past religious faith)
The second part (explaining how a zero-sum model can justify behaviour that isn’t LOCALLY zero-sum) is, quite simply, obvious to me; because it is so analogous to the zero-sum nature of energy in physics (energy can be neither created nor destroyed, but there are plenty of ways for you to get your hands on more of it)
Yup, good point. I have no idea what “should” count as the “gold standard” for status.
If it had been the case that status was “really” a ranking, and therefore inherently zero sum,
then it could produce one of those cases where people would be better off if they were
consistently wrong about their actual status—if they consistently overestimated it.
However, since status is a vastly fuzzier thing than, for instance, height or weight,
it isn’t at all clear what counts as correctly estimating one’s status.
The main thing that comes to mind is that status is not a one-dimensional variable. Somebody may have high status among LW posters, low status among goths, and moderate status among window-cleaners. If you could arbitrarily construct social groups and assign people to them, as well as deciding everyone’s status in each group, you could construct such a set of social groups that every human belonged to at least one group where he was high-status.
Of course, in practice you can’t do that, especially since people typically prefer hanging out in the social groups where they’re high-status and avoid the groups where they’re low-status.
I know what you’re talking about and I think it’s a mistake. Specifically I think it’s an exemplar of a larger category of cases where a marginalized group’s adaptation to unfavorable circumstances is mistaken by culture (and by evo psych, which has an alarming tendency to make excuses such things) as being a fundamental facet of their nature.
Historically male chances of successfully reproducing have been significantly smaller than female chances, at least this is what the difference in genetic legacy shows.
Also male variation is greater than female variation on practically any trait.
This together with our (perhaps culturally maintained) intuitions about unexceptional men being worth less than unexceptional women point to men being disposable.
I know what you’re talking about and I think it’s a mistake. Specifically I think it’s an exemplar of a larger category of cases where a marginalized group’s adaptation to unfavorable circumstances is mistaken by culture (and by evo psych, which has an alarming tendency to make excuses such things) as being a fundamental facet of their nature.
I’m confused by you using the word ‘adaptation’ and differentiating that from a fundamental facet of their nature. If women predisposed to be hypergamous outcompeted women predisposed to not be hypergamous (because hypergamy is the game-theoretically correct plan), then shouldn’t we expect there to be more women predisposed to hypergamy now? The counterargument would have to be that sexual selection strategies can’t be inherited.
I was perhaps confusing in my use of language. To clarify, I mean volitional behavioral adaptation, not evolutionary adaptation. Or to spell it out, the people in the marginalized group have made a (contextually) sensible decision to advance their agendas by seizing the opportunities for power, resources, status etc which the restrictive social system leaves open to them.
For example, a poor Indian woman gaining resources through marriage (because she can’t dream of being independently rich by her own effort), or a working-class woman in England trying to marry a footballer and raise her status (because social mobility is broken and it’s that or a career in Asda).
Because people can and do adapt their behavior very simply and quickly, and we have an inheritance for this kind of flexibility, there isn’t a need to produce a hypothesis of inherited behavior. And in fact, producing that hypothesis pretends that a social misfeature, sexism and its side effects, is somehow hardwired and thus blameless. Which is hogwash.
producing that hypothesis pretends that a social misfeature [...] is somehow hardwired and thus blameless
You can’t derive an ought from an is; the hypothesis that a trait is “hardwired” (that is, that there exists a biological predisposition towards that trait) does not imply that the trait is blameless. Failure to appreciate this point leads to confusion: in particular, we must be careful not to reject hypotheses that might be true, just because they are unpleasant or even horrifying to contemplate.
Since our culture links misdeeds to volition, things not volitional are generally considered blameless. But I wasn’t implying that the hypothesis is right, quite the opposite. I was implying that people are making untrue excuses by deflecting blame onto spurious made-up instincts.
One assumes- but why? Surely there are just as many poor Indian men who can’t dream of being independently rich by their own effort, shouldn’t they be marrying the daughters of footballers?
It’s common for modern viewers to think of gold diggers as female, but this is only true in modern times. In historical eras where men controlled all their wives’ money, and received dowries upon marrying, they were much more likely to be gold diggers than women. The actual term “gold-digger” is rarely applied to men however; a male gold-digger is normally called a “fortune hunter”. If you go back far enough, you’ll find that all gold diggers were men, because marriage was originally an agreement made between the groom and the bride’s father, with the bride having little to no say in the matter. It’s therefore common in historical texts for the male to be the gold digger, but it isn’t always spelled out. An excellent example is in Emma, where Mr. Elton is never actually referred to as a gold-digger despite copious evidence that he is. Austen probably thought it too blindingly obvious to mention.
Of course, this kind of expectation is hardly unique to one culture. My thinking is that many cultures that encourage women marrying up will encourage men marrying down. In a culture that encouraged women to marry down, men would likely be encouraged to marry up.
Not strictly true. I’m from India and have heard many stories of men asking their fathers-in-law for money for large expenditures such as building/buying houses. Both in my extended family and in my friends circle.
Also, the dowry system in India is a strong evidence against this hypothesis. The amounts of money that are paid in some parts for highly educated young men boggles the mind. The dowry amounts seem to depend both on the bridegroom’s qualifications (higher for doctors etc) and also on the bride’s own attractiveness.
Interesting. Thanks for your perspective. I think you probably know more about this topic than I do. What do you think the expectations are for the husband, and for the wife’s family? It seems that there is an expectation that the husband is able to earn money (ie. since you mentioned that large amounts of money are given to highly educated men, my assumption is that the wife’s family is expecting him to earn money with his education, but if you think that’s untrue I’d be interested to know your reasoning). However, you seem to be saying that there is also the expectation that the wife’s family will help him with money. Is this expectation generally only for a short duration of time or is it considered a long-term obligation? Is there any expectation in the reverse (that the husband help the wife’s family with money)?
Yes, I believe the general expectation is that the husband will be able to earn money in the future in order to support his family. So to that extent, the answer to Jack’s question of why poor Indian men don’t marry the daughters of footballers is that the woman’s family will simply not allow such a thing to take place- and eloping with the girl against the wishes of the family is not likely to earn them much by way of dowry.
From what I understand there is no long term expectation of help with money from the wife’s family apart from the dowry amounts paid at the time of the wedding. However, it is also not terribly uncommon to find that even years after the wedding there are requests/demands for money and these are fulfilled. There are generally no expectations for the husband to support the wife’s family with money.
Standard disclaimers about the size of India and the diversity of practices there apply to this comment as well. :)
Polyamory, especially the “open mesh” kind, dissolves the question of whether there exists a better match, or (most of) the fear of losing a partner to someone better. It’s no longer necessary to consider whether this match outranks alternatives you haven’t yet encountered, for both of you. It’s sufficient to consider whether it works in itself.
Percent of all women 15-44 years of age who have had three or more male partners in the last 12 months, 2002: 6.8%
Percent of all men 15-44 years of age who have had three or more female partners in the last 12 months, 2002: 10.4%”
“Median number of female sexual partners in lifetime, for men 25-44 years of age, 2002: 6.7
Percent of men 25-44 years of age who have had 15 or more female sexual partners, 2002: 29.2%
Median number of male sexual partners in lifetime, for women 25-44 years of age, 2002: 3.8
Percent of women 25-44 years of age who have had 15 or more male sexual partners, 2002: 11.4%
You forgot to follow that with ”...in a sexist culture with a very strong monogamy taboo and a tendency to punish women unequally for behavior considered slutty”.
I’m struggling to come up with a reason why female and male average tendencies wouldn’t differ from each other on this.
Women’s unavoidable investment in reproduction for most of our history is something that rewards very different strategies between women and men in nearly any sexual marketplace conditions that I’ve so far thought of.
You need to read “Evolution’s Rainbow” and to a lesser extent, “Sex at Dawn”. Neither are perfect but they are strong antidotes to this kind of “sexual strategies” thinking, which is heavily contaminated with cultural assumptions.
In the last post I’m just wondering why the attraction hardware would differ in predisposing us for desiring different physical types but not behavioural types (independent of the question if hypergamy is or isn’t such an adaptation).
As to the recommendation, that has been on my to read list for a while now, I guess I’ll bump it up. :) The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature was the last book with a similar subject if not conclusion that caught my interest.
Neither are perfect but they are strong antidotes to this kind of “sexual strategies” thinking, which is heavily contaminated with cultural assumptions.
Watch out for biology too. That stuff is heavily contaminated with sexism and doesn’t pay the proper respect to politically correct ideals. We should ostracize it.
Both of the books above are biology. Sex at Dawn is by non-biologists but Evolution’s Rainbow is by an evolutionary biologist. Her complaint is that actual biology is being misread in ways that distort the science, including the science of evolution, by people whose interpretations are culturally biased.
But hey, you can also wave brain-stop words like “political correctness” around if you want.
Let me translate in to overt. The following statement-reply pair:
I’m struggling to come up with a reason why female and male average tendencies wouldn’t differ from each other on this.
You need to read “Evolution’s Rainbow” and to a lesser extent, “Sex at Dawn”. Neither are perfect but they are strong antidotes to this kind of “sexual strategies” thinking, which is heavily contaminated with cultural assumptions.
Is overwhelmingly strong evidence that your beliefs on this subject are not optimally correlated with reality.
Sure it is quite possible (and likely) that a lot of people are wrong about what sexual strategies are used. But not that there are sexual strategies and not that it should be startling to find that the sexual strategies turn out to be symmetric. It should be difficult for Konkvistador to think of reasons for that to occur, because it would be a miraculous coincidence.
I think the burden of proof is on one who claims that different things are equal. “Involve many partners” is extremely vague, it’s not so fine-grained a similarity that for it to be a common strategy for both men and women would be miraculous, it’s not a strategy at all any more than “theism” or “atheism” are philosophies.
If someone were to claim that Mercury has exactly as much mass as a moon of Jupiter plus or minus one kilogram, I wouldn’t feel the slightest discomfort at not having a source to back up my expectation they’d be different, and I would not be convinced without a mountain of evidence.
Things don’t magically align like that in nature. I could find out tomorrow that every study ever showing differences between men and women was too contaminated by culture to be useful, I’d still not believe that no significant differences exist. So long as I’m not claiming to know exactly what those differences are, I don’t have the burden of proof.
mention of “hypergamy”, the usual definition of which simply treats marriage (by implication, either monogamous or polygamous) as the default
stats purporting to show that women seek fewer partners.
followed by Julian pointing out that the stats come from a particular culture (and later pointing to research that looks at many cultures).
Mind you, the evidence I mentioned over here does seem consistent with a broader definition of “hypergamy”. But again, this comes from the same culture.
It moved on from there a long time ago and started being about the things literally represented by the characters contained in the comments instead of what side they affiliate with.
Edit: This gave Hairy an excuse to get confused. I should have, instead, written “The parent is almost entirely irrelevant to the point the grandparent is making”.
Even on this level your objection fails, because K said s/he thought the two strategies “differ from each other on this” while Julian claimed to provide ‘antidotes to this kind of “sexual strategies” thinking’ (emphasis added). You can’t leave out some of the symbols and claim this makes for a more literal interpretation.
Here’s the sub-thread I refer to. You come into it strawmanning JulianMorrison and accusing him of political bias. Now you seem to say that you ‘moved the discussion’ in this way because you (falsely) believed he made a technically incorrect statement in the comment that I just quoted correctly.
Had he in fact done so, and had I wanted to correct it for some reason, I would have started my response with “Technically...” rather than going straight to sarcasm.
Odds are neither wedrifid nor hairyfigment is learning anything from this discussion any more. But if you want to continue, consider tabooing “sexual strategies.” It’s possible you’re just using that phrase to mean different things.
Why do you implicitly assume that mating behavior is determined by culture, rather than vice versa? Humans had mating strategies long before we had language, let alone anything resembling modern societies. A priori is seems a lot more plausible that human cultures evolve to fit our natural behaviors, or perhaps that mating behaviors and traditional cultures co-evolved for long enough to become inextricable.
Humanity has lived in cities for around 10,000 years. Evolutionarily a blip—we’ve been Homo Sapiens for 200,000 years. 10,000 years is long enough for simple, useful evolution (such as the spread of a gene for digesting milk). Not enough for complex behaviors, especially with a huge transnational interbreeding population tending to stir up genes and cause “regression toward the mean”.
Something’s wrong with those numbers. Medians of integer-valued quantities are always integers or half-integers.
EDIT: I’ve taken a look at the report, and it doesn’t say anything about how they calculate medians, so I don’t know how they’re fudging their numbers to get these out.
EDIT 2: I should also say “good job for looking at the research and getting numbers”, even if I’d like these researchers to be more transparent as to what they’re actually reporting.
It’s almost certainly true, perhaps doing a weighted average of the medians of subgroups. However, any method that does that is not producing a median. A good way of doing that adjustment might give “cooked” numbers for the various options, but the point where 50% are below and 50% are above would still almost certainly be an integer. And if it is actually balanced (highly unlikely with so many data points), so that any number greater than X and less than X+1 divides the population in two, then the convention is to report X + 1⁄2. There is no information about the median that anything past the decimal point can actually convey.
every time a male has sex with a female, both of their opposite-sex partners rise by one.
Just to ensure clarity, you meant to say; “every time a male has sex with a new female [partner], their opposite-sex partners rise by one. Correct?
One other thing which could skew the statistics is the fact that people that have had many sexual relationships can die, and the dead are not often counted in statistical surveys, while some of their partners might be.
While I agree that some attempt should be made to explain the data, it’s a bit much to say it’s “wrong”. There’s no real fault in just reporting the results you actually got without speculation, and there might well be a good explanation.
in general I mistrust surveys to give accurate data.
Seems pretty obvious that hypergamy is what poor women do in societies that only let them gain control of resources through marriage. It’s a rational adjustment to a sexist, unequal society, not some sort of instinct.
Polyamory, especially the “open mesh” kind, dissolves the question of whether there exists a better match, or (most of) the fear of losing a partner to someone better. It’s no longer necessary to consider whether this match outranks alternatives you haven’t yet encountered, for both of you. It’s sufficient to consider whether it works in itself.
JulianMorrison:
This is a hypothesis worth investigating, but how much data seems to support it? The research I’ve read supports the existence of hypergamy in both modern societies, and in pre-agricultural societies without high levels of gender inequality.
The Dalmia study cited on Wikipedia supposedly doesn’t find women “marrying up,” but since I can’t read the full text I’m not sure how they were operationalizing “marries up.” For instance, perhaps the study found that women don’t marry up in wealth. But that doesn’t mean they don’t marry up in education, which is what this study found:
In short, education hypergamy exists, but it’s getting weaker at the top (presumably because there is a shortage of higher-education men to date up to), and may be getting stronger at the bottom.
For women of high socioeconomic status, hypergamy does appear to decrease. For instance, women in some college samples tend to not care about men’s wealth very much. Though this could also be partly because those women are more oriented towards short-term mating.
Even in a modern, short-term mating context, it’s not clear that hypergamy disappears. In a speed dating study, Asendorpf & Penke found
Note how eduction and income mattered to women, but not to men. Those are elements of hypergamy. Avoiding shy men is also hypergamy because shyness is low-status in Western men.
For another example of modern hypergamy, observe the attraction of women to rockstars and actors. Yet do women become groupies of rockstars merely in hope of gaining their resources through marriage, as a rational adjustment to a sexist society? I doubt it.
Is modern hypergamy merely a hold-over due to outdated norms? No. In pre-agricultural societies where women don’t economically depend on men, hypergamy still exists. Anthropologists used to be bamboozled by the discovery that the lioness’ share of calories in some cultures is supplied by the women. So why were the men hunting, if it was so inefficient? Anthroplogists eventually came up with the hypothesis that male hunting isn’t (just) about providing meat.
Hawkes and Bird argue that a large function of men’s hunting isn’t putting food on the table for their families, but rather showing off to gain social status and mating success. The researchers observe that competent male Ache hunters have greater mating success:
Since the hunter’s skill doesn’t translate into more provisioning for his family, the it’s difficult to explain women’s preference for hunters as a response to economic deprivation. Women don’t have to date good hunters to feed their children, but they do anyway.
Successful hunters gain high status, have more partners, and experience greater reproductive success. That’s hypergamy.
The “economic inequality” hypothesis does not explain this pattern of women “dating up” in terms of . It does seem plausible that women start caring less about men’s economic status in prosperous societies, but that doesn’t mean that women have stopped being hypergamous.
Without the need to mate with good providers to put roofs over their heads, women are free to go after the men they are attracted to, which seems to mean dating up on other dimensions they care about such as personality traits, education, status, intelligence, and accomplishments (some of these traits have been discussed in this comment, and others will have to wait for another time). This appears to be a generalized phenomenon; for instance, women care more about humor in their partners than men do, another culturally-valued trait.
As far as I can tell, this pattern of evidence looks a lot more like some sort of instinct on the part of women than merely a response to economic inequality (those as I’ve mentioned above, economic inequality is a factor in how hypergamy is expressed). The other problem with the sociocultural inequality hypothesis is that it can’t explain how gender inequality came about in the first place: clearly there are some pre-cultural forces in play. It’s difficult to make any sense out of this data without invoking evolutionary theories like sexual selection.
I’m not necessarily talking about marriage or women seeking material comfort here. I’m referring to the mechanisms of female and male sexual desire and how they on average differ in more than just the parameters of the physical attributes the sexes seek in mates.
For most women their sexual attraction is in itself partially dependant on how desirable she thinks other women find the male in question. It also depends heavily on his status. And status as we know is basically zero sum.
My impression is that men are also influenced by how attractive other men think a woman is.
Semi-Anecdotal evidence of this: Tina Fey reports that she was never seen as “hot” until after she became famous.
Evidence that I suspect says more about Tina Fey’s past insecurities than about scarcity bias. She is hot enough that she would have been seen as such even in school. Unless American high schools really are like they appear in movies. The hot girl isn’t hot until she has a makeover involving taking off her glasses and letting her hair down!
When I was in high school, most of the girls around me seemed to me to be as beautiful as anyone I ever saw on television or in the movies. Most high school girls are significantly hotter than the woman of median hotness in the population as a whole (getting older tends to make women less beautiful), so they would have to be even hotter than that in order to stand out.
It’s plausible that people weren’t talking about in public where she could hear it about how good she looked until she became famous.
Also, excuse me if I’m mistaken about this, but there’s something about your phrasing which leaves me thinking that there’s something weird about a woman who’s attractive to you being insecure about her looks. There seems to be huge cultural pressure in the US for women to think they don’t look good enough, and what’s surprising to me is immunity to it.
No. I’ve met enough people who fit that category that I don’t find it weird at all. A little annoying and something to be discouraged if convenient but not particularly weird.
The ‘hot’ evaluation is not a matter of who I find attractive but of who I evaluate as being considered attractive in general (or possibly what I think other people with think other people find attractive). She isn’t exactly what I find attractive even though her general purpose hotness overflows into the wedrifid specific evaluation at least in part.
I was referring to an indication of the verbal behaviour of people encountering Tina Fey (people saying that she is hot) rather than whether Tina Fey personally considers herself hot. Sure, personal insecurity can bias recollections about what people say and do but that certainly isn’t covered in my phrasing—that’s all in your reading!
Tina Fey lost a bunch of weight just before she got on TV. Given that there isn’t really anything else to explain.
That would do it. She’d have been pretty and even attractive with the extra weight but ‘hot’ is rather more specific in this culture.
Status is zero sum? I highly doubt it. I am certain that it’s not something you can simply wave at with an “as we know”.
It is, more or less by the practical meaning of being a ranking of all individuals in the group in question. You really can’t all come first in a (rat) race. Encouragement awards don’t count.
The more interesting thing to consider is how our internal measures of status and outward indicators of status can be manipulated such that we can get better results from those instincts in a positive sum way. This is definitely possible, at least to some degree.
Before you posted that I’d have said it was a pretty obvious idea. Can you develop your objection more?
The reason it seems obvious to me is that status is measured relative to the rest of the tribe. If you climb up the social ladder, that means someone got bumped down. Zero net change.
Imagine two islands, each with some tiny population—let’s say, 10 each. Nobody ever interacts with anyone off-island, and the resources and living standards are the same. Now if I told you that people on island 1 are higher-status than people on island 2, does that strike you as a nonsensical statement? To me, it does not; it means that there is more mutual respect on island 1. I think that parsing that as “status” is justified, because it’s not synonymous with how nice they are to each other, how much they like each other, or any other such variable (though of course it would tend to correlate with those).
You may disagree, but you should consider whether a definition of status which is tautologically zero-sum is likely to be blinding you to positive-sum interactions that are best interpreted as status-related (as opposed to friendship- or kindness-related).
“Mutual respect” could stand to be more rigorously defined.
Here’s how I would imagine it: island 1 has specialists who divide the tasks of survival among themselves according to comparative advantage; everyone can say “I’m the best there is (on the island) at what I do” and does what they’re best at most of the time. Island 2 has a king and nine cringing slaves.
To me; it would, in principle, be nonsensical. However, in actuality, for this problem to be proposed, there must exist at least one person who knows of both island 1 and island 2, and it is that persons ranking that is being referred to. So they rank the people of island 1 higher than those of island 2. Perhaps because there’s more mutual respect on island 1.
Those are entirely understandable in a zero-sum model. Put simply: those people are co-operating to increase their status, yes, but by doing so they are decreasing the status of those they overtake.
Note that I’m not sure which description of status is more useful yet, I just thought I’d chime in with some “thoughts so far”
Are those responses epicycles, or are they really part of your original model?
The first half is part of my original model. Status only ever exists relative to a particular community.
Imagine the two islands, island 1 and island 2 came into contact; but the people of each island were extremely patriotic.
On island 1, the people of island 2 would be low status. BUT on island 2, the people of island 1 would be low status.
In the same way one can lose status in one community (ie. a church-based community) while gaining it in another (ie. the rationalist community) through a single action (ie. abandoning their past religious faith)
The second part (explaining how a zero-sum model can justify behaviour that isn’t LOCALLY zero-sum) is, quite simply, obvious to me; because it is so analogous to the zero-sum nature of energy in physics (energy can be neither created nor destroyed, but there are plenty of ways for you to get your hands on more of it)
Yup, good point. I have no idea what “should” count as the “gold standard” for status. If it had been the case that status was “really” a ranking, and therefore inherently zero sum, then it could produce one of those cases where people would be better off if they were consistently wrong about their actual status—if they consistently overestimated it. However, since status is a vastly fuzzier thing than, for instance, height or weight, it isn’t at all clear what counts as correctly estimating one’s status.
The main thing that comes to mind is that status is not a one-dimensional variable. Somebody may have high status among LW posters, low status among goths, and moderate status among window-cleaners. If you could arbitrarily construct social groups and assign people to them, as well as deciding everyone’s status in each group, you could construct such a set of social groups that every human belonged to at least one group where he was high-status.
Of course, in practice you can’t do that, especially since people typically prefer hanging out in the social groups where they’re high-status and avoid the groups where they’re low-status.
I know what you’re talking about and I think it’s a mistake. Specifically I think it’s an exemplar of a larger category of cases where a marginalized group’s adaptation to unfavorable circumstances is mistaken by culture (and by evo psych, which has an alarming tendency to make excuses such things) as being a fundamental facet of their nature.
Historically male chances of successfully reproducing have been significantly smaller than female chances, at least this is what the difference in genetic legacy shows.
Also male variation is greater than female variation on practically any trait.
This together with our (perhaps culturally maintained) intuitions about unexceptional men being worth less than unexceptional women point to men being disposable.
I’m confused by you using the word ‘adaptation’ and differentiating that from a fundamental facet of their nature. If women predisposed to be hypergamous outcompeted women predisposed to not be hypergamous (because hypergamy is the game-theoretically correct plan), then shouldn’t we expect there to be more women predisposed to hypergamy now? The counterargument would have to be that sexual selection strategies can’t be inherited.
I was perhaps confusing in my use of language. To clarify, I mean volitional behavioral adaptation, not evolutionary adaptation. Or to spell it out, the people in the marginalized group have made a (contextually) sensible decision to advance their agendas by seizing the opportunities for power, resources, status etc which the restrictive social system leaves open to them.
For example, a poor Indian woman gaining resources through marriage (because she can’t dream of being independently rich by her own effort), or a working-class woman in England trying to marry a footballer and raise her status (because social mobility is broken and it’s that or a career in Asda).
Because people can and do adapt their behavior very simply and quickly, and we have an inheritance for this kind of flexibility, there isn’t a need to produce a hypothesis of inherited behavior. And in fact, producing that hypothesis pretends that a social misfeature, sexism and its side effects, is somehow hardwired and thus blameless. Which is hogwash.
You can’t derive an ought from an is; the hypothesis that a trait is “hardwired” (that is, that there exists a biological predisposition towards that trait) does not imply that the trait is blameless. Failure to appreciate this point leads to confusion: in particular, we must be careful not to reject hypotheses that might be true, just because they are unpleasant or even horrifying to contemplate.
Since our culture links misdeeds to volition, things not volitional are generally considered blameless. But I wasn’t implying that the hypothesis is right, quite the opposite. I was implying that people are making untrue excuses by deflecting blame onto spurious made-up instincts.
How do you explain men marrying down?
They don’t care about status so much?
My previous flippant response misread Jack’s comment
One assumes- but why? Surely there are just as many poor Indian men who can’t dream of being independently rich by their own effort, shouldn’t they be marrying the daughters of footballers?
TV Tropes explains male gold diggers:
Maybe because the culture tries to influence men into not depending on their wife’s family for money? An example of vows made in some Indian weddings:
During kanyadaan, the bride’s parents give their daughter away in marriage. The groom makes three promises – to be just (dharma), earn sufficiently to support his family, (artha) and love his wife (kama).
Of course, this kind of expectation is hardly unique to one culture. My thinking is that many cultures that encourage women marrying up will encourage men marrying down. In a culture that encouraged women to marry down, men would likely be encouraged to marry up.
Not strictly true. I’m from India and have heard many stories of men asking their fathers-in-law for money for large expenditures such as building/buying houses. Both in my extended family and in my friends circle.
Also, the dowry system in India is a strong evidence against this hypothesis. The amounts of money that are paid in some parts for highly educated young men boggles the mind. The dowry amounts seem to depend both on the bridegroom’s qualifications (higher for doctors etc) and also on the bride’s own attractiveness.
Interesting. Thanks for your perspective. I think you probably know more about this topic than I do. What do you think the expectations are for the husband, and for the wife’s family? It seems that there is an expectation that the husband is able to earn money (ie. since you mentioned that large amounts of money are given to highly educated men, my assumption is that the wife’s family is expecting him to earn money with his education, but if you think that’s untrue I’d be interested to know your reasoning). However, you seem to be saying that there is also the expectation that the wife’s family will help him with money. Is this expectation generally only for a short duration of time or is it considered a long-term obligation? Is there any expectation in the reverse (that the husband help the wife’s family with money)?
Yes, I believe the general expectation is that the husband will be able to earn money in the future in order to support his family. So to that extent, the answer to Jack’s question of why poor Indian men don’t marry the daughters of footballers is that the woman’s family will simply not allow such a thing to take place- and eloping with the girl against the wishes of the family is not likely to earn them much by way of dowry.
From what I understand there is no long term expectation of help with money from the wife’s family apart from the dowry amounts paid at the time of the wedding. However, it is also not terribly uncommon to find that even years after the wedding there are requests/demands for money and these are fulfilled. There are generally no expectations for the husband to support the wife’s family with money.
Standard disclaimers about the size of India and the diversity of practices there apply to this comment as well. :)
If the hypergamy hypothesis is correct this isn’t so at all.
Also consider these stats from the CDC:
You forgot to follow that with ”...in a sexist culture with a very strong monogamy taboo and a tendency to punish women unequally for behavior considered slutty”.
I’m struggling to come up with a reason why female and male average tendencies wouldn’t differ from each other on this.
Women’s unavoidable investment in reproduction for most of our history is something that rewards very different strategies between women and men in nearly any sexual marketplace conditions that I’ve so far thought of.
You need to read “Evolution’s Rainbow” and to a lesser extent, “Sex at Dawn”. Neither are perfect but they are strong antidotes to this kind of “sexual strategies” thinking, which is heavily contaminated with cultural assumptions.
In the last post I’m just wondering why the attraction hardware would differ in predisposing us for desiring different physical types but not behavioural types (independent of the question if hypergamy is or isn’t such an adaptation).
As to the recommendation, that has been on my to read list for a while now, I guess I’ll bump it up. :) The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature was the last book with a similar subject if not conclusion that caught my interest.
Check out Male, Female by David Geary. It’s more rigorous than the Red Queen.
Watch out for biology too. That stuff is heavily contaminated with sexism and doesn’t pay the proper respect to politically correct ideals. We should ostracize it.
Both of the books above are biology. Sex at Dawn is by non-biologists but Evolution’s Rainbow is by an evolutionary biologist. Her complaint is that actual biology is being misread in ways that distort the science, including the science of evolution, by people whose interpretations are culturally biased.
But hey, you can also wave brain-stop words like “political correctness” around if you want.
Let me translate in to overt. The following statement-reply pair:
Is overwhelmingly strong evidence that your beliefs on this subject are not optimally correlated with reality.
Sure it is quite possible (and likely) that a lot of people are wrong about what sexual strategies are used. But not that there are sexual strategies and not that it should be startling to find that the sexual strategies turn out to be symmetric. It should be difficult for Konkvistador to think of reasons for that to occur, because it would be a miraculous coincidence.
Why? From what I know of Sex at Dawn, the book’s claims would lead us to expect sexual strategies for both men and women that involve many partners.
You’re making claims and ignoring sources without giving a shred of evidence yourself.
I think the burden of proof is on one who claims that different things are equal. “Involve many partners” is extremely vague, it’s not so fine-grained a similarity that for it to be a common strategy for both men and women would be miraculous, it’s not a strategy at all any more than “theism” or “atheism” are philosophies.
If someone were to claim that Mercury has exactly as much mass as a moon of Jupiter plus or minus one kilogram, I wouldn’t feel the slightest discomfort at not having a source to back up my expectation they’d be different, and I would not be convinced without a mountain of evidence.
Things don’t magically align like that in nature. I could find out tomorrow that every study ever showing differences between men and women was too contaminated by culture to be useful, I’d still not believe that no significant differences exist. So long as I’m not claiming to know exactly what those differences are, I don’t have the burden of proof.
This discussion started with:
mention of “hypergamy”, the usual definition of which simply treats marriage (by implication, either monogamous or polygamous) as the default
stats purporting to show that women seek fewer partners.
followed by Julian pointing out that the stats come from a particular culture (and later pointing to research that looks at many cultures).
Mind you, the evidence I mentioned over here does seem consistent with a broader definition of “hypergamy”. But again, this comes from the same culture.
It moved on from there a long time ago and started being about the things literally represented by the characters contained in the comments instead of what side they affiliate with.
Edit: This gave Hairy an excuse to get confused. I should have, instead, written “The parent is almost entirely irrelevant to the point the grandparent is making”.
Ah. So you’re being needlessly pedantic.
Even on this level your objection fails, because K said s/he thought the two strategies “differ from each other on this” while Julian claimed to provide ‘antidotes to this kind of “sexual strategies” thinking’ (emphasis added). You can’t leave out some of the symbols and claim this makes for a more literal interpretation.
No. Just no.
Here’s the sub-thread I refer to. You come into it strawmanning JulianMorrison and accusing him of political bias. Now you seem to say that you ‘moved the discussion’ in this way because you (falsely) believed he made a technically incorrect statement in the comment that I just quoted correctly.
Had he in fact done so, and had I wanted to correct it for some reason, I would have started my response with “Technically...” rather than going straight to sarcasm.
Odds are neither wedrifid nor hairyfigment is learning anything from this discussion any more. But if you want to continue, consider tabooing “sexual strategies.” It’s possible you’re just using that phrase to mean different things.
Why do you implicitly assume that mating behavior is determined by culture, rather than vice versa? Humans had mating strategies long before we had language, let alone anything resembling modern societies. A priori is seems a lot more plausible that human cultures evolve to fit our natural behaviors, or perhaps that mating behaviors and traditional cultures co-evolved for long enough to become inextricable.
Because families that moved between societies don’t retain some kind of genetic memory of the rituals used by their ancestors.
Humanity has lived in cities for around 10,000 years. Evolutionarily a blip—we’ve been Homo Sapiens for 200,000 years. 10,000 years is long enough for simple, useful evolution (such as the spread of a gene for digesting milk). Not enough for complex behaviors, especially with a huge transnational interbreeding population tending to stir up genes and cause “regression toward the mean”.
Something’s wrong with those numbers. Medians of integer-valued quantities are always integers or half-integers.
EDIT: I’ve taken a look at the report, and it doesn’t say anything about how they calculate medians, so I don’t know how they’re fudging their numbers to get these out.
EDIT 2: I should also say “good job for looking at the research and getting numbers”, even if I’d like these researchers to be more transparent as to what they’re actually reporting.
An uninformed guess: those medians are presumably based on survey data, so they might’ve been adjusted using the survey’s sampling weights.
It’s almost certainly true, perhaps doing a weighted average of the medians of subgroups. However, any method that does that is not producing a median. A good way of doing that adjustment might give “cooked” numbers for the various options, but the point where 50% are below and 50% are above would still almost certainly be an integer. And if it is actually balanced (highly unlikely with so many data points), so that any number greater than X and less than X+1 divides the population in two, then the convention is to report X + 1⁄2. There is no information about the median that anything past the decimal point can actually convey.
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Just to ensure clarity, you meant to say; “every time a male has sex with a new female [partner], their opposite-sex partners rise by one. Correct?
One other thing which could skew the statistics is the fact that people that have had many sexual relationships can die, and the dead are not often counted in statistical surveys, while some of their partners might be.
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The true mean values should be close, but the medians etc can be very different.
While I agree that some attempt should be made to explain the data, it’s a bit much to say it’s “wrong”. There’s no real fault in just reporting the results you actually got without speculation, and there might well be a good explanation.
That is a good heuristic.
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