Muscularity and attractiveness as predictors of human egalitarianism

Does a competent leader make a good friend? Conflict, ideology and the psychologies of friendship and followership

“…Importantly, however, having a dominant leader is also associated with a specific range of costs and, accordingly, followers must carefully trade these costs against the benefits of the better enforcement of collective action. One key source of costs comes from an association between physical dominance-related traits and selfishness: Physically stronger individuals are more self-interested (Petersen, Sznycer, Sell, Cosmides, & Tooby, 2013), more supportive of inequality and oppression (Price, Kang, Dunn, & Hopkins, 2011), and people tend to view dominance-related physical traits as indicative of dishonesty and untrustworthiness (Buckingham et al, 2006;Jensen & Petersen, 2011;Perrett et al, 1998). While dominant leaders might be better able to "extract" aggressive collective action from group members, they might also be more inclined to use their position as a means to exploit the collective for their own benefit (see also von Rueden, Gurven, Kaplan, & Stieglitz, 2014).…”

Is sociopolitical egalitarianism related to bodily and facial formidability in men?

“…However, of those that were, only one has found such relationships (Holtzman et al, 2011). All other studies have reported these relationships in men only (Price et al, 2011;Price et al, 2015;Sell et al, 2009b;Shinada & Yamagishi, 2014;Takahashi et al, 2006;Zaatari & Trivers, 2007). Two studies have reported negative relationships between egalitarianism and self-perceived attractiveness in women (Price et al, 2011;Sell et al, 2009b), and an additional study (not cited above) reported positive correlations between self-perceived attractiveness and support for inequality in both women and men (Belmi & Neale, 2014).…”

“…Individuals who were more formidable and/or attractive would thus have had more opportunity to benefit from social norms promoting inequality rather than those promoting equality. By this reasoning, a tendency for people who are more formidable and/or attractive to exhibit a reduced tendency to support egalitarian norms may be an element of evolved human psychology (Price, Brown, Dukes, & Kang, 2015;Price, Kang, Dunn, & Hopkins, 2011). We'll refer to this proposition as the 'simple social bargaining' model of egalitarianism ('simple' because as discussed below, a more complex social bargaining model of egalitarianism has also been proposed).…”

It’s the way he tells them (and who is listening): men’s dominance is positively correlated with their preference for jokes told by dominant-sounding men

“…Consistent with this theoretical proposal, indices of attractiveness and/or dominance are positively correlated with self-report measures of anger and aggression in past and hypothetical conflicts (Sell et al, 2009). Moreover, physically-dominant men have a weaker preference for distributing resources evenly among their peers (Price et al, 2011), with recent work demonstrating that this relationship is qualified by men"s current access to resources, such that strong men with access to resources are relatively less egalitarian than strong men without access to resources (Petersen et al, 2013). Collectively, while there may be a premium placed on cues of interest signalled by desirable social partners (e.g.…”