Same-sex Targets Research Articles

Married women with children experience greater intrasexual competition than their male counterparts

Human males are considered to be more competitive than females. However, females must also compete for resources necessary for their own and their offsprings’ survival. Since females use more indirect forms of competition than males, comparing observable forms of competition may be misleading. One critical driver of competition is resource asymmetry. Since competition occurs primarily within sex, reactions to resource asymmetry with same-sex peers should provide an important measure of competitiveness. We asked 596 married participants, 25–45 years of age with at least one child from three different countries to evaluate how same-sex individuals they know would react to a target individual who had a valuable resource that the same-sex individuals did not have. Half the participants evaluated reactions to same-sex targets, while the other half evaluated reactions to other-sex targets. Participants reported that women would react more negatively than men to resource asymmetry with same-sex targets, but not other-sex targets. These results suggest that women may be even more competitive than men in contexts when important resources related to reproductive success are at stake.

The powerful self: How social power and gender influence face perception

While ample evidence supports an association between power and dominance, little is still known about how temporary experiences of power influence the way people come to see themselves and others. The present research investigates the effect of social power on self- and other-face recognition, and examines whether gender modulates the direction of this effect. Male and female participants were induced to feel either powerful or powerless and had to recognize their own face and those of same-sex strangers from a series of images ranging from a dominant to a submissive version of the original. Results showed that males more frequently chose a dominant self-image under high power, whereas females selected a submissive self-image under low power. When presented with faces of same-sex targets female participants relied on low-power features (i.e., submissiveness) of the self in the perception of others (assimilation effect), whereas male participants more often selected a dominant image of strangers when feeling powerless (constrast effect). The effects of power did not extend to more deliberate judgments of dominance and likability, suggesting that respective biases in face recollection operated at an implicit level. This research underscores the cognitive and motivational underpinnings of power and related gender gaps in power attainment.

Weight bias towards individuals and groups in young children

The aim of this study was to examine the effects of participants??? gender, and target figures??? gender on the preferences for individuals with overweight and average-weight. The study also assessed whether evaluations of the groups are affected by the group composition (the number of children with overweight). The study was conducted on the sample of 102 children (43 girls and 59 boys). The age of the participants ranged from 7 to 11 years. Twenty pairs of female and male child images with average-weight and overweight were drawn for this study. The individual images were combined into five groups of children with average-weight and overweight. The results showed that target with average-weight and male targets were preferred more than target with overweight and female targets and that participants evaluated same-sex targets more positively. The same trend was obtained for group images. The results also showed that the increase in the number of children with overweight in groups was connected with more negative evaluations of these groups.

Consumer Reactions to Attractive Service Providers: Approach or Avoid?

Attractive service providers are often assumed to elicit favorable consumer reactions and to increase purchase intentions. However, this may not always be true. A pilot study and five field and laboratory experiments show that when a self-presentation concern is made salient, consumers react less positively to highly attractive providers than to less attractive ones. This concern can be influenced by chronic social anxiety or can be aroused by unrelated experiences that consumers have before being exposed to the service interactions. In addition, it can be activated by the type of product being sold, that is, a product that is likely to cause embarrassment. Thus the attractiveness of a service provider can have either positive or negative effects on consumers’ reactions to a consumption experience and their consequent purchase intentions, depending on the type of product under consideration. These effects occur when the service provider is both of the opposite sex and the same sex. However, self-presentation concerns when an opposite-sex provider is attractive are driven by sexual motives, whereas these self-presentation concerns when a same-sex target is attractive are stimulated by social comparison processes.

Birds of a feather? Not when it comes to sexual permissiveness

Prior research finds that sexually permissive individuals are judged more negatively than nonpermissive peers, placing them at risk of social isolation. Based on the positive assortment principle (i.e., preferences for similarity in attributes in close relationships), we examined whether participants’ own permissiveness mitigated negative judgments of permissive others in the same-sex friendship context. College students ( N = 751) evaluated a hypothetical same-sex target with either 2 (nonpermissive) or 20 (permissive) past sex partners on 10 friendship-relevant outcomes. Participant permissiveness attenuated some negative evaluations. However, preferences were rarely reversed, and no moderation was found in five outcomes, suggesting the role of permissiveness-based positive assortment is limited, and evolutionary concerns may take precedence. Partial support for the sexual double standard was also found.

Confronting Intrasexual Rivals

The current research sheds light on a physiological mechanism potentially underlying confrontational responses to infidelity. Findings suggest that responses to infidelity threats in adulthood are shaped by hormonally mediated masculinization of the brain in utero. 2D:4D digit ratio (widely regarded as an index of prenatal testosterone exposure) moderated behavioral and endocrinological responses to infidelity threat. After an infidelity prime (but not a control prime), lower (more masculine) 2D:4D was associated with a greater tendency to approach attractive same-sex targets (intrasexual rivals) and with heightened increases in circulating testosterone, a hormone related to a variety of aggressive and confrontational behaviors.

When Romance and Rivalry Awaken

Previous research indicates positive effects of a person's attractiveness on evaluations of opposite-sex persons, but less positive or even negative effects of attractiveness on same-sex evaluations. These biases are consistent with social motives linked to mate search and intrasexual rivalry. In line with the hypothesis that such motives should not become operative until after puberty, 6- to 12-year-old participants (i.e., children) displayed no evidence for biased social evaluations based on other people's attractiveness. In contrast, 13- to 19-year-old participants (i.e., adolescents) displayed positive and negative attractiveness biases toward opposite- and same-sex targets, respectively. Moreover, these biases increased with the age-and thus the reproductive relevance-of the targets being evaluated. Findings corroborate the relevance of mating-related motives for social judgment and illustrate how such biases can grow during human development. At a broader conceptual level, this research demonstrates the utility of investigating proximate social judgment processes through the lens of adaptationist thinking.

Another fundamental social category? Spontaneous categorization of people who uphold or violate moral norms

Studies of social categorization have shown that humans robustly categorize others along dimensions of sex, age, kinship, and coalition. Drawing on a functional perspective, we predicted that humans should also categorize others along the dimension of morality (i.e., violating vs. upholding moral norms). In a study employing the memory confusion paradigm, university undergraduate participants (N=39) were presented with same-sex targets randomly matched with sentences indicating violation or upholding of moral norms, and with sentences indicating competence or incompetence. Results showed that participants spontaneously categorized along morality but not along competence, suggesting that morality (beyond general valence) may be an important dimension of social categorization.

Motivated social categorization: Fundamental motives enhance people's sensitivity to basic social categories.

This article presents an evolutionary framework for identifying the characteristics people use to categorize members of their social world. Findings suggest that fundamental social motives lead people to implicitly categorize social targets based on whether those targets display goal-relevant phenotypic traits. A mate-search prime caused participants to categorize opposite-sex targets (but not same-sex targets) based on their level of physical attractiveness (Experiment 1). A mate-guarding prime interacted with relationship investment, causing participants to categorize same-sex targets (but not opposite-sex targets) based on their physical attractiveness (Experiment 2). A self-protection prime interacted with chronic beliefs about danger, increasing participants' tendency to categorize targets based on their racial group membership (Black or White; Experiment 3). This work demonstrates that people categorize others based on whether they display goal-relevant characteristics reflecting high levels of perceived desirability or threat. Social categorization is guided by fundamental evolved motives designed to enhance adaptive social outcomes.

The effects of intimacy and target sex on direct aggression: further evidence.

The effects on aggression of target sex and relationship with the target were investigated using self-report data. One hundred and seventy-four participants (115 female) reported on acts of direct aggression in the last 2 years toward intimate partners, known and unknown same-sex targets, and known and unknown opposite-sex targets. Women's self-reported aggression was higher toward partners than other targets, replicating previous findings regarding women's intimate partner aggression. Women's aggression was consistently higher toward same-sex than opposite-sex targets, but the effect of knowing the target was inconsistent. Men's self-reported aggression was more frequent toward same-sex than opposite-sex targets-including intimate partners-and more frequent toward known than unknown targets. Results are discussed with reference to a partner-specific reduction in women's fear, and sex differences in threshold for classifying someone as "known well." Limitations of the present sample and suggestions for future work are discussed.

Does Being Attractive Always Help? Positive and Negative Effects of Attractiveness on Social Decision Making

Previous studies of organizational decision making demonstrate an abundance of positive biases directed toward highly attractive individuals. The current research, in contrast, suggests that when the person being evaluated is of the same sex as the evaluator, attractiveness hurts, rather than helps. Three experiments assessing evaluations of potential job candidates (Studies 1 and 3) and university applicants (Study 2) demonstrated positive biases toward highly attractive other-sex targets but negative biases toward highly attractive same-sex targets. This pattern was mediated by variability in participants' desire to interact with versus avoid the target individual (Studies 1 and 2) and was moderated by participants' level of self-esteem (Study 3); the derogation of attractive same-sex targets was not observed among people with high self-esteem. Findings demonstrate an important exception to the positive effects of attractiveness in organizational settings and suggest that negative responses to attractive same-sex targets stem from perceptions of self-threat.

Is mate choice in Drosophila males guided by olfactory or gustatory pheromones?

Drosophila melanogaster flies use both olfactory and taste systems to detect sex pheromones and select the most suitable mate for reproduction. In nature, flies often face multiple potential partners and should have an acute sensory ability to discriminate between different pheromonal bouquets. We investigated both the pheromones and the chemosensory neurons influencing Drosophila mate choice. We measured various courtship traits in single tester males simultaneously presented with two target male and/or female flies carrying different pheromonal bouquets (pairs of control flies of the same or different sex, same-sex target pairs of pheromonal variant strains). The courtship traits reflected the perception of either olfactory cues perceived before or gustatory cues perceived after the first physical taste contact. Our results suggest that male mate choice exists in D. melanogaster and that male discrimination between potential mates could be a two-step process involving chemical cues perceived before and after the first gustatory contact. In addition, when a male was simultaneously presented with two potential sexual partners, the olfactory and gustatory cues he used depended on the pheromonal patterns of both flies, but his response could also depend on additional effects resulting from the simultaneous perception of the two flies, leading to a nonlinear choice of a sexual partner. Moreover, some tester males with genetically altered gustatory receptor neurons strongly changed their partner preference, indicating that the fly's peripheral nervous system is essential for pheromonal detection and mate choice.

Intrasexual vigilance: The implicit cognition of romantic rivalry.

Four experiments tested the hypothesis that concerns about infidelity would lead people, particularly those displaying high chronic levels of romantic jealousy, to display a functionally coordinated set of implicit cognitive biases aimed at vigilantly processing attractive romantic rivals. Priming concerns about infidelity led people with high levels of chronic jealousy (but not those low in chronic jealousy) to attend vigilantly to physically attractive same-sex targets at an early stage of visual processing (Study 1), to strongly encode and remember attractive same-sex targets (Study 2), and to form implicit negative evaluations of attractive same-sex targets (Studies 3 and 4). In each case, effects were observed only for same-sex targets who were physically attractive-individuals who can pose especially potent threats to a person's own romantic interests. These studies reveal a cascade of implicit, lower order cognitive processes underlying romantic rivalry and identify the individuals most likely to display those processes. At a broader conceptual level, this research illustrates the utility of integrating social cognitive and evolutionary approaches to psychological science.

Relational dominance and mate-selection criteria: Evidence that males attend to female dominance

The present study argues that pressures associated with the threat of paternal uncertainty shaped a male mate-preference for relatively subordinate partners in the context of long- (high investment) but not short-term (low investment) relationships. Using a hypothetical scenario depicting a workplace setting, 120 male and 208 female undergraduates were randomly assigned to one of six experimental conditions in which they were asked to judge a male or female target, described as either their supervisor (higher dominance), coworker (equal dominance), or their assistant (lower dominance). Participants exposed to an opposite-sex target rated their attraction to the target for varying types of investment (e.g., desire for a one-night stand, desire to affiliate, or desire for a long-term relationship), and participants exposed to a same-sex target rated their desire to affiliate with the target. Results supported predictions and indicated that males preferred the subordinate over the dominant target for affiliation and high-investment items, and females were unaffected by the target's dominance status. The results of same-sex ratings indicated that dominance status did not influence females' ratings of the female target, and that dominance did not influence males' ratings of the male target. These results are discussed in terms of the role of relational dominance in shaping male mate-preferences.

Stereotypes and crossed-category evaluations: the case of gender and science education.

A sample of UK adolescents (n = 1140), grouped by sex and liking of science, evaluated themselves, and girl and boy targets who did or did not like science, on masculine, feminine and gender non-specific traits. Contrary to sociological concerns about the masculine image and appeal of science, those who liked science more rated themselves more positively on feminine and gender non-specific-but not masculine-traits. The girl target was rated lower on feminine traits if she liked science, but the boy was rated higher on feminine traits if he liked science. Target ratings also showed in-group enhancement based on liking of science, and a 'black sheep' effect: those who liked science less discriminated against the same-sex target who liked science, especially on gender in-group relevant traits. We argue that gender differences in science education should be attributed partly to subjective group dynamics and not solely to images of science.

Validation of Personal Identity as a Terror Management Mechanism: Evidence that Sex-Role Identity Moderates Mortality Salience Effects

Two studies examined the effects of mortality salience on the willingness to interact with sex-typed and cross-sex-typed stereotypic targets while assessing the moderating role of sex-role identity. In both studies, Israeli adolescent participants completed the Bem Sex-Role Inventory, were exposed to a mortality salience or control induction, and rated their willingness to interact with two same-sex targets that were defined by either feminine or masculine stereotypic traits. Study 1 included 169 boys; Study 2 consisted of 200 girls. Results from both studies indicated that mortality salience led sex-typed individuals (masculine boys, feminine girls) to report less willingness to interact with same-sex peers who are cross-sex-typed. In contrast, mortality salience led cross-sex-typed individuals (feminine boys, masculine girls) to report more willingness to interact with same-sex peers who are cross-sex-typed. Findings were discussed in light of the function of personal identity validation as a possible terror management mechanism.

Effects of perceived physical attractiveness on females' facial displays and affect

This study used facial electromyographic (EMG) techniques to investigate the effects of perceived physical attractiveness of a target on female viewers' facial muscle activity and self-reported emotion. Female subjects viewed slides of adult males and females that varied in attractiveness. When these female subjects viewed same-sex stimuli, the highly attractive targets evoked greater mean corrugator muscle (brow lowering muscle) EMG and greater reported arousal than the less attractive targets, while reported pleasure was not affected by perceptions of same-sex-stimulus attractiveness. When the female subjects viewed males, ratings of felt pleasure, arousal, and to a lesser extent zygomatic EMG were all greater in response to the highly attractive males than the less attractive. The greater corrugator EMG to highly attractive same-sex targets is interpreted as evidence of a defensive reaction to viewing a high-status competitor, and several explanations for the lack of a self-reported increase in negative affect to these targets are considered.

Cues to Infidelity

This research sought to identify cues to a long-term partner's sexual infidelity and emotional infidelity. In Study 1, 204 participants nominated acts that evoke suspicions of sexual or emotional infidelity. In Study 2, 230 participants evaluated these acts on how diagnostic each was of sexual and emotional infidelity. Factor analysis revealed 14 factors of cues, including Anger and Argumentativeness, Exaggerated Affection, Sexual Boredom, and Relationship Dissatisfaction. Twelve factors were differentially diagnostic of sexual versus emotional infidelity. Sexual Boredom, for example, was more diagnostic of sexual infidelity, whereas Relationship Dissatisfaction was more diagnostic of emotional infidelity. Men and women provided higher diagnosticity ratings for acts performed by an opposite-sex versus same-sex target. For ratings collapsed across sex of target, however, women provided higher diagnosticity ratings than did men. Discussion integrates results with previous research on infidelity and suggests important directions for future research on the cues to infidelity.

Judging toy breakers: Gender stereotypes have devious effects on children

Second-grade children listened to short stories about male or female children who accidentally broke neutral and sex-appropriate or opposite-sex toys. Children then rated the severity of punishment due to each toy breaker and provided justifications for their ratings. The justifications were coded for citing intentionality (or lack thereof) and toy ownership (or lack thereof). No differences were found between boys and girls in the punishment severity ratings of targets of either gender who broke neutral toys. In the punishment severity ratings of toy breakers of sex-appropriate and opposite-sex toys, gender stereotype effects were found only for girls; they suggested more severe punishment for toy breakers of opposite-sex toys, irrespective of their gender. The citation of toy ownership was found to be a significant variable in boys’ nonuse of gender stereotypes in their punishment severity ratings; with the impact of toy ownership removed, gender differences in punishment severity ratings were eliminated. Although the citation of intentions did not influence the punishment severity ratings of either boys or girls, boys referred to intentions primarily in same-sex targets. The data illustrate both the direct and the devious impact of gender stereotypes on children’s social cognitive processes.

Homophobia? No, homoprejudice.

The ubiquitous expression of anti-homosexual responses and the lack of consensus regarding the characterization of such responses served as the impetus for this study. The purpose of this study was to investigate the nature of anti-homosexual responses as reported by male and female undergraduates. Participants in the study were asked to respond to both a lesbian and a gay target questionnaire. Responses were measured as either phobic or prejudicial. Findings indicated that there is little, if any, evidence to support the characterization of anti-homosexual responses as a phobia. Responses to prejudicial items suggested that anti-homosexual responses lie primarily within the realm of prejudice. Results also indicated that males were less tolerant than females of gays and lesbians and males and females respond differentially according to same-sex target. The implications of using a more accurate term such as "homoprejudice" to characterize anti-homosexual responses are discussed. Additionally, avenues for future research are addressed.