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Data from the Carolina Abecedarian Project (N = 104) was used to test the hypothesis that infants deemed at-risk who received an intensive and individualized intervention would develop a slower life history (LH) strategy as measured in young adulthood. Additionally, it was predicted that this effect on life history strategy would mediate several effects of the intervention. This possibility was tested in the areas of risk-taking, mental health, and cognitive ability. Results supported the hypothesis that the intervention caused a slowing of LH strategy and that LH strategy mediated the effect of the intervention on risk-taking, mental health, and cognitive ability. Lastly, it was predicted that any effects would be strongest at the most molar level of measurement. This was found for a composite trait and cognitive ability, but not for risk-taking and mental health. The results have several significant implications, but given the small sample size, replication is especially important.

Status is a universal feature of human sociality. A lesser-studied adaptive problem surrounding status is assessing who has which levels of status in a given group (e.g., identifying which people possess high status). Here, we integrate theory and methods from evolutionary social science, animal behavior, and social psychology, and we use an emotion inference paradigm to investigate what cues render people high status in the eyes of social perceivers. This paradigm relies on robust associations between status and emotion display—particularly the anger display. If a target is expected to enact (but not necessarily feel) anger, this would suggest that social perceivers view that target as higher status. By varying target attributes, we test whether those attributes are considered status cues in the eyes of social perceivers. In two well-powered, pre-registered experiments in the United States (N = 451) and India (N = 378), participants read one of eight vignettes about a male or female target—described as high or low in either physical strength or physical attractiveness (possible status cues)—who is thwarted by another person, and then reported expectations of the target’s felt and enacted anger. We find that people expected physically stronger (versus less strong) men and more (versus less) physically attractive women to enact greater anger when thwarted by a same-sex other. Strength had no significant effect on estimations of female status and attractiveness had no significant effect on estimations of male status. There were no differences in expectations of felt anger. Results suggest that people use men’s strength and women’s attractiveness as status cues. Moreover, results underscore the notion that focusing on male-typical cues of status might obscure our understanding of the female status landscape. We discuss how this paradigm might be fruitfully employed to examine and discover other unexplored cues of male and female status.

In the mating domain, same-sex conspecifics can be competitors when pursuing, attracting, and retaining desirable partners. We provide (a) an overview of the major metatheories (e.g., obligate parental investment and biological markets) that bear on intrasexual competition for mates; (b) explore support for predictions derived from these metatheories in empirical research on females’ and males’ intrasexual mating competition; and also discuss (c) robust evidence consistent with the core premise of intrasexual mating competition—that members of each sex compete with rivals to gain and retain access to mates, and that this competition centers on features that the other sex finds particularly desirable. Moreover, the tactics of this competition often differ in revealing ways. Whereas examples in both human and nonhuman animals are considered, the current work focuses on the causes, consequences, and modes of intrasexual mating competition among heterosexual men and women, but we nevertheless conclude by highlighting important qualifiers and limitations in existing work with an eye toward future research (e.g., on women, non-heterosexual relationships, and parents) that challenges our current conceptualizations of the boundaries of intrasexual mating competition.