Women As Worriers Who Exclude

This is an excellent 2014 book on how men differ from women:

In Warriors and Worriers, psychologist Joyce Benenson presents a new theory of sex differences, based on thirty years of research with young children and primates around the world. … boys and men deter their enemies, while girls and women find assistants to aid them in coping with vulnerable children and elders. … Human males form cooperative groups that compete against out-groups, while human females exclude other females in their quest to find mates, female family members to invest in their children, and keep their own hearts ticking. In the process, Benenson turns upside down the familiar wisdom that women are more sociable than men and that men are more competitive than women.

Especially interesting is her discussion of how central social exclusion is to female behavior: 

How does a woman compete while minimizing the risk of retaliation? I suggest that women use a few simple strategies. Strategy 1 is that a woman does not ever let anyone else know that she is competing with them. …  She preaches the mantra of equality for all, and sincerely believes it. …Unaware of her own competitive instincts, she tries to get as much as she can for herself, while insisting that everyone else share equally. If strategy 1 is not working out well enough, then a woman may switch to strategy 2, which requires employing social exclusion. She must ally with other females to run their target out of town. That way, they retain more resources, status, allies, babysitters, and high-quality mates for themselves. The virtue of social exclusion is that it allows overt competition but reduces the risk of retalitation because the target is outnumbered. Should strategy 2 fail, the final fallback is strategy 3, which is reserved for emergencies. It entails a direct hit on a competitor, a physical or verbal assault. If a woman must use strategy 3, she has failed. She is no longer nice; she is mean. … She will be abandoned by former allies. Not only that, but she risks retaliation from her target. …

Strategy 2 comes into play when one female stands out. She may stand out because she obviously tries to outdo everyone else. She may stand out because she is new, extremely talented, or simply has the resources or relationships that others want. She may even stand out simply because she is an easy target and has nothing going for her. She has no allies. It would cost little to be rid of her, leaving more for everyone else. In any of these circumstances, it might be worth using a more direct competitive strategy. However, any form of individual, direct competition leaves open the possibility of retaliation and potential harm. One way of minimizing this is for several girls or women to gang up on a single target. This way, there is little chance of any one of the group suffering harm. Social exclusion accomplishes just that. …

Barring imminent death of herself or her child, nothing strikes more fear into the heart of a girl or woman than the thought that she will be excluded. In one recent study, my students and I asked women and men simply to read about being socially excluded by a friend. Women’s heart rates increased much more than men’s heart rates did. In contrast, women’s and men’s heart rates increased equally when they imagined being physically assaulted by a friend. … 

Social exclusion is primarily a female strategy. … Girls practice it from early childhood. It has been used by females across diverse cultures in middle childhood and adolescence and adulthood … An experimenter brought two 6-year-olds, either girls or boys, to a room … One week later, the same two children returned to the room and …  a third child of the same sex was brought to the room after the pair had been playing for a while. … pairs of girls were more likely than pairs of boys to exclude the newcomer. … Girls took more than three times as long as boys to speak to the newcomer. … In 4 of the 15 girls’ groups, the girls never spoke a single word to the newcomer. …

In interviews conducted in Adelaide, Australia, middle-class girls in Catholic schools reported many instances of temporary and permanent exclusion of former friends, new girls, vulnerable girls with few friends or little self-confidence, or geeky girls. … At one … school, two or three cases occurred per year in which the exclusion was so severe that a girl had to transfer to another school. Unfortunately, nothing is worse than entering a new school. These transfer girls often found themselves excluded again. … Several studies show that [women] dislike moving more than men do. …

We asked groups of five 10-year-olds from schools in Plymouth, England, if they would produce a short play. … Every group worked hard. No adults were present. … The seven boys’ plays consisted primarily of skits based either on a popular television show or on football (soccer) matches between two well-known teams. … All of the boys took part equally in these plays. No one was singled out. In contrast, six of the seven girls’ plays involved social exclusion of a target girl. … girls more frequently formed a coalition whose members synchronously directed behavior toward one lone girl. Second, the girls varied more in the amount of time each girl got on stage. The girl who was excluded got a lot less air time …

We mentioned that if a participant played alone, then the two opponents would be able to get together to exclude them. Even though this did not affect the participant’s chances of winning, women immediately switched strategies. Instead of playing alone, they chose to ally with one player and exclude the other one. Men were completely unaffected. …

When we asked young adults to describe any occasions in the past year when they had been socially excluded by same-sex friends, women listed more occasions than men. 

This all suggests to me that “cancel culture” can be seen as a straightforward extension of a common relatively-female strategy, upped in part by #MeToo. 

That is, many orgs are now willing to break association with anyone who enough others say they don’t like. Some sort of accusation is often required, but details or supporting concrete evidence are less often required. I guess this change is part of the overall feminization of culture, though it must also have other causes. (What?)

The above descriptions don’t give me much confidence that the excluded are typically guilty of justly-punishable offenses. Expect to see a lot more of this, unless we re-establish prior norms that discouraged it.