#evolutionarypsychology — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #evolutionarypsychology, aggregated by home.social.
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DATE: September 3, 2026 at 06:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: New research questions the role of fertility in women’s indirect aggression
A new study finds that a woman’s competitive behavior toward other women is driven by her individual personality traits rather than changes in her menstrual cycle. The research suggests that fertility levels do not influence whether women act competitively in mating or social contexts. The findings were published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior.
Evolutionary psychologists study how human behavior adapts to ensure survival and reproduction. For women, competing for romantic partners and social alliances is an important part of life. Historically, direct physical fights posed severe risks, as injuries could limit a mother’s ability to raise offspring.
To avoid physical harm, female competition often takes the form of indirect aggression. Indirect aggression includes covert strategies like spreading rumors, social exclusion, and subtle character assassination. These tactics allow individuals to damage a rival’s reputation without initiating a physical confrontation.
Past research has suggested that hormone fluctuations during the menstrual cycle might dictate when and how women use these strategies. Estrogen reaches its peak just before ovulation. This is the phase of the menstrual cycle when women are most fertile and physically capable of becoming pregnant.
Because the immediate reproductive benefits of mating are highest during ovulation, some researchers hypothesized that this estrogen peak would trigger increased competition for romantic partners. Progesterone, another hormone, follows a different pattern. It remains low during ovulation but peaks later in the luteal phase as the body prepares for a potential pregnancy.
High progesterone levels have been linked to affiliative behaviors and a desire for social bonding. During a pregnancy, social support from other women would be highly beneficial for acquiring resources and childcare. Researchers theorized that during this high-progesterone phase, women might compete more fiercely to protect their existing social alliances from potential threats.
Lead author Jaime L. Palmer-Hague, a psychology researcher at Trinity Western University, and her colleagues set out to test these hormone-based theories. They wanted to see if women target their competitive behaviors toward strong rivals at specific points in their menstrual cycles.
The research team recruited 464 naturally cycling women for an online experiment. The participants did not use hormonal birth control, which alters natural hormone fluctuations. The researchers estimated each participant’s current menstrual cycle phase using a technique known as the backward counting method.
This method involves tracking exactly when a participant’s next period begins and counting backward to estimate the day ovulation likely occurred. Based on these estimates, participants were categorized into groups reflecting high or low fertility phases.
In the first part of the experiment, participants viewed computer-generated faces of hypothetical romantic rivals. The researchers used special software to blend existing photos into composite faces. One face was designed to be highly attractive, representing a strong mating threat, while the other face was less attractive, representing a weak mating threat.
Participants answered questions about how they would react to each woman in a romantic context. They rated their likelihood of introducing the rival to their boyfriend, their comfort leaving the two alone, and their likelihood of gossiping about the rival. The researchers then compared these behavioral responses across the different menstrual cycle phases.
Women reported a much higher likelihood of acting competitively toward the highly attractive rival than the less attractive one. However, the menstrual cycle phase had no effect on these behaviors. The statistical tests comparing competitive behavior across the different hormonal phases were not statistically significant.
Instead of hormones, the researchers found that an individual’s baseline personality predicted their responses. Women who scored high on a separate questionnaire measuring intrasexual competitiveness were much more likely to act competitively toward the attractive face. Intrasexual competitiveness is a psychological trait reflecting a general tendency to view same-sex peers as rivals.
Participant age also played a predictive role in the mating context. Younger participants displayed more competitive responses toward the highly attractive face than older participants. Estimated hormone levels played no role in predicting these behaviors.
In a second set of tasks, the researchers explored competition for social alliances. They showed the participants a different pair of computer-generated faces representing potential social rivals. One face represented a strong social threat, designed to look socially dominant and prone to indirect aggression, while the other represented a weak social threat.
Participants answered questions about how they would interact with these women in relation to their own best friend. They rated their comfort with the rival spending time with their best friend and their likelihood of gossiping about the rival. Once again, participants exhibited more competitive behavior toward the strong social threat compared to the weak one.
Just as in the mating context, the menstrual cycle phase did not influence the social competition results. Variations in estimated estrogen and progesterone levels played no role in how women reacted to the social rivals. Personality traits were the only factors that predicted social competition.
Women with higher levels of self-reported dominance and intrasexual competitiveness were more likely to act competitively toward the social rivals. Conversely, women who scored high in friendliness and self-esteem were less likely to engage in competitive behaviors in the social scenario.
The study relied on a mathematical estimation method to determine menstrual cycle phases rather than biological tests. The researchers did not use ovulation kits or blood tests to verify exact hormone levels. This limitation means that subtle hormonal effects might have been missed due to natural variations in cycle length across individuals.
Additionally, the experiment used hypothetical scenarios and computer-generated faces to gauge reactions. Self-reported responses in an online survey might not perfectly reflect how people behave in real-world situations. People are not always fully aware of their own competitive behaviors, which could lead to underreporting.
Future studies might benefit from observing actual social interactions to verify these self-reported tendencies. Larger samples and direct hormone tracking could also help evaluate whether any minor hormonal influences exist.
The study, “Women’s intrasexual competitiveness, but not fertility, predicts greater competitive behavior toward attractive women across the menstrual cycle,” was authored by Jaime L. Palmer-Hague, Jade S. Stobbart, and Benjamin J. Zubaly.
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #WomensIntrasexualCompetitiveness #FertilityDoesNotDriveAggression #IndirectAggression #MatingCompetition #SocialAllianceCompetition #PersonalityTraitsMatter #EvolutionaryPsychology #MenstrualCycleMyths #AttractiveRivalImpact #ResearchOnBehavior
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DATE: August 10, 2026 at 06:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: New research finds women’s buttocks play a more stable role in male physical attraction than breasts
A recent study published in Evolutionary Psychology suggests that men fall into distinct subgroups based on how much they prioritize a romantic partner’s physical features, particularly breasts and buttocks. The research indicates that most men value both traits, but a specific subset focuses predominantly on buttocks, and no equivalent group prioritizes breasts alone. These patterns provide evidence that buttocks tend to play a more central and stable role in male physical attraction than previously assumed.
Evolutionary psychology proposes that human mate selection relies heavily on physical traits that historically signaled health, youth, and reproductive viability. In human females, breasts and buttocks act as secondary sexual characteristics that develop during puberty. According to evolutionary frameworks, these features provided ancestral males with visual cues about a potential mate’s nutritional status, developmental stability, and fertility. Much of the existing literature treats both traits as similarly important indicators of female physical attractiveness.
Mehmet Mehmetoglu, a professor in the Department of Psychology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, initiated this research to understand how individual men differ in their specific preferences. Averaging preferences across a whole population can mask important variations among individuals.
“I’ve always had the impression, both from academic reading and, even more so, from just chatting with friends, that people assume buttocks and breasts are equally important to men,” Mehmetoglu explained. “In social settings, I’ve been asked this very question so many times that I’ve actually been thinking about it for the past 10 years. I realized that there wasn’t really a specific answer to this question. I was honestly just very curious to see the results!”
To explore these preferences, Mehmetoglu analyzed survey responses from 395 Norwegian men. The participants were predominantly young adults, with an average age of about 23, and most were not in a romantic relationship at the time. The survey asked respondents to rate the importance of a partner’s buttocks and breasts on a scale from one to five, where one meant not at all important and five meant very important.
Participants also rated how much they valued general traits like sexiness and intellectuality in a mate. The survey included questions to measure broader attitudes, asking participants to rate their agreement with statements reflecting egalitarianism, or the belief in equal rights and opportunities, and materialism, the desire for possessions that impress others. Mehmetoglu used a statistical technique called latent profile analysis to group the men based on their rating patterns. This method identifies naturally occurring categories within a dataset rather than forcing data into predefined boxes.
The analysis identified four distinct subgroups of men. The largest group, which the author called Highly Body-Oriented, made up 53 percent of the sample. These men rated both breasts and buttocks as highly important, with average scores of 4.1 and 4.4 out of five, respectively. The Moderately Body-Oriented group, representing 20 percent of the participants, showed a balanced but less intense interest, giving both features an average rating of 3.2.
A third group, making up 18 percent of the sample, was classified as Buttocks-Oriented. These men showed a strong preference for buttocks, with an average rating of 4.5, but gave breasts a much lower average rating of 2.5. The final 9 percent of men formed the Body-Unoriented group, placing minimal importance on either feature, with average ratings falling below two.
The statistical models consistently detected a group that favored buttocks across various mathematical solutions, but no group emerged that favored breasts exclusively. High ratings for breasts always appeared alongside high ratings for buttocks.
“I’ll be honest and admit that I was expecting to find a distinct ‘breasts-oriented’ segment, but I didn’t!” Mehmetoglu told PsyPost. “In every model we tested, a clear buttocks-oriented group appeared, but we found that ratings for breasts always co-occurred with high ratings for buttocks. This suggests that for most men, breasts are more of a ‘complementary’ feature rather than a primary preference on their own.”
Men may derive sufficient evolutionary cues related to youth and fertility by observing the buttocks alone. “The main takeaway is how buttocks seem to be a much more central and stable cue in the male brain than breasts,” Mehmetoglu noted. “It appears that this preference is ‘wired-in’ from millions of years ago because these features signal things like youth, fertility, and health.”
The broader attitudes measured in the survey also predicted which group a man was likely to fall into. A one-unit increase in how much a participant valued sexiness on the five-point scale increased his odds of belonging to the Highly Body-Oriented group by 501 percent compared to the Body-Unoriented group. Higher levels of materialism also increased the likelihood of being in the Buttocks-Oriented group by 86 percent. Materialistic individuals tend to value visible status signals, which can include a partner’s physical attractiveness.
In contrast, egalitarian attitudes were associated with a lower focus on physical features, and a preference for intellectuality was not statistically significant in predicting membership in any specific group. A one-unit increase in egalitarianism reduced a man’s odds of being in the Highly Body-Oriented group by 63 percent, which aligns with the tendency of egalitarian individuals to downplay traditional social status hierarchies.
“It was interesting to find that these physical preferences are actually linked to a person’s values,” Mehmetoglu explained. “For example, men who held stronger egalitarian views were less likely to be in the body-oriented groups, while those who placed greater value on materialism and status gave much more importance to these physical features. It shows that our broader worldview appears to influence the strength of our mate preferences!”
Reflecting on these deep-seated drives, Mehmetoglu offered a piece of practical advice for navigating the modern dating landscape. “For the average person, this shows that men’s mating psychology is both simple and deep-seated, but also that men should maybe be aware of these instincts and remember to look for other qualities too,” he added.
As with all research, there are some caveats. The findings reflect a specific cultural context. “The sample is quite specific,” Mehmetoglu pointed out. “It’s a young sample of Norwegian men (average age 23). Since the study was done in Norway, which is a very egalitarian society, the results are best generalized to similar social contexts. We used a ‘convenience sample,’ so it might not represent every demographic perfectly.”
A convenience sample refers to a group of participants who are selected because they are easily accessible, such as university students on a local campus, rather than a randomly selected cross-section of the entire population. The study also relied on self-reported survey data using single questions to measure complex traits like materialism and egalitarianism. Future research should aim to replicate these findings using established, multi-item psychological tests to measure these broad personal values, and observe whether self-reported priorities align with actual dating behaviors.
Future studies could also expand on this foundation by tracking eye movements to observe how men view varying physical combinations. “I am planning to do a similar study in a less egalitarian society to see if those different social constraints change these preference ‘camps’,” Mehmetoglu said. “I am also really interested in that 9% ‘Body-Unoriented’ group. Since they aren’t primarily focused on buttocks or breasts, I want to find out what actually drives their attraction, whether it’s personality, intelligence, or other facial features.”
The study, “Buttocks or Breasts? Identifying Latent Subgroups in Male Preferences for Female Bodily Features,” was authored by Mehmet Mehmetoglu.
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #ButtocksVsBreasts #MaleAttractionResearch #EvolutionaryPsychology #BodyOrientedPrefs #ButtocksOriented #PhysicalFeaturePreferences #DatingPsychology #NorwegianStudy #MatingPreferences #SexualSignals
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Therapist shares 3 life-changing quotes she uses ‘almost daily’ with her patients
https://web.brid.gy/r/https://www.upworthy.com/therapist-3-daily-life-changing-quotes-ex1/
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It’s not just a sentiment; it’s biology. The intensity of a mother’s love for her children is evolutionary, hardwired into almost every species to guarantee the survival of the next generation. While fatherhood is vital, the biological drive behind maternal protection is truly unmatched. 🌍✨
#Science #Biology #Motherhood #EvolutionaryPsychology #FamilyDynamics
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New research suggests we still pick friends using criteria built for hunter-gatherer life: strength, perceived hunting skill, cooperativeness. Even when it has nothing to do with our actual goals. #HumanEvolution #EvolutionaryPsychology #Anthropology https://www.anthropology.net/p/why-your-brain-still-wants-a-hunting
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Why Buddhism is True "The reason we suffer—and the reason we make other people suffer—is that we don’t see the world clearly" Sale: $12.99 to $1.99 by Robert Wright Rating: 4.5/5 (2,297 Reviews) #Buddhism #Mindfulness #Meditation #Psychology #EvolutionaryPsychology #Wellness #SelfHelp #BookSky
Why Buddhism is True -
Therapist shares 3 life-changing quotes she uses ‘almost daily’ with her patients
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Left-Handed People Are More Competitive, Says Science
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I recently finished reading Richard Wollheim's "Painting As An Art".
I found much of it stimulating in the close attention paid to particular pictures and thought provoking with regard to his theory of "seeing in" as the way to understand our perception of paintings.
On the other hand, his use of psychoanalytic theory left me with questions.
Surprisingly, his use of this theory reminded of some recent reading of mine in evolutionary psychology. Both Wollheim and the evolutionary psychologists stress the significance of a common human nature and are inclined to downplay the importance of systems of symbols or culture in general.
I do think that a substantive concept of human nature makes sense, and I am open to the possibility of evolutionary psychology and psychoanalytical theory contributing to an understanding of of human nature.
Altogether less agreeable to me is the tendency of these theories to smuggle in a social ontology in which culture is merely the creation of atomized individuals. One can believe in the evolved nature of the mind and allow for the possibility of certain kinds of psychic forces at work in the individual without denying the importance, still less the existence, of social facts. Thinking about languages as at once learned and used by individuals but also existing as entities external to those individuals is helpful here.
Image: The Construction of the Tower of Babel -- Folio xvii, The Bedford Book of Hours -- 1423 - 30 - The British Library.
#Wollheim #RichardWollheim #PaintingAsAnArt #EvolutionaryPsychology #Psychoanalysis #SocialOntology #Art #Philosophy #IlluminatedManuscript #BookOfHours #BedfordBBookOfHours #15thCenturyArt #TowerOfBabel
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Reciprocal altruism (Evolutionary biology 🧬)
In evolutionary biology, reciprocal altruism is a behaviour whereby an organism acts in a manner that temporarily reduces its fitness while increasing another organism's fitness, with the expectation that the other organism will act in a similar manner at a later time. The concept was initially developed by Rob...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reciprocal_altruism
#ReciprocalAltruism #Altruism #Symbiosis #EvolutionaryBiology #EvolutionaryPsychology
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Therapist shares 3 life-changing quotes she uses 'almost daily' with her patients
https://web.brid.gy/r/https://www.upworthy.com/therapist-3-life-changing-quotes
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The Mind as Semi-Solid Smoke
This post continues the series on Socratic Thinking, turning the space-and-place lens inward to examine the mind itself. Human minds can be thought of as an imperfect place with the ability to create their own insta-places to navigate ambiguity.
On the Trail (1889) by Winslow Homer. Original from The National Gallery of Art. Digitally enhanced by rawpixel.Exploration in any real or conceptual space needs navigational markers with sufficient meaning. Humans are biologically predisposed to seek out and use navigational markers. This tendency is rooted in our neural architecture, emerges early in life, and is shared with other animals, reflecting its deep evolutionary origins 1,2 . Even the simplest of life performing chemotaxis uses the signal-field of food to navigate.
When you’re microscopic, the territory is the map; at human scale, we externalise those cues as landmarks—then mirror the process inside our heads. Just as cells follow chemical gradients, our thoughts follow self-made landmarks, yet these landmarks are vaporous.
From the outside our mind is a single place, it is our identity. Probe closer and our identity is nebulous and dissolves the way a city dissolves into smaller and smaller places the closer you look. We use our identity to create the first stable place in the world and then use other places to navigate life. However, these places come from unreliable sources, our internal and external environments. How do we know the places are even real, and do we have the knowledge to trust their reality? Well, we don’t. We can’t judge our mental landmarks false. Callard calls this normative self-blindness: the built-in refusal to saw off the branch we stand on.
Normative self-blindness is a trick to gloss over details and keep moving. Insta-places are conjured from our experience and are treated as solid no matter how poorly they are tied down by actual knowledge. We can accept that a place was loosely formed in the past, an error, or is not yet well defined in the future, is unknown. However, in the moment, the places exist and we use them to see.
Understanding and accepting that our minds work this way is a key tenet of Socratic Thinking. It makes adopting the posture of inquiry much easier. Socratic inquiry begins by admitting that everyone’s guiding landmarks may be made of semi-solid smoke.
1Chan, Edgar, Oliver Baumann, Mark A. Bellgrove, and Jason B. Mattingley. “From Objects to Landmarks: The Function of Visual Location Information in Spatial Navigation.” Frontiers in Psychology 3 (2012). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00304
2Freas, Cody A., and Ken Cheng. “The Basis of Navigation Across Species.” Annual Review of Psychology 73, no. 1 (January 4, 2022): 217–41. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-020821-111311.
#AgnesCallard #cognitiveBiases #cognitiveScience #criticalThinking #decisionMaking #epistemology #evolutionaryPsychology #humanPsychology #identity #introspection #mentalModels #metacognition #mindset #navigation #neuroscience #normativeSelfBlindness #personalDevelopment #philosophy #sensemaking #socraticThinking #spaceAndPlace
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Scientists investigating human sperm competition stumble upon an intriguing paradox
#health #reproductivehealth #evolutionarybiology #evolutionarypsychology #menshealth
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Evolutionary ethics (Evolution 🧬)
Evolutionary ethics is a field of inquiry that explores how evolutionary theory might bear on our understanding of ethics or morality. The range of issues investigated by evolutionary ethics is quite broad. Supporters of evolutionary ethics have argued that it has important implications in the fields of descri...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_ethics
#EvolutionaryEthics #Bioethics #Evolution #Sociobiology #DescriptiveEthics #EvolutionaryPsychology