Male Deception Research Articles

Uncovering Gender-Specific and Cross-Gender Features in Mandarin Deception: An Acoustic and Electroglottographic Approach.

This study aimed to investigate the acoustic and electroglottographic (EGG) profiles of Mandarin deception, including global characteristics and the influence of gender. Thirty-six Mandarin speakers participated in an interactive interview game in which they provided both deceptive and truthful answers to 14 biographical questions. Acoustic and EGG signals of the participants' responses were simultaneously recorded; 20 acoustic and 14 EGG features were analyzed using binary logistic regression models. Increases in fundamental frequency (F0) mean, intensity mean, first formant (F1), fifth formant (F5), contact quotient (CQ), decontacting-time quotient (DTQ), and contact index (CI) as well as decreases in jitter, shimmer, harmonics-to-noise ratio (HNR), and fourth formant (F4) were significantly correlated with global deception. Cross-gender features included increases in intensity mean and F5 and decreases in jitter, HNR, and F4, whereas gender-specific features encompassed increases in F0 mean, shimmer, F1, third formant, and DTQ, as well as decreases in F0 maximum and CQ for female deception, and increases in CQ and CI and decreases in shimmer for male deception. The results suggest that Mandarin deception could be tied to underlying pragmatic functions, emotional arousal, decreased glottal contact skewness, and more pressed phonation. Disparities in gender-specific features lend support to differences in the use of pragmatics, levels of deception-induced emotional arousal, skewness of glottal contact patterns, and phonation types.

Metabolic cost of holding nuptial food gifts for male spiders

1. In various insect and spiders, males offer nuptial food gifts to females during copulation that enhance male fitness either directly through their effects on male fertilisation success or indirectly through the nutritional benefits delivering for females. However, the physiological costs of producing these gifts remain largely unexplored.2. We examined energetic costs of holding nuptial gifts in the gift‐giving spider, Pisaura mirabilis, using stop‐flow respirometry.3. Males exhibited 37% higher metabolic rates when holding a nuptial gift than when they do not have one.4. Our findings suggest the existence of metabolic costs associated with holding a nuptial gift for males. This confirm that male condition is particularly relevant for gift‐giving and may explain the evolution of male deception for cheaper nuptial gifts.

Gendered Pathways to Prison in Thailand for Drug Offending? Exploring Women’s and Men’s Narratives of Offending and Criminalization

In criminology, there is a growing body of research exploring pathways into prison. However, few researchers have concerned themselves with qualitative gender-comparative studies of women’s and men’s journeys to offending and criminalization. Further, little is known about trajectories into non-Western prison systems. In this article, life course and feminist pathways perspectives are drawn on to describe, examine, and compare women’s and men’s pathways to prison for drug offending in Thailand. Overall, findings point to both similarities and divergences in experiences by gender. Four common themes or pathways to prison emerged for both women and men: (1) adverse childhood experiences, (2) peer-group association, (3) economic motivation, and (4) male deception and exploitation. However, gendered variance was found within these common pathways.

Females of a gift-giving spider do not trade sex for food gifts: a consequence of male deception?

BackgroundPolyandry is commonly maintained by direct benefits in gift-giving species, so females may remate as an adaptive foraging strategy. However, the assumption of a direct benefit fades in mating systems where male gift-giving behaviour has evolved from offering nutritive to worthless (non-nutritive) items. In the spider Paratrechalea ornata, 70% of gifts in nature are worthless. We therefore predicted female receptivity to be independent of hunger in this species. We exposed poorly-fed and well-fed females to multiple males offering nutritive gifts and well-fed females to males offering worthless gifts.ResultsThough the treatments strongly affected fecundity, females of all groups had similar number of matings. This confirms that female receptivity is independent of their nutritional state, i.e. polyandry does not prevail as a foraging strategy.ConclusionsIn the spider Pisaura mirabilis, in which the majority (62%) of gifts in nature are nutritive, female receptivity depends on hunger. We therefore propose that the dependence of female receptivity on hunger state may have evolved in species with predominantly nutritive gifts but is absent in species with predominantly worthless gifts.

Silk wrapping of nuptial gifts aids cheating behaviour in male spiders

Sexual traits, such as nuptial gifts, are costly and often condition-dependent. Males should be under selection to reduce these costs without impairing their reproductive success. Spider gifts consist of silk-wrapped food, but may also consist of worthless (non-nutritive) donations that successfully lead to mating, despite yielding shorter copulations. Worthless gifts may either represent a cheaper cheating strategy or the inability to produce genuine gifts due to resource limitations (i.e. poor body condition). Unless energetic constraints limit expenditure in silk, males should apply more silk to worthless gifts to compensate for their lower reproductive value. We ask whether in Pisaura mirabilis 1) worthless gifts are condition-dependent and 2) males strategically use silk based on gift type (genuine vs worthless). We tested whether male body condition explains the gift-giving strategy and compared silk amounts covering each gift type, in gifts collected from the field and produced in the laboratory by males given different feeding regimes. Our findings show that worthless gifts are not promoted by poor body condition or limited resources. They rather result from a cheating strategy evolved to opportunistically reduce the costs of genuine gifts while ensuring nutritional advantages, with cheaters gaining body mass. Males applied more silk to worthless gifts regardless of their body condition or feeding state, suggesting they can strategically adjust silk expenditure despite its costs. By masking gift contents and prolonging female feeding, silk is crucial for the maintenance of cheating, likely resulting from an evolutionary arms race between male deception and female assessment.

Cognitive skills and the evolution of social systems.

How do animal social skills influence evolution? Complex animal social behaviors require many cognitive skills including individual recognition and observational learning. For social systems to evolve, these abilities need to be transmitted genetically or culturally and supported by the evolution of underlying neural systems. Because animal skill sets are so varied, it seems best to describe animal cognitive behaviors as being a social calculus that can change with experience, which has evolved to match and facilitate the complexity of the social system where it arose. That is, acquiring and using social information in response to a rapidly changing complex world leads to social competence enabling success in essential behavioral interactions. Here, we describe the remarkable suite of social skills discovered in the African cichlid fish Astatotilapia burtoni, including an attention hierarchy, male deception, transitive inference, the mechanistic bases of social dominance, female mate choice and the neural control of female reproductive behavior. The social calculus of this species is presented as an example of a potential causal factor in the evolution of sophisticated social behavior necessary for the evolutionary success of their social system.

Evolution of deceit by worthless donations in a nuptial gift-giving spider

Abstract Males of the nursery web spider Pisaura mirabilis usually offer an insect prey wrapped in white silk as a nuptial gift to facilitate copulation. Males exploit female foraging preferences in a sexual context as females feed on the gift during copulation. It is possible for males to copulate without a gift, however strong female preference for the gift leads to dramatically higher mating success for gift-giving males. Females are polyandrous, and gift-giving males achieve higher mating success, longer copulations, and increased sperm transfer that confer advantages in sperm competition. Intriguingly, field studies show that approximately one third of males carry a worthless gift consisting of dry and empty insect exoskeletons or plant fragments wrapped in white silk. Silk wrapping disguises gift content and females are able to disclose gift content only after accepting and feeding on the gift, meanwhile males succeed in transferring sperm. The evolution of deceit by worthless gift donation may be favoured by strong intra-sexual competition and costs of gift-construction including prey capture, lost foraging opportunities and investment in silk wrapping. Females that receive empty worthless gifts terminate copulation sooner, which reduces sperm transfer and likely disadvantages males in sperm competition. The gift-giving trait may thus become a target of sexually antagonistic co-evolution, where deceit by worthless gifts leads to female resistance to the trait. We discuss factors such as female mating rate and intensity of sperm competition that may shape the evolution of male deception, and how ecological factors may influence the evolution and maintenance of worthless gifts as an evolutionarily stable alternative mating strategy by frequency dependent selection.

Worthless donations: male deception and female counter play in a nuptial gift-giving spider

BackgroundIn nuptial gift-giving species, benefits of acquiring a mate may select for male deception by donation of worthless gifts. We investigated the effect of worthless gifts on mating success in the spider Pisaura mirabilis. Males usually offer an insect prey wrapped in silk; however, worthless gifts containing inedible items are reported. We tested male mating success in the following experimental groups: protein enriched fly gift (PG), regular fly gift (FG), worthless gift (WG), or no gift (NG).ResultsMales that offered worthless gifts acquired similar mating success as males offering nutritional gifts, while males with no gift experienced reduced mating success. The results suggest that strong selection on the nuptial gift-giving trait facilitates male deception by donation of worthless gifts. Females terminated matings faster when males offered worthless donations; this demonstrate a cost of deception for the males as shorter matings lead to reduced sperm transfer and thus give the deceiving males a disadvantage in sperm competition.ConclusionWe propose that the gift wrapping trait allows males to exploit female foraging preference by disguising the gift content thus deceiving females into mating without acquiring direct benefits. Female preference for a genuine prey gift combined with control over mating duration, however, counteracts the male deception.

A visit to the Foundling Museum.

A visit to the Foundling Museum.

Sexual Education as Enlightenment in Riccoboni's Lettres de Mistriss Fanni Butlerd à Mylord Charles Alfred and Histoire du Marquis de Cressy

This article examines Marie Jeanne Riccoboni's first two novels as testimonials in favor of an expanded understanding of Enlightenment that is broad enough to address women's experiences and contributions within both the social world and the intellectual project of eighteenth-century France. The trope of sexual education as Enlightenment serves as a lens through which to read the novels. On the surface, these two works would seem to be simply commentaries on failed love affairs and condemnations of male deception. On a deeper level, however, they offer insight into the gender coding of the Enlightenment. The novels show that, for women, there are two possible contradictory outcomes of sexual education as Enlightenment: maturity or death. The novels serve to educate readers about both possibilities.

Non-verbal behavior as courtship signals: the role of control and choice in selecting partners

In this work, we provide evidence based on direct observation of behavior in encounters of opposite-sexed strangers, that women initiate and “control” the outcome. In the first minute of these videotaped 10-min interactions, neither female “solicitation” behavior nor “negative” behavior is strongly related to professed interest in the man, while female “affirmative” behavior at this stage modulates male verbal output in later stages (4–10 min). Although the rate of female courtship-like behavior is significantly higher in the first minute, it is only in the fourth to tenth minute that the rate of female courtship-like behavior is correlated with professed female interest. We hypothesize that this serves as a strategic dynamic reflecting sexual asymmetry in parental investment and the potential cost of male deception to women. Ambiguous protean behavioral strategies veil individuals' intentions and make their future actions unpredictable. These behavioral strategies may result in men's overestimation of female sexual interest.

Female pied flycatchers trade between male quality and mating status in mate choice

According to mate choice theory, females should consider both male quality and mating status when choosing a mate. In birds, strong experimental evidence indicates that females prefer males with elaborate traits. No comparable evidence exists to determine whether females take male mating status into account or how they may trade between male quality and male mating status. We studied mate choice of female pied flycatchers ( Ficedula hypoleuca ) in outdoor aviaries where the effect of territory quality could be eliminated and where we could control which males were mated and which were unmated. We used male plumage colour as our measure of male quality. In the aviaries, focal females could easily compare males and assess their plumage colour and mating status, and resident females were prevented from attacking prospecting females because of separation in different compartments. The study provided evidence for a trade–off in mate choice. Females may compromise by choosing an already mated male if he is more brightly coloured and, presumably, of higher quality than available unmated males. The study did not support the idea that polygyny is based on male deception of females, but the results were consistent with the female aggression hypothesis.

Female sand gobies prefer good fathers over dominant males

Female preference for males successful in male–male competition is generally assumed to result in mating with high quality males. Here I report results from an experiment disentangling the effects of intra– and intersexual selection in the sand goby, Pomatoschistus minutus , a marine fish that exhibits paternal care. I show that large males are successful in male–male competition, but contrary to what one would expect, dominants are not preferred by females and are not better at taking care of the eggs. Female preference, however, correlated with the subsequent hatching success of the eggs. Thus, female choice selects for good parenting. Hence, direct benefits in the form of superior paternal care can explain female choice in this species, supporting a good parent process of sexual selection. However, choosing on the outcome of male–male competition does not enable females to mate with the ‘best’ males.

Polygyny and deception in the pied flycatcher: can females determine male mating status?

Abstract. The polyterritorial pied flycatcher, Ficedula hypoleuca, was used to investigate the deception hypothesis, which states that mated males behave as unmated to hide their mating status from prospecting females. Previous studies on this species have shown that unmated and mated males differ in territorial presence, but not when females are present in their territories. Male behaviour after female visits may differ, however, and this was tested in the present study. Caged females were presented to males during periods of 5 min and the behaviour of the males in the following hour was recorded. Mated males were present significantly less often in their territories than unmated males. Video-recordings of male behaviour after natural female visits indicated that mated males spent less time singing than unmated males, suggesting that they were often absent from their territories. Given this difference, females can potentially determine male mating status by making repeated returns to the territories of males they have visited, and sampling the presence of the males. Field data showed that females visited their chosen mate 5-37 times before mating. A model is presented which gives the probability of rejecting mated males, depending (1) on the number of repeated visits and (2) on how many of these visits a male should be present to be classified as unmated. The model also describes one cost of such behaviour, namely that of rejecting unmated males. The model indicates that females can reject up to 87-99% of the mated males by visiting males 5-37 times. In conclusion, male deception of females may be countered by females using the repeated visits strategy.

Marriage Entrapment by "Solitary" Mothers: A Study on Male Deception by Female Pied Flycatchers

Les 2emes femelles du gobe mouche ne sont pas aidees par leur compagnon de l'elevage des jeunes. L'evolution aurait favorise des mecanismes comportementaux pour neutraliser la diminution du succes dans l'elevage chez la 2eme femelle. Afin de tester un tel mecanisme, les 2eme femelles sont etudiees

Female reproductive success and nest predation in polyterritorial wood warblers (Phylloscopus sibilatrix)

Polyterritorial polygyny in passerine birds, i.e., when already-paired males attract females in secondary territories, has been explained by male deception. Secondary females are assumed to make a poor choice, because they lack information about males' pairing status. To date, the deception hypothesis has focused mainly on the hole-nesting pied flycatcher. In this study of polyterritorial wood warblers, an open-nesting species, secondary females did not differ in number of fledged young compared with females of monogamous males, and they fledged even more young than primary females. Nest predation influenced the allocation of paternal care. Almost half of the secondary females had exclusive male assistance because nests of primary females were preyed upon.

The sexy son hypothesis: data from the pied flycatcher Ficedula hypoleuca

The sexy son hypothesis has been proposed as a possible explanation for polygyny in territorial birds. Females mated with polygynous males are assumed to derive benefits in future generations through their ‘sexy’ sons, and hence they can afford to produce fewer offspring than simultaneously breeding monogamous females, the polygyny threshold thus being reduced. In the pied flycatcher, secondary females are not fully aided by males in feeding the nestlings, and they produce only 65% as many fledglings as do simultaneous monogamous and primary females. We have proposed male deception through polyterritoriality as the explanation for females ending up as secondary females, while some authors have advocated the sexy son hypothesis as an alternative. However, secondary females do not achieve benefits in future generations in this species. Repeatability of male mating status is far too low to grant any significant benefits through grandsons. In fact, offspring hatched in secondary female nests suffer from food shortage and therefore are of poor phenotypic quality with low fledging weight and short tarsus length. Therefore they are likely to enjoy lower reproductive success than offspring born in monogamous nests, as is illustrated by data on the relation between lifetime reproductive success and tarsus length. Altogether the applicability of the sexy son hypothesis is limited since it is based on the unrealistic assumption of relatively high heritability for a character with great influence on male fitness.

Male Deception or Female Choice in the Pied Flycatcher Ficedula hypoleuca: A Reply

Reponse aux critiques de T. Jarvi (1982) et P. Meier (1983). Ces critiques ne sont pas consideres comme valables par les auteurs qui confirment leur hypothese selon laquelle la polygynie chez F.h. ne peut s'expliquer par les modeles concernant le choix de la femelle. L'hypothese de la «duperie» (le mâle deja accouple trompant ainsi une nouvelle partenaire) est l'explication la plus plausible d'une polygynie polyterritoriale chez cet oiseau

Polyterritorial Polygyny in the Pied Flycatcher: Male Deception or Female Choice?

Polyterritorial Polygyny in the Pied Flycatcher: Male Deception or Female Choice?