TO UNDERSTAND why cultures collapse, we must understand why they do not. Humans are, I believe, unique in the animal kingdom in forming extremely large social structures without this being underpinned by kinship. A certain amount has been explained though much is still not well understood. A review of this major topic is not appropriate here. Instead I restrict myself to a few broad generalities.
In social groups, women tend to be more conciliatory, co-operative and egalitarian than men. Roy Baumeister, amongst others, has opined that women’s social style, while more obviously pro-social in small groups, does not scale to large social structures. This may be true but misses the key point. Women’s social style was honed by evolution in the same-sex context of childcare. The crucial observation is this: women tend to have what can be described as ‘in-group’ preference, men do not. Instead, men have competition and hierarchy – the antitheses of women’s egalitarian style. If anything, men have ‘out-group’ preference. (I explain the idea of in-group preference below, and defend my claim that women have it but men do not).
Baumeister and others claim that large-scale culture tends to be male-created and led because of the scaling issue alluded to above. This puzzled me for a long time. It seems paradoxical that the sex – men – who are individualists, seeking personal status and achievement, are the ones upon whom cohesive societies should be based. The resolution of this conundrum lies in men’s lack of in-group preference as contrasted with women’s in-group preference. It is easier to understand now that the implications of the latter have become so painfully apparent.
In-group preference refers to the tendency for people to favour, trust, and positively evaluate members of their own group more than members of an outside group. It is a product of psychological tendencies which are largely, but not entirely, evolutionary. Amongst these factors is that, in evolutionary times, belonging to a group increased chances of survival, providing protection and the benefits of shared resources. In this respect please note the probable origin of the sex dependence of in-group preference in the greater importance of female survival than male survival (due to reproductive asymmetry). Brutally put, the death of a few men does not matter because it will not impact the reproductive capacity of the tribe, in contrast to the deaths of women. Hence, men evolve to be individualist risk-takers and have lesser need of ‘in-group’ preference.
So much for the evo-psych theory on in-group preference, but what is the empirical evidence for its gendered nature? Lest I mislead the reader, I emphasise that the issue would be regarded as contentious in mainstream psychology circles. The bulk of the current academy would probably regard the claim that women have strong in-group preference whereas men tend not to have in-group preference at all as tainted with ‘manosphere’ overtones. But that is not a valid critique, and given the direction in which mainstream academic psychology has gone in recent decades it does not disturb me overmuch. In so far as there is a theoretical difficulty with my claim it is because system justification theory argues that dominants should show stronger in-group bias than subordinates at the nonconscious level. Whether that conflicts with my claim depends, however, on which sex you regard as dominant. Or system justification theory may just be wrong in the context of sex.
As regards the empirical evidence, I cannot attempt a thorough literature review here. I will offer some supporting studies only. My strong suspicion is that the controversy, if it is not based simply on preconceptions or prejudice, arises due to the false conflating of studies on co-operative or coalitional behaviours with in-group preference. There are many studies which identify men as having strong tendencies towards co-operative group behaviours, or forming coalitions between male groups. Large industrial endeavours and, of course, war are obvious examples. But this does not relate to in-group preference at all. Men do not go to work, or go to war, because they have a preference for other men. War involves killing other men, so the conflation is preposterous.
Here are some studies which support my claim. They are all based on response latency techniques of one sort or another. (These are methodologies such as the Implicit Association Test (IAT) or the Go/No-Go Association Task (GNAT) which require instant responses. I confess I have misgivings about these methodologies because it is not established that they relate to actual behaviour – but they are what is available. I omit the detailed statistics from the quotes below, for which please see the original papers.
Connor et al (2023): ‘Overall, the largest and most consistent evaluative bias was pro-women/anti-men bias, followed by smaller but nonetheless consistent pro-upper-class/anti-lower-class biases. By contrast, we observed less consistent effects of targets’ race, no effects of targets’ age . . .’
Nosek and Banaji (2001): ‘Subjects showed greater sensitivity for female+good than for female+bad. Likewise, subjects showed greater sensitivity for male+bad than male+good . . . Examining subject gender differences in the overall attitude effects, we see that women had much stronger in-group liking and out-group derogation. That is, women showed both strong positive associations to the category female and strong negative attitudes toward males. Unlike women, men did not show strong liking for the in-group. In fact they showed a negative automatic attitude toward the category male.’
Rudman and Goodwin (2004): The title of this paper rather says it all: ‘Gender Differences in Automatic In-Group Bias: Why Do Women Like Women More Than Men Like Men?’ They carried out four distinct experiments. Experiment 1: ‘Men and women strongly identified with their gender and showed robust self-esteem, but women showed dramatically more in-group bias than did men.’ Experiment 2: ‘Examining whether IAT effects were significantly different from zero revealed an absence of in-group bias for men . . . By contrast, women showed strong preference for their own group and for their same-sexed parent.’ Experiment 3 (gender attitude IAT part): ‘As in experiments 1 and 2 women showed more implicit in-group bias than men.’ Experiment 4: ‘Men showed the typical pattern of weaker in-group bias compared with women on the gender attitude IAT.’
That last reference reports, worryingly, that people who were raised primarily by their mothers showed stronger pro-female bias. This suggests that widespread fatherlessness, itself a product of feminism, will be causing a positive feedback effect to further enhance female in-group preference and men’s tendency towards out-group preference, i.e. universal pro-female bias.
The final part of this series will be published tomorrow.
