Biosocial Construction of Sex Differences and Similarities in Behavior

Wood, Wendy; Eagly, Alice H.

doi:10.1016/b978-0-12-394281-4.00002-7

Cited by 557 publications

(713 citation statements)

References 283 publications

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“…During recent decades, women have realized significant gains in educational achievement and now earn the majority of tertiary degrees (Wood & Eagly, 2012). Therefore, it would be interesting to examine all of the outlined changes in a gender-specific way.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Educational expansion and the education gradient in health: A hierarchical age-period-cohort analysis

Delaruelle

Buffel

Bracke

2015

Social Science & Medicine

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Educational expansion and the education gradient in health: A hierarchical age-period-cohort analysis

Delaruelle

Buffel

Bracke

2015

Social Science & Medicine

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“…Leading to the same conclusion through a different route, the biopsychosocial construction of sex differences (15) suggests that men and women conform to the gendered roles prescribed by the societies in which they live. Consequently, the act of seeking out an extramarital affair, like purchasing a red sports car, is one of the canonical indicators that a man (but not a woman) has experienced a so-called midlife crisis.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

People search for meaning when they approach a new decade in chronological age

Alter

Hershfield

2014

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Although humans measure time using a continuous scale, certain numerical ages inspire greater self-reflection than others. Six studies show that adults undertake a search for existential meaning when they approach a new decade in age (e.g., at ages 29, 39, 49, etc.) or imagine entering a new epoch, which leads them to behave in ways that suggest an ongoing or failed search for meaning (e.g., by exercising more vigorously, seeking extramarital affairs, or choosing to end their lives).aging | meaning in life | time | decade | life-span development A lthough humans age continuously, many societies divide the human life span into 10-year periods, or decades. In the English-speaking world, for example, people describe these periods as "the twenties," "the thirties," "the forties," and so on, which implies that human aging progresses through discrete 10-year epochs. Because the imminent approach of a new decade signals the end of one era and the beginning of another, we examine how adults respond when they enter the final year of a chronological decade (i.e., when they reach the age of 29, 39, or 49 years, and so on, hereafter, "9-ending ages" and the people at those ages, "9-enders").We expect decades to play an outsized role in human psychology, just as discrete boundaries do in other domains. For example, round numbers occur more often than other numbers in literature (1) and function as behavioral goals (e.g., SAT takers are more likely to retake the SAT if they score just under rather than just over a round number) (2). We confirmed this intuition by asking 100 adults on Amazon's Mechanical Turk platform to indicate, in descending order, which 10 birthdays they considered to be the most significant throughout the human lifespan. Apart from 18 and 21, which are momentous because they signal the beginning of adulthood and the arrival of certain state-sanctioned rights and responsibilities, the most common responses were 30, 40, 60, 50, and 100. Moreover, the most common end-digit for all listed ages was 0 (46.4% of all responses), followed distantly by ages ending in 1 (14.8%), 5 (12.7%), 8 (9.6%), 6 (7.1%), 3 (5.2%), 2 (1.5%), 9 (1.1%), 7 (0.7%), and 4 (0.7%). In contrast to ages 18 and 21, 0-ending ages are momentous because they feel subjectively different from the ages that come before them, rather than because they impose objective changes on people's lives. Because the approach of a new decade represents a salient boundary between life stages and functions as a marker of progress through the life span, and because life transitions tend to prompt changes in evaluations of the self, people are more apt to evaluate their lives as a chronological decade ends than they are at other times (3-5). Consequently, although people may not routinely ponder whether their lives are meaningful, we believe they will be more likely to consider this question when they reach 9-ending ages.Once they do audit the meaningfulness of their lives, people tend to reach one of two conclusions: Either they conclude happily that their l...

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“…Because partner preferences have been proposed to develop in response to sex-typical social roles (40,41), it is possible that increasingly differentiated roles could influence masculinity preferences if desirable social roles not present in less developed groups are associated with facial appearance.…”

Section: Significancementioning

confidence: 99%

Human preferences for sexually dimorphic faces may be evolutionarily novel

Scott

Clark

Josephson

et al. 2014

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

161

147

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A large literature proposes that preferences for exaggerated sex typicality in human faces (masculinity/femininity) reflect a long evolutionary history of sexual and social selection. This proposal implies that dimorphism was important to judgments of attractiveness and personality in ancestral environments. It is difficult to evaluate, however, because most available data come from largescale, industrialized, urban populations. Here, we report the results for 12 populations with very diverse levels of economic development. Surprisingly, preferences for exaggerated sex-specific traits are only found in the novel, highly developed environments. Similarly, perceptions that masculine males look aggressive increase strongly with development and, specifically, urbanization. These data challenge the hypothesis that facial dimorphism was an important ancestral signal of heritable mate value. One possibility is that highly developed environments provide novel opportunities to discern relationships between facial traits and behavior by exposing individuals to large numbers of unfamiliar faces, revealing patterns too subtle to detect with smaller samples.facial attractiveness | evolution | cross-cultural | aggression | stereotyping

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Biosocial Construction of Sex Differences and Similarities in Behavior

Cited by 557 publications

References 283 publications

Educational expansion and the education gradient in health: A hierarchical age-period-cohort analysis

Educational expansion and the education gradient in health: A hierarchical age-period-cohort analysis

People search for meaning when they approach a new decade in chronological age

Human preferences for sexually dimorphic faces may be evolutionarily novel

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