Why are some females sometimes unreasonably mean to other females? Is this even the case?
For example, I recently asked a friend why she felt the need to buy a new dress for every ‘special event’ (galas, dances, etc.). After some thought, she said it’s most likely because she will be looked down upon by other females if she is seen wearing something that she has previously been known to wear. I asked why again, and she said that sort of judgement has probably been inculcated in the majority of females; she clarified that she only bought new dresses so as not to be thought of as low status, and has no qualms wearing the same things around family.
In other words, she thinks other females constantly judge each other based upon their wardrobe; she said the same judgement does not apply to men. I have heard that some females play relatively cruel psychological games with each other when compared to male culture. Is this true? Why do some do it?
I’ve always assumed it’s due to mere insecurity, in the same way some males often put each other down in order to be thought of as higher status.
For example, I recently asked a friend why she felt the need to buy a new dress for every ‘special event’ (galas, dances, etc.). After some thought, she said it’s most likely because she will be looked down upon by other females if she is seen wearing something that she has previously been known to wear. I asked why again, and she said that sort of judgement has probably been inculcated in the majority of females; she clarified that she only bought new dresses so as not to be thought of as low status, and has no qualms wearing the same things around family.
Men have comparable status competitions and nastiness, it just isn’t about clothes.
Men have comparable status competitions and nastiness it just isn’t about clothes.
Part of Zaine’s question is whether this is actually the case. There’s an aphorism: “Men insult each other and don’t mean it. Women compliment each other and don’t mean it.” Do groups of men who are friends engage zero-sum status games? What do those look like?
Do groups of men who are friends engage zero-sum status games? What do those look like?
Aren’t most status games zero-sum, though? Would I be right to assume that you meant the kind of status games where the men of Group Y are trying to raise their status at the expense of each other rather than those not in their in-group?
If so, almost any form of social interaction in a given group can have zero-sum status game elements. As an example, the simple act of sharing information can be construed as promoting one’s superior knowledge and thus showing the other guy up.
You mentioned the saying “Men insult each other and don’t mean it. Women compliment each other and don’t mean it.” That’s definitely a working example of such games. Here’s an extract from Duels and Duets: Why Men and Women Talk So Differently by John L. Locke, via Google Books:
Although duels abound in adolescence, and in the oral cultures that anthropologists love to study, they may erupt wherever competitive men congregate. Playful insulting occurs everywhere that men go. In the early 1970s, anthropologist Frank Manning spent some time in a black bar (or “social club”) in Bermuda. One thing that stood out about the male patrons was their insulting, especially the artful and friendly way that they did it. Since there was always a responsive audience of men and women in the club, Manning thought these verbal exchanges could “be viewed as spectator games and public performances,” opportunities for the participants “to display their personality and style for the benefits of an audience as well as their competitors.”
While Manning was observing the black duelers in Bermuda, E. E. LeMasters was busily at work in a white working-class tavern in southern Wisconsin. LeMasters, a sociology professor by day and patron of the “Oasis” by night, noticed a great deal of banter in his natural laboratory. In fact, some regular patrons light-heartedly attacked each other more or less continuously. In the Oasis, social success was dependant on men’s “ability to ‘dish it out’ in the rapid-fire exchange called ‘joshing,‘” wrote LeMasters. “You have to have a quick retort, and preferably one that puts you ‘one up’ on your opponent. People who can’t compete in the game lose status.”
Do groups of men who are friends engage zero-sum status games? What do those look like?
Yes. Particularly popular ones are known as “sports.”
Note the asymmetry between men and women- men compete both as groups and as individuals. Women generally only compete as individuals- so males have a flavor of camaraderie that women rarely do.
I don’t believe athletic competition is zero-sum. The status gain of the winners isn’t offset by a status loss of the losers. In fact, the losers often come out with a gain in status, assuming they play well.
Another way to see that it’s positive-sum is as follows: A close-fought game results in more status for both sides than does a rout. If the game were zero-sum, that status had to come from somewhere. But in fact, if the losers play better, both sides come out better than if the losers lost, badly.
Conclusion: athletics and similar competition is positive-sum, and the size of the total status gain depends on the talent being displayed.
Status is relative by its essence. So, if some forms of direct competition seem to raise the status of both competitors, somebody else has to lose. It only needn’t be one of the direct participants in the match. You’re right that both competitors may gain status if they both play well, but the very meaning of “well” is decided from comparison with other players in the relevant pool; if you play better than they usually do, your status grows at their expense.
Also, it is not universally true that close-fought results get positive status change to both competitors. Close win against a low-status outsider is often a status loss for the winner, even if the loser played well.
Yes, I agree with all this. But the original claim was “sports are a zero-sum status game”. And I think you and I are both saying that this isn’t so—competition is sometimes positive and sometimes negative- sum for the participants.
While social status, at the society-wide level is necessarily zero sum, the participants in the activity might all come out ahead of the bystanders—or behind, perhaps, if the sport is disreputable.
Somewhat related: exactly one of the groups of male friends I’m a member of has/had a very clear, completely self-appointed omega. This weirded me out; I think he thought he wasn’t as smart as some of us, but he’s hardly stupid (currently doing PhD research in engineering!) and a very nice guy.
I read some long livejournal comment discussions (hundreds of comments, and sorry, I can’t place it more accurately than that it was probably more than four years ago and might have been in theferrett’s journal) about bullying by girls in school, and there was a lot of it. Almost all of it was social rather than physical.
One of the classics was pretending to be someone’s friend, and then laughing at them for believing it. That can apparently cause longterm (possibly permanent) damage to the victim’s ability to trust people.
The only incident from the threads that I remember in detail was from someone in a school where a particular pin was the thing the popular girls wore. She begged her parents for the pin, and eventually got one. When the other girls saw her wearing it, they took off their pins and threw them on the floor.
I suppose adults (around 20 years and onward) are the most productively discussable age group, as by then the mind has completed most of its development.
I can only think sadism the reason for why one would pretend to be someone’s friend, unless affirming the “absurdity” of the concept itself reinforces a status divide.
The pin incident points to in-groups using exclusionary measures to define themselves from everyone out-group.
Just conceived theory: In school settings, groups of girls that signal unavailability and attract the majority of their class’s opposite sex maintain these two measures of status through exclusively signalling themselves as what ‘high-status’ means. These signals often express themselves as psychological games. The theory would extrapolate to post-school settings by essentially repeating the process; have others signal one as high-status by treating one as such, then represent oneself as the epitome of high-status by using similar games to signal others as lower status.
The theory operates on the premise that the games are all about status, which I think would be sad if true. So specious.
I have heard that some females play relatively cruel psychological games with each other when compared to male culture. Is this true?
I would say no. I’m with Konkvistador; the male and female games simply take on different forms. Still, on the psychological-physical axis of abuse, women tend toward the psychological more than men, so I’d expect them to be commensurately more adept at purely psychological abuse.
However, regarding the big picture, there’s nothing “relatively less cruel” about being beat up or shoved around than with being given the silent treatment. I’ve wondered more than a few times at how often the psychological effects of physical interactions tend to be overlooked. Even aside from, say, the actual physical pain of losing a fight, there’s still all the other stuff. It’s not like the memory of a fight lost in front of everybody suddenly vanishes or is instantly overcome. Physical pains intentionally inflicted on you by others always come with corresponding mental counterparts, while the reverse is not true.
However, regarding the big picture, there’s nothing “relatively less cruel” about being beat up or shoved around than with being given the silent treatment.
Outside of fairly toxic environments, my experience is that social conflicts among men rarely devolve to violence past high school age. How far does this sort of judgmental behavior among women persist? It’s something I’m aware of in abstract but I’ve never really observed it firsthand.
I suppose I also meant to ask after the proliferation of both types of abuse. Physical confrontations among men, from my schooling experience, were quite rare. I once witnessed an ‘alpha’ stare down someone challenging his status, while verbally asserting dominance and forcing the challenger to agree the alpha was superior, and the challenger was an idiot for thinking otherwise. From an anthropological perspective it was quite enthralling to watch.
I know that physical violence among male culture occurs more frequently in other regions, and that in Japan males employ psychological games similar to those of western women. So, to narrow down the question and assist in mitigating what ambiguity can arise from relativism:
In ‘western culture’, which type of abuse is most often used, and by whom? Why? Do females abuse the longest, and are their psychological games thus comparatively worse?
In ‘western culture’, which type of abuse is most often used, and by which sex?
I guess this answer strongly depends on how exactly you define “abuse”. My intuition is that generally the more intensive acts of abuse are less frequent, and the less intentive acts of abuse are more frequent; for example people more often scream at each other than hit each other. So where exactly you draw the line, the kind of abuse just above the line will probably be the most frequent. If we count only physical violence, in western culture (during peace) the most frequent would be men against women, or maybe parents against children. With psychological abuse, I am not sure.
A fair comparison would be a weighted sum: to multiply the frequency of abuse with severity of average consequences. But it is easier to evaluate physical damage from physical abuse (although this is also not simple: a small brain tissue damage from one incident may be undetected, but cumulative effects can be serious) than a damage from psychological abuse; the latter is almost impossible to evaluate.
(As a sidenote, focusing on statistics by sex is kind of privileging a hypothesis. We should start by looking at data, and draw the boundary accordingly. Sometimes the incidence will correlate with one sex very strongly: I guess criticizing not having a new dress for an event is a predominantly female behavior, just like e.g. bar fights are a predominantly male behavior. For other kinds of abuse, the incidence may be different.)
I think defining psychological abuse as that which is done passively (behind someone’s back, through subtly in a conversation, etc.) and physical abuse as that which is done actively (aggressive contact, screaming, heated insults) would suffice.
I can see how asking, ”… and by which sex?” can privilege the hypothesis that the most common type of abuse would be used by one sex more than the other. I think fixing it to saying, ”… and by what sex?” solves it, though; what other answers could the data reflect besides male, female, DSD (intersex), or some combination of the three?
I meant something like this: Imagine that there is a thing T that you want to study. Correlation between T and X is 0.9. Correlation between T and Y is 0.6. Let’s assume that there are no other known factors besides X and Y which would correlate significantly with T.
If you start your research by asking (if you are primed to ask) “is there a significant correlation between T and Y?”, your research will continue like this “yes, we have measured that correlation between T and Y is 0.6, end of story” and you will publish this. There is a risk that you will miss X completely, because you will focus only on Y. But if your goal is to find a good predictor of T, it would be better to discover X.
I think there is a lot of motivated “research” about violence, where the bottom line is: men are evil, women are victims. This has some relation to the territory: certainly men commit much more violent crimes than women. Though even in this situation, why stop at the male sex? Why not also evaluate the impact of e.g. education, social class, previous criminal record, or (political correctness forbid!) ethnicity? Maybe there is some correlation here, too.
If we move from physical violence to other kinds of abuse, the results may change. Not just the correlation with male sex can be weaker, maybe even negative, but more importantly, there may be a significant correlation with something else, which we completely ignore, because we focus only on correlation with sex.
So generally, is is better to ask “what causes this kind of abuse?” than “how is this kind of abuse related to sex?”. If the correlation with sex is significant (yes, sometimes it is), let it come freely as an answer to the first question, but let’s not start with assumption that it is significant.
there’s nothing “relatively less cruel” about being beat up or shoved around than with being given the silent treatment.
My best friend was once given the silent treatment in a context and manner so stressful that she could not eat solid food for several days and I had to make her smoothies. A physical beating with the same effect would have had to be really seriously injurious.
A friend of mine was once given a physical beating in a context and manner so stressful that it fractured his skull. The silent treatment with the same effect would have had to be extraordinary.
It’s not clear to me what follows from either of those comparisons, beyond the relatively obvious observation that different forms of harm have different types of symptoms.
It also depends on the context where the physical beating happens, not just the intensity.
For example imagine being beaten in front of your best friends, who are too afraid to intervene (maybe they realistically didn’t have a chance, but you feel that they should have done something) -- that would hurt beyond the pain of beating itself. For a guy, being beaten in front of the girl he has crush on, probably means losing status and reproductive chances. Also the context determines the probability that the same thing will happen again: being beaten in the school where you must go every day, is worse than being beaten in a dark street you can avoid next time.
A physical beating comes with psychological effects, too, though. It wouldn’t have to completely physically incapacitate someone to the point of not being able to eat; it would only have to have a sum of (physical + psychological) effect totaling to that level of bad.
I’m not a female, but this seems to me an obvious competition within sexes. Assuming that most people are heterosexual, for a female a competitor is another female, just like for a male a competitor is another male. So the ability to put down members of the same sex is an evolutionarily selected trait. (Of course it is not the only evolutionarily selected trait; in other contexts a cooperation is rewarded.) Males and females use somehow different methods of putting down their competitor, probably the ones better suited to their comparative advantages: males will try to put down other males by physical attacks or threats, females prefer mental and social attacks.
However, a reason why some behavior is evolutionarily selected is not the same as a mental process by which it is started. (For example a desire to have sex is selected because it leads to reproduction, but we do it for pleasure.) A psychological trigger that starts the intra-sex competition may be a feeling of insecurity. Which, among other things, may be also triggered by a presence of a competitor.
In my understanding, few men would notice if I wore the same dress twice. Out-competing other women for men only makes sense if the men notice. The level of attention to dress that will impress most men is lower than the level that will impress most other women. So to the extent that women are dressing carefully to impress men, it’s largely mediated through other women. Women may snark to men, or to other women in men’s hearing, about other women in order to jockey for status. (I realize this isn’t an Austen crowd, but think Miss Bingley snarking to Mr. Darcy about Elizabeth Bennet.)
I work for a fashion company, marketing high-end designer goods to both men and women, and can assure you the phenomenon your friend is describing is very real.
On the broader subject of cruelty, I think you’re on the right lines with insecurity, but that’s still not an answer. Why do people experience insecurity (i.e. why do feelings of insecurity exist in human beings)?
Why do people experience insecurity (i.e. why do feelings of insecurity exist in human beings)?
Humans are exquisitely sensitive to tribal status for fairly obvious reasons. This is why pretty much all human interactions have an element of status game about them.
Well, yes, but lots of human emotional responses are about mediating the perception and signalling of status. Insecurity is (more or less) second-guessing one’s self-perceived status, regardless of the reality of the situation. We might imagine this becoming more useful (and more frequent) in environments where there’s a lot of status competition.
So what happens in an environment where you have a cadre of ridiculously high-status superstimulatory celebrities, with media channels dedicated to demonstrating their high-status qualities and disseminating gossip about them?
After some thought, she said it’s most likely because she will be looked down upon by other females if she is seen wearing something that she has previously been known to wear. I asked why again, and she said that sort of judgement has probably been inculcated in the majority of females; she clarified that she only bought new dresses so as not to be thought of as low status, and has no qualms wearing the same things around family.
Wow, I (a man) never had the slightest inkling that this pressure existed.
she thinks other females constantly judge each other based upon their wardrobe
In doing so, they evaluate others’ taste (mental abilities / fitness) and ability to afford many new dresses (resources).
Why is this an example of special cruelty to others? As long as you have status at all, you must have constant appraisal of others’ status. This isn’t even an attempt to deliberately lower someone else’s status, this is just straightforward competition at raising your own.
As long as you have status at all, you must have constant appraisal of others’ status.
I don’t do this. I may value others based upon their potential impact on the world, though, on a very subconscious level; I more consciously value others relative to me. Status only matters in so much as it can achieve or accomplish something, and thus is just one tool through which one pursues a goal hierarchically higher on one’s objective tree.
In doing so, they evaluate others’ taste (mental abilities / fitness) and ability to afford many new dresses (resources).
Being viewed as high-status only matters if those judging have value. I understand that in the microcosm of high school, people with little world-value can be high-status, and have the power to negatively affect one’s life; complying with their games makes sense in this instance. However, when those judging have no value on the scale of the game one plays or intends to play (work, mating, scholarship), then efforts undergone to have them think of one as high-status no longer make sense. In this case, buying a dress effects a net: decrease in personal funds, which I’m assuming are valued; increase in status judgment by party X, who has/have no value.
‘Tis then frivolous to partake in the games of party X as ‘twould only yield the loss of something valued, with no valued gains. I don’t enjoy frivolity that costs me something I value and gives me nothing I value, and I operate under the understanding that neither do others. Forcing someone to make an unnecessary value assessment of: negative value of social games vs. experience of ‘special event’, is cruel, as it’s an unbalanced choice; one knows the first negative value, but not the second. I don’t think the second value can be accurately calculated using Bayes’ theorem: too many variables (exempli gratia individual’s personalities, inclinations, intentions, resources, hidden plans, etcetera).
I think it cruel to force one to make uninformed value calculations. In this instance, the friend plays the game on the world and high school level; she knows party X has little to no value in the world game, but does have some value in the high school game, which she will soon leave. She can’t know the potential negative value of not complying with the games of party X, nor the potential positive value of attending the ‘special event’. I think this forced unbalanced value calculation cruel. I am also not particularly fond of your asking such a loaded question, but I can’t fault you for it.
Then you’re probably going to be low status in the eyes of the vast majority who does do this. Which is a perfectly valid choice, of course.
Being viewed as high-status only matters if those judging have value.
To your friend who bought the dresses, those judging did have value. Otherwise she wouldn’t play the expensive status game. This seems to me like a pretty complete answer to your original question.
You might ask why they have value to her—you haven’t given the details for me to answer that. At the very least you said they are a majority of all women, so they probably include some friends of hers and new potential friends, else why would she go to these events at all?
Tis then frivolous to partake in the games of party X as ’twould only yield the loss of something valued, with no valued gains.
The valued gain is first of all the willingness of party X to interact with you. If you want it, you must pay the costs. If you don’t want it, you don’t care to play and don’t pay.
Why do you describe this as “forcing someone”? Everyone is free to choose with whom to associate. Everyone who plays the expensive games does so by choice. All the standard considerations of game theory apply.
Forcing someone to make an unnecessary value assessment of: negative value of social games vs. experience of ‘special event’, is cruel, as it’s an unbalanced choice; one knows the first negative value, but not the second.
Why not? If one has been to similar events in the past, and missed some events, one should have a good idea of the benefits to be had on average.
I don’t think the second value can be accurately calculated using Bayes’ theorem
Even if this is true, I don’t see why it’s more so than for most other aspects of the (social) world.
Yes, it’s hard to predict the opportunity value of a specific social event as opposed to on average. But consider that everyone attending the event is equally in the dark. If your friend could win (by whatever metric) by not going to social events (and not paying the cost), then she would do so, and others would notice and follow. So I predict on average people benefit individually from going to the events, even taking the cost into account.
Compare the opportunity of going to the events with me offering you the same bet on a biased coin toss every week. You pay money to bet against me, but the expected value of many bets is positive. Even though you can’t calculate the outcome of the next bet and may lose it (the coin is only slightly biased).
Why do you view the social events as an obligation or someone forcing someone else to participate, rather than an opportunity?
Having said that, from rather a devil’s advocate POV, I’ll try to address the question from another angle.
You may be thinking: a single person defecting from the game loses, but if only many people defected together, they could establish a group where people didn’t pay continuous costs and still offered each other the same opportunities. Then each of them would gain more value than from staying with the old group.
Now, if that worked and resulted in a stable and better-for-everyone outcome, people would do so more often. So why don’t they? Presumably the current solution is a Nash equilibrium, but why exactly? I don’t have a good single answer, but I can think of several possible factors:
Outdated adaptation execution: we are to an extent pre-wired to play the existing game and try raise the participation cost to whatever we ourselves can bear, so as to exclude lower-status people who can’t pay it. This worked ancestrally because people lived in relatively small groups (much smaller than the average school, let alone the wide world) and didn’t have the freedom to defect from a group and look for new associates elsewhere.
People really care and/or benefit from excluding lower status people from their groups. Your friend pays the cost and goes to the events, but some people simply cannot pay the cost (either in money or in dress-sense or in something else), so they never go to these events. There are social benefits to forming exclusive clubs (in game theoretical terms) which only require that the club be exclusive (doesn’t matter on which basis). For instance, it makes use of us vs. them ingroup/outgroup dynamics to strengthen in-group ties.
If the exclusive group is based on a really worthwhile metric (in evolutionary terms), then people benefit from joining, if only because they get exclusive access to a good pool of potential mates. As another example, if it’s based on money (being able to afford dresses), then it helps rich people network together, which is useful in the future when money becomes a powerful tool for rich people to help one another.
I am also not particularly fond of your asking such a loaded question, but I can’t fault you for it.
I don’t understand why my question was loaded. You asked why such-and-such cruel behavior existed. I asked, to clarify, why did you consider it cruel? Perhaps the behavior I have a mental image of isn’t what you mean.
I wish I could better understand your reaction to my question, and others’ reactions to my words in general (in the spirit of the current post). So I would appreciate it if you could explain why my question struck you as unpleasant and how I could have gone about it better. Thanks!
Then you’re probably going to be low status in the eyes of the vast majority who does do this. Which is a perfectly valid choice, of course.
Actually, I find this quite useful. I’ve found (before I discovered the following) that those who care enough about status to write me off for not ‘playing the game’ are the same whom I’d rather not associate with; in a sense they self-filter themselves from my life, and I’m much happier for it.
To your friend who bought the dresses, those judging did have value. Otherwise she wouldn’t play the expensive status game. This seems to me like a pretty complete answer to your original question.
Agreed. Though I don’t think this answer fully solves the whole riddle of why some initiate the game at all.
You might ask why they have value to her—you haven’t given the details for me to answer that. At the very least you said they are a majority of all women, so they probably include some friends of hers and new potential friends, else why would she go to these events at all?
They are old friends with whom she was out of touch, and with whom she has recently started spending time again. Ironically, she (says she) detests every moment spent with them, as they have little to nothing in common. As to why she cares at all, I’ve not an idea.
Why do you describe this as “forcing someone”? Everyone is free to choose with whom to associate. Everyone who plays the expensive games does so by choice. All the standard considerations of game theory apply.
I use ‘force’ to refer to how one must play their game when deciding whether they wish to attend the event. Even in deciding to attend and not play the game by wearing a previously owned dress, or not attend and avoid the dilemma entirely, one still makes a decision heavily influenced by the mere existence of the game. As long as one has high-enough status, merely initiating the game forces everyone to play it, as one can’t make a comprehensive decision on whether to attend the event without taking the game into account.
Why not? If one has been to similar events in the past, and missed some events, one should have a good idea of the benefits to be had on average.
Indeed; however, the event in question (high-school senior prom) is entirely unique to her. School student government changes every year, and thus every year prom changes as well. The cathartic (marking the ending of a personal era) experience of the senior prom adds more to the event as well. Any other generic ‘special event’, though, would not apply—assuming one has previously attended a similar event.
Why do you view the social events as an obligation or someone forcing someone else to participate, rather than an opportunity?
I view such events as both an obligation and an opportunity—different for each party. To use the present example: for my friend, the event is an obligation; as far as can be predicted (not far), she loses more than she gains by attending. For another, though, the event might provide a once in a lifetime opportunity to secure a future with the lovely Sal Crenley. The following table represents my reasoning:
| | Projected Monetary | Projected Opportunity |
| Available Funds | Cost of Attending | Cost of Not Attending | End Result
-------+-----------------+--------------------+---------------------------+-----------------------------
Friend | $600 | $600 | Unknown (Possibly Nought) | Known loss of monetary funds
| | | | - unknown opportunity cost
-------+-----------------+--------------------+---------------------------+-----------------------------
Other | $3,000 | $1,200 | Lifelong Saudade | Worthwhile expenditure of
| | | | time & funds
-------+-----------------+--------------------+---------------------------+-----------------------------
Potential factors numbers two and three have merit, and I’ll keep them in mind to test against future experiences.
So I would appreciate it if you could explain why my question struck you as unpleasant and how I could have gone about it better. Thanks!
I really appreciate your asking the question, and apologize if commenting on my emotional reaction to your question caused you distress. I think, on some level, I realized that you asked a sound question that would take me much time to respond; my aversion to this expenditure of time likely effected an emotional resentment. Why answer at all, then? Rationally, I knew the question needed answering, and would help me learn how to better express myself. The effort would be difficult, but according to my values, worth doing. I would not emotionally enjoy the experience however, and my subconscience resented you for presenting the opportunity for my brain to force itself to do an activity it wouldn’t enjoy.
I particularly appreciate how your question made me realize this—though not until after I’d posted. I used to love mulling the answers to these sorts of questions, but somewhere along the way I seem to have developed a dislike for them, probably due to repeated experience of tediously and verbosely proving an answer to such questions with overlong semantic proofs. Now I know I should neither completely forswear nor righteously pursue unloading these concepts, but should concisely answer them while still avoiding using leaps of logic. Thanks to your question, I can also now work on overwriting the nasty bit of emotional reaction brought on by loaded, difficult questions (the reason for why I perceive such behavior to be cruel had a difficult and complex answer—thus the ‘loaded’ question).
I shared my reaction to your question with you in order to expose any bias that may have affected my logic, and to give you a sense of the mental state your question effected within me. If you knew that asking for clarification on the foundation of a question’s premise might invoke an adverse reaction, then you might be better equipped for handling a similar situation in the future.
Less Wrong’s Markdown implementation doesn’t allow HTML, and there’s no way to do tables in the non-HTML part of Markdown, except for using spaces to separate the columns so that they line up in a fixed-width font, then indenting each line by four spaces.
| | Projected Monetary | Projected Opportunity |
| Available Funds | Cost of Attending | Cost of Not Attending | End Result
-------+-----------------+--------------------+---------------------------+-----------------------------
Friend | $600 | $600 | Unknown (Possibly Nought) | Known loss of monetary funds
| | | | - unknown opportunity cost
-------+-----------------+--------------------+---------------------------+-----------------------------
Other | $3,000 | $1,200 | Lifelong Saudade | Worthwhile expenditure of
| | | | time & funds
-------+-----------------+--------------------+---------------------------+-----------------------------
Why are some females sometimes unreasonably mean to other females? Is this even the case?
For example, I recently asked a friend why she felt the need to buy a new dress for every ‘special event’ (galas, dances, etc.). After some thought, she said it’s most likely because she will be looked down upon by other females if she is seen wearing something that she has previously been known to wear. I asked why again, and she said that sort of judgement has probably been inculcated in the majority of females; she clarified that she only bought new dresses so as not to be thought of as low status, and has no qualms wearing the same things around family.
In other words, she thinks other females constantly judge each other based upon their wardrobe; she said the same judgement does not apply to men. I have heard that some females play relatively cruel psychological games with each other when compared to male culture. Is this true? Why do some do it?
I’ve always assumed it’s due to mere insecurity, in the same way some males often put each other down in order to be thought of as higher status.
Men have comparable status competitions and nastiness, it just isn’t about clothes.
Part of Zaine’s question is whether this is actually the case. There’s an aphorism: “Men insult each other and don’t mean it. Women compliment each other and don’t mean it.” Do groups of men who are friends engage zero-sum status games? What do those look like?
Aren’t most status games zero-sum, though? Would I be right to assume that you meant the kind of status games where the men of Group Y are trying to raise their status at the expense of each other rather than those not in their in-group?
If so, almost any form of social interaction in a given group can have zero-sum status game elements. As an example, the simple act of sharing information can be construed as promoting one’s superior knowledge and thus showing the other guy up.
You mentioned the saying “Men insult each other and don’t mean it. Women compliment each other and don’t mean it.” That’s definitely a working example of such games. Here’s an extract from Duels and Duets: Why Men and Women Talk So Differently by John L. Locke, via Google Books:
Yes. Particularly popular ones are known as “sports.”
Note the asymmetry between men and women- men compete both as groups and as individuals. Women generally only compete as individuals- so males have a flavor of camaraderie that women rarely do.
I don’t believe athletic competition is zero-sum. The status gain of the winners isn’t offset by a status loss of the losers. In fact, the losers often come out with a gain in status, assuming they play well.
Another way to see that it’s positive-sum is as follows: A close-fought game results in more status for both sides than does a rout. If the game were zero-sum, that status had to come from somewhere. But in fact, if the losers play better, both sides come out better than if the losers lost, badly.
Conclusion: athletics and similar competition is positive-sum, and the size of the total status gain depends on the talent being displayed.
Status is relative by its essence. So, if some forms of direct competition seem to raise the status of both competitors, somebody else has to lose. It only needn’t be one of the direct participants in the match. You’re right that both competitors may gain status if they both play well, but the very meaning of “well” is decided from comparison with other players in the relevant pool; if you play better than they usually do, your status grows at their expense.
Also, it is not universally true that close-fought results get positive status change to both competitors. Close win against a low-status outsider is often a status loss for the winner, even if the loser played well.
Yes, I agree with all this. But the original claim was “sports are a zero-sum status game”. And I think you and I are both saying that this isn’t so—competition is sometimes positive and sometimes negative- sum for the participants.
While social status, at the society-wide level is necessarily zero sum, the participants in the activity might all come out ahead of the bystanders—or behind, perhaps, if the sport is disreputable.
Somewhat related: exactly one of the groups of male friends I’m a member of has/had a very clear, completely self-appointed omega. This weirded me out; I think he thought he wasn’t as smart as some of us, but he’s hardly stupid (currently doing PhD research in engineering!) and a very nice guy.
Curious how different an omega and an Omega are.
We now have a clue about Omega’s backstory.
What age group are we talking about?
I read some long livejournal comment discussions (hundreds of comments, and sorry, I can’t place it more accurately than that it was probably more than four years ago and might have been in theferrett’s journal) about bullying by girls in school, and there was a lot of it. Almost all of it was social rather than physical.
One of the classics was pretending to be someone’s friend, and then laughing at them for believing it. That can apparently cause longterm (possibly permanent) damage to the victim’s ability to trust people.
The only incident from the threads that I remember in detail was from someone in a school where a particular pin was the thing the popular girls wore. She begged her parents for the pin, and eventually got one. When the other girls saw her wearing it, they took off their pins and threw them on the floor.
I suppose adults (around 20 years and onward) are the most productively discussable age group, as by then the mind has completed most of its development.
I can only think sadism the reason for why one would pretend to be someone’s friend, unless affirming the “absurdity” of the concept itself reinforces a status divide.
The pin incident points to in-groups using exclusionary measures to define themselves from everyone out-group.
Just conceived theory:
In school settings, groups of girls that signal unavailability and attract the majority of their class’s opposite sex maintain these two measures of status through exclusively signalling themselves as what ‘high-status’ means. These signals often express themselves as psychological games.
The theory would extrapolate to post-school settings by essentially repeating the process; have others signal one as high-status by treating one as such, then represent oneself as the epitome of high-status by using similar games to signal others as lower status.
The theory operates on the premise that the games are all about status, which I think would be sad if true. So specious.
I would say no. I’m with Konkvistador; the male and female games simply take on different forms. Still, on the psychological-physical axis of abuse, women tend toward the psychological more than men, so I’d expect them to be commensurately more adept at purely psychological abuse.
However, regarding the big picture, there’s nothing “relatively less cruel” about being beat up or shoved around than with being given the silent treatment. I’ve wondered more than a few times at how often the psychological effects of physical interactions tend to be overlooked. Even aside from, say, the actual physical pain of losing a fight, there’s still all the other stuff. It’s not like the memory of a fight lost in front of everybody suddenly vanishes or is instantly overcome. Physical pains intentionally inflicted on you by others always come with corresponding mental counterparts, while the reverse is not true.
Outside of fairly toxic environments, my experience is that social conflicts among men rarely devolve to violence past high school age. How far does this sort of judgmental behavior among women persist? It’s something I’m aware of in abstract but I’ve never really observed it firsthand.
I suppose I also meant to ask after the proliferation of both types of abuse. Physical confrontations among men, from my schooling experience, were quite rare. I once witnessed an ‘alpha’ stare down someone challenging his status, while verbally asserting dominance and forcing the challenger to agree the alpha was superior, and the challenger was an idiot for thinking otherwise. From an anthropological perspective it was quite enthralling to watch.
I know that physical violence among male culture occurs more frequently in other regions, and that in Japan males employ psychological games similar to those of western women. So, to narrow down the question and assist in mitigating what ambiguity can arise from relativism:
In ‘western culture’, which type of abuse is most often used, and by whom? Why? Do females abuse the longest, and are their psychological games thus comparatively worse?
I guess this answer strongly depends on how exactly you define “abuse”. My intuition is that generally the more intensive acts of abuse are less frequent, and the less intentive acts of abuse are more frequent; for example people more often scream at each other than hit each other. So where exactly you draw the line, the kind of abuse just above the line will probably be the most frequent. If we count only physical violence, in western culture (during peace) the most frequent would be men against women, or maybe parents against children. With psychological abuse, I am not sure.
A fair comparison would be a weighted sum: to multiply the frequency of abuse with severity of average consequences. But it is easier to evaluate physical damage from physical abuse (although this is also not simple: a small brain tissue damage from one incident may be undetected, but cumulative effects can be serious) than a damage from psychological abuse; the latter is almost impossible to evaluate.
(As a sidenote, focusing on statistics by sex is kind of privileging a hypothesis. We should start by looking at data, and draw the boundary accordingly. Sometimes the incidence will correlate with one sex very strongly: I guess criticizing not having a new dress for an event is a predominantly female behavior, just like e.g. bar fights are a predominantly male behavior. For other kinds of abuse, the incidence may be different.)
I think defining psychological abuse as that which is done passively (behind someone’s back, through subtly in a conversation, etc.) and physical abuse as that which is done actively (aggressive contact, screaming, heated insults) would suffice.
I can see how asking, ”… and by which sex?” can privilege the hypothesis that the most common type of abuse would be used by one sex more than the other. I think fixing it to saying, ”… and by what sex?” solves it, though; what other answers could the data reflect besides male, female, DSD (intersex), or some combination of the three?
I meant something like this: Imagine that there is a thing T that you want to study. Correlation between T and X is 0.9. Correlation between T and Y is 0.6. Let’s assume that there are no other known factors besides X and Y which would correlate significantly with T.
If you start your research by asking (if you are primed to ask) “is there a significant correlation between T and Y?”, your research will continue like this “yes, we have measured that correlation between T and Y is 0.6, end of story” and you will publish this. There is a risk that you will miss X completely, because you will focus only on Y. But if your goal is to find a good predictor of T, it would be better to discover X.
I think there is a lot of motivated “research” about violence, where the bottom line is: men are evil, women are victims. This has some relation to the territory: certainly men commit much more violent crimes than women. Though even in this situation, why stop at the male sex? Why not also evaluate the impact of e.g. education, social class, previous criminal record, or (political correctness forbid!) ethnicity? Maybe there is some correlation here, too.
If we move from physical violence to other kinds of abuse, the results may change. Not just the correlation with male sex can be weaker, maybe even negative, but more importantly, there may be a significant correlation with something else, which we completely ignore, because we focus only on correlation with sex.
So generally, is is better to ask “what causes this kind of abuse?” than “how is this kind of abuse related to sex?”. If the correlation with sex is significant (yes, sometimes it is), let it come freely as an answer to the first question, but let’s not start with assumption that it is significant.
Thank you; I edited the question to eliminate the (selection bias?) privileged hypothesis.
My best friend was once given the silent treatment in a context and manner so stressful that she could not eat solid food for several days and I had to make her smoothies. A physical beating with the same effect would have had to be really seriously injurious.
Probably.
A friend of mine was once given a physical beating in a context and manner so stressful that it fractured his skull. The silent treatment with the same effect would have had to be extraordinary.
It’s not clear to me what follows from either of those comparisons, beyond the relatively obvious observation that different forms of harm have different types of symptoms.
It also depends on the context where the physical beating happens, not just the intensity.
For example imagine being beaten in front of your best friends, who are too afraid to intervene (maybe they realistically didn’t have a chance, but you feel that they should have done something) -- that would hurt beyond the pain of beating itself. For a guy, being beaten in front of the girl he has crush on, probably means losing status and reproductive chances. Also the context determines the probability that the same thing will happen again: being beaten in the school where you must go every day, is worse than being beaten in a dark street you can avoid next time.
A physical beating comes with psychological effects, too, though. It wouldn’t have to completely physically incapacitate someone to the point of not being able to eat; it would only have to have a sum of (physical + psychological) effect totaling to that level of bad.
I’m not a female, but this seems to me an obvious competition within sexes. Assuming that most people are heterosexual, for a female a competitor is another female, just like for a male a competitor is another male. So the ability to put down members of the same sex is an evolutionarily selected trait. (Of course it is not the only evolutionarily selected trait; in other contexts a cooperation is rewarded.) Males and females use somehow different methods of putting down their competitor, probably the ones better suited to their comparative advantages: males will try to put down other males by physical attacks or threats, females prefer mental and social attacks.
However, a reason why some behavior is evolutionarily selected is not the same as a mental process by which it is started. (For example a desire to have sex is selected because it leads to reproduction, but we do it for pleasure.) A psychological trigger that starts the intra-sex competition may be a feeling of insecurity. Which, among other things, may be also triggered by a presence of a competitor.
In my understanding, few men would notice if I wore the same dress twice. Out-competing other women for men only makes sense if the men notice. The level of attention to dress that will impress most men is lower than the level that will impress most other women. So to the extent that women are dressing carefully to impress men, it’s largely mediated through other women. Women may snark to men, or to other women in men’s hearing, about other women in order to jockey for status. (I realize this isn’t an Austen crowd, but think Miss Bingley snarking to Mr. Darcy about Elizabeth Bennet.)
I work for a fashion company, marketing high-end designer goods to both men and women, and can assure you the phenomenon your friend is describing is very real.
On the broader subject of cruelty, I think you’re on the right lines with insecurity, but that’s still not an answer. Why do people experience insecurity (i.e. why do feelings of insecurity exist in human beings)?
Humans are exquisitely sensitive to tribal status for fairly obvious reasons. This is why pretty much all human interactions have an element of status game about them.
Well, yes, but lots of human emotional responses are about mediating the perception and signalling of status. Insecurity is (more or less) second-guessing one’s self-perceived status, regardless of the reality of the situation. We might imagine this becoming more useful (and more frequent) in environments where there’s a lot of status competition.
So what happens in an environment where you have a cadre of ridiculously high-status superstimulatory celebrities, with media channels dedicated to demonstrating their high-status qualities and disseminating gossip about them?
Bloody hell. I think I’ve turned into a feminist.
Wow, I (a man) never had the slightest inkling that this pressure existed.
In doing so, they evaluate others’ taste (mental abilities / fitness) and ability to afford many new dresses (resources).
Why is this an example of special cruelty to others? As long as you have status at all, you must have constant appraisal of others’ status. This isn’t even an attempt to deliberately lower someone else’s status, this is just straightforward competition at raising your own.
I don’t do this. I may value others based upon their potential impact on the world, though, on a very subconscious level; I more consciously value others relative to me. Status only matters in so much as it can achieve or accomplish something, and thus is just one tool through which one pursues a goal hierarchically higher on one’s objective tree.
Being viewed as high-status only matters if those judging have value. I understand that in the microcosm of high school, people with little world-value can be high-status, and have the power to negatively affect one’s life; complying with their games makes sense in this instance. However, when those judging have no value on the scale of the game one plays or intends to play (work, mating, scholarship), then efforts undergone to have them think of one as high-status no longer make sense. In this case, buying a dress effects a net: decrease in personal funds, which I’m assuming are valued; increase in status judgment by party X, who has/have no value.
‘Tis then frivolous to partake in the games of party X as ‘twould only yield the loss of something valued, with no valued gains. I don’t enjoy frivolity that costs me something I value and gives me nothing I value, and I operate under the understanding that neither do others. Forcing someone to make an unnecessary value assessment of: negative value of social games vs. experience of ‘special event’, is cruel, as it’s an unbalanced choice; one knows the first negative value, but not the second. I don’t think the second value can be accurately calculated using Bayes’ theorem: too many variables (exempli gratia individual’s personalities, inclinations, intentions, resources, hidden plans, etcetera).
I think it cruel to force one to make uninformed value calculations. In this instance, the friend plays the game on the world and high school level; she knows party X has little to no value in the world game, but does have some value in the high school game, which she will soon leave. She can’t know the potential negative value of not complying with the games of party X, nor the potential positive value of attending the ‘special event’. I think this forced unbalanced value calculation cruel. I am also not particularly fond of your asking such a loaded question, but I can’t fault you for it.
I hope I answered your question adequately.
Then you’re probably going to be low status in the eyes of the vast majority who does do this. Which is a perfectly valid choice, of course.
To your friend who bought the dresses, those judging did have value. Otherwise she wouldn’t play the expensive status game. This seems to me like a pretty complete answer to your original question.
You might ask why they have value to her—you haven’t given the details for me to answer that. At the very least you said they are a majority of all women, so they probably include some friends of hers and new potential friends, else why would she go to these events at all?
The valued gain is first of all the willingness of party X to interact with you. If you want it, you must pay the costs. If you don’t want it, you don’t care to play and don’t pay.
Why do you describe this as “forcing someone”? Everyone is free to choose with whom to associate. Everyone who plays the expensive games does so by choice. All the standard considerations of game theory apply.
Why not? If one has been to similar events in the past, and missed some events, one should have a good idea of the benefits to be had on average.
Even if this is true, I don’t see why it’s more so than for most other aspects of the (social) world.
Yes, it’s hard to predict the opportunity value of a specific social event as opposed to on average. But consider that everyone attending the event is equally in the dark. If your friend could win (by whatever metric) by not going to social events (and not paying the cost), then she would do so, and others would notice and follow. So I predict on average people benefit individually from going to the events, even taking the cost into account.
Compare the opportunity of going to the events with me offering you the same bet on a biased coin toss every week. You pay money to bet against me, but the expected value of many bets is positive. Even though you can’t calculate the outcome of the next bet and may lose it (the coin is only slightly biased).
Why do you view the social events as an obligation or someone forcing someone else to participate, rather than an opportunity?
Having said that, from rather a devil’s advocate POV, I’ll try to address the question from another angle.
You may be thinking: a single person defecting from the game loses, but if only many people defected together, they could establish a group where people didn’t pay continuous costs and still offered each other the same opportunities. Then each of them would gain more value than from staying with the old group.
Now, if that worked and resulted in a stable and better-for-everyone outcome, people would do so more often. So why don’t they? Presumably the current solution is a Nash equilibrium, but why exactly? I don’t have a good single answer, but I can think of several possible factors:
Outdated adaptation execution: we are to an extent pre-wired to play the existing game and try raise the participation cost to whatever we ourselves can bear, so as to exclude lower-status people who can’t pay it. This worked ancestrally because people lived in relatively small groups (much smaller than the average school, let alone the wide world) and didn’t have the freedom to defect from a group and look for new associates elsewhere.
People really care and/or benefit from excluding lower status people from their groups. Your friend pays the cost and goes to the events, but some people simply cannot pay the cost (either in money or in dress-sense or in something else), so they never go to these events. There are social benefits to forming exclusive clubs (in game theoretical terms) which only require that the club be exclusive (doesn’t matter on which basis). For instance, it makes use of us vs. them ingroup/outgroup dynamics to strengthen in-group ties.
If the exclusive group is based on a really worthwhile metric (in evolutionary terms), then people benefit from joining, if only because they get exclusive access to a good pool of potential mates. As another example, if it’s based on money (being able to afford dresses), then it helps rich people network together, which is useful in the future when money becomes a powerful tool for rich people to help one another.
I don’t understand why my question was loaded. You asked why such-and-such cruel behavior existed. I asked, to clarify, why did you consider it cruel? Perhaps the behavior I have a mental image of isn’t what you mean.
I wish I could better understand your reaction to my question, and others’ reactions to my words in general (in the spirit of the current post). So I would appreciate it if you could explain why my question struck you as unpleasant and how I could have gone about it better. Thanks!
Actually, I find this quite useful. I’ve found (before I discovered the following) that those who care enough about status to write me off for not ‘playing the game’ are the same whom I’d rather not associate with; in a sense they self-filter themselves from my life, and I’m much happier for it.
Agreed. Though I don’t think this answer fully solves the whole riddle of why some initiate the game at all.
They are old friends with whom she was out of touch, and with whom she has recently started spending time again. Ironically, she (says she) detests every moment spent with them, as they have little to nothing in common. As to why she cares at all, I’ve not an idea.
I use ‘force’ to refer to how one must play their game when deciding whether they wish to attend the event. Even in deciding to attend and not play the game by wearing a previously owned dress, or not attend and avoid the dilemma entirely, one still makes a decision heavily influenced by the mere existence of the game. As long as one has high-enough status, merely initiating the game forces everyone to play it, as one can’t make a comprehensive decision on whether to attend the event without taking the game into account.
Indeed; however, the event in question (high-school senior prom) is entirely unique to her. School student government changes every year, and thus every year prom changes as well. The cathartic (marking the ending of a personal era) experience of the senior prom adds more to the event as well. Any other generic ‘special event’, though, would not apply—assuming one has previously attended a similar event.
I view such events as both an obligation and an opportunity—different for each party. To use the present example: for my friend, the event is an obligation; as far as can be predicted (not far), she loses more than she gains by attending. For another, though, the event might provide a once in a lifetime opportunity to secure a future with the lovely Sal Crenley. The following table represents my reasoning:
Potential factors numbers two and three have merit, and I’ll keep them in mind to test against future experiences.
I really appreciate your asking the question, and apologize if commenting on my emotional reaction to your question caused you distress. I think, on some level, I realized that you asked a sound question that would take me much time to respond; my aversion to this expenditure of time likely effected an emotional resentment. Why answer at all, then? Rationally, I knew the question needed answering, and would help me learn how to better express myself. The effort would be difficult, but according to my values, worth doing. I would not emotionally enjoy the experience however, and my subconscience resented you for presenting the opportunity for my brain to force itself to do an activity it wouldn’t enjoy.
I particularly appreciate how your question made me realize this—though not until after I’d posted. I used to love mulling the answers to these sorts of questions, but somewhere along the way I seem to have developed a dislike for them, probably due to repeated experience of tediously and verbosely proving an answer to such questions with overlong semantic proofs. Now I know I should neither completely forswear nor righteously pursue unloading these concepts, but should concisely answer them while still avoiding using leaps of logic. Thanks to your question, I can also now work on overwriting the nasty bit of emotional reaction brought on by loaded, difficult questions (the reason for why I perceive such behavior to be cruel had a difficult and complex answer—thus the ‘loaded’ question).
I shared my reaction to your question with you in order to expose any bias that may have affected my logic, and to give you a sense of the mental state your question effected within me. If you knew that asking for clarification on the foundation of a question’s premise might invoke an adverse reaction, then you might be better equipped for handling a similar situation in the future.
Less Wrong’s Markdown implementation doesn’t allow HTML, and there’s no way to do tables in the non-HTML part of Markdown, except for using spaces to separate the columns so that they line up in a fixed-width font, then indenting each line by four spaces.
(Today I learned a new word.)
Ｔｈａｎｋ ｙｏｕ． I used the page source code from the tables in this article to try it previously.
Yeah, posts use HTML but comments use Markdown.