Modern Wisdom - #559 - David Puts - What Use Is The Female Orgasm?

Episode Date: December 1, 2022

David Puts is a Professor of Anthropology at Penn State whose research focuses on the evolution and development of human sexuality and sex differences. Apparently women orgasm. Why they do it however, has been a mystery for a long time. They don't need to in order to get pregnant. And sometimes they don't do it at all, for ages. So what use is the female orgasm, and what predicts the sort of partner who'll make it happen? Expect to learn if the female orgasm is just a gatekeeper for oxytocin, whether more dominant male faces predicted earlier orgasm, why men competed for women through contests rather than sexual selection, how male-male aggression, not female selection drove the evolved differences between men and women, whether you can tell a person's personality from their voice pitch and much more... Sponsors: Get £150 discount on Eight Sleep products at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 15% discount on Craftd London’s jewellery at https://bit.ly/cdwisdom (use code MW15) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and Free Shipping from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Check out David's website - https://beel.la.psu.edu/  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is David Putz, he's a professor of anthropology at Penn State, whose research focuses on the evolution and development of human sexuality and sex differences. Apparently, women orgasm. Why they need to do it, however, has been a mystery for a long time. They don't need to, in order to get pregnant, and sometimes they don't do it at all, for ages. So what use is the female orgasm and what predicts the sort of partner who'll make it happen?

Expect to learn if the female orgasm is just a gatekeeper for oxytocin, whether more dominant male faces predicted early orgasm, why men competed for women through contests rather than sexual selection, how male-male aggression, not female selection, drove the evolve differences between men and women, whether you can tell a person's personality from their voice pitch and much more. David is an absolute beast and some of the work and studies that have come out of his lab are my favourites that I've learned about this year, including that epic one that Rob Henderson taught us about a couple of weeks ago about how male interpretations of Femidability is a better predictor of male

sexual success than female rated attractiveness and a ton of other ones. Like, the guy is a complete legend and I'm very, very glad to have had him on. Also, don't forget that if you're listening, you should have also got a copy of the Modern Wisdom reading list and you can get that right now by going to chriswillx.com slash books. There's 100 books that you should read also got a copy of the Modern Wisdom reading list and you can get that right now by going to chriswillx.com slash books. There's 100 books you should read before you die, fiction and nonfiction and there's explanations for why I like them and there's links to go and get them and you can go and pick it up right now for free chriswillx.com slash books. But now ladies and gentlemen please welcome David Putz. David I want to talk about the female orgasm. I feel like that's what everybody's come

to hear us talk about. Female orgasm, a massive mystery. You've done some really, really interesting work on it. Why does the female orgasm exist? What's the function of it? That's a great question. And I would say it's about 10% of the research that we do in my lab, but about 90% of the interviews that I do are about on that topic. And, you know, I guess I should start by saying we don't know. But if I had to sort of put my money on a hypothesis, it would be that it functions in made choice. And, you know, whether, and it, that could be in a couple of ways, I mean, it could be that it functions to, to choose mates of high genetic quality that will make females offspring healthier and more fit themselves, or it could be that it functions to choose long-term

investing partners, or it could be that it functions to choose long-term investing partners or it could be some of both. I mean, there's some evidence that orgasm increases the probability of conception. And so, you know, it makes sense then that it could be for it either function. If orgasm functions to choose males of high genetic quality, then it would make a special sense, especially since it would be more likely to increase the probability of fertilization. There's also lots of evidence that when women feel closer to their partners and have an emotional connection, that orgasm is more likely as well. So I can talk about some of the evidence that, you know, sort of bears on this, but I guess,

well, maybe I'll stop there, or maybe, I can actually, maybe I'll say how I got into this, which was I always sort of appreciated it as an interesting intellectual question, and I understood that some evolutionary biologists thought that it was likely an adaptation, and it makes sense that it might be. It's something that is so intimately connected to reproductive behaviors that it seems unlikely to be selectively neutral, of behaviors that it seems unlikely to be selectively neutral, you know, to have been irrelevant to our ancestors reproductive success.

But then, you know, it's something that males are much more likely to have an orgasm when they have sex and some women have never had an orgasm. And there's not some kind of smoking-guine evidence for its function that there are plenty of other evolutionary biologists to say no, it's not an adaptation, it's just sort of a happy coincidence, and that it's really a byproduct of selection favoring orgasm and males,

that in the same way that males have nipples because of selection on females, female mammals, some female mammals to have nipples, that selection on males to have orgasms has produced a similar trait. So, and females. And so, you know, I appreciated that question. And then, I guess about 15 years ago or so, I was asked to review a book on the topic. And I thought for a journal for archives of sexual behavior. And I thought, okay, great chance for me to get into the literature a little bit, read

a book that reviews the literature and also have a publication. I was a postdoc at the time and the more publications, the better I thought at the time. And the book sort of took a strong, ostensibly, it was sort of more neutral, but I came away. It's anyone reading the book comes away thinking that the author really supports the byproduct hypothesis, that orgasm is not functional in human females. And I came away from the book feeling that the author was more likely to be wrong than when I started the book. You know, that it just seemed to me that, you know, you could pick away at any

bit of evidence and say, well, it's an imperfect study. This doesn't show for sure. But every bit seems to support the hypothesis that women's orgasm functions in choosing mates and that it's unlikely to be simply a byproduct that, you know, it should be reduced, for example, but byproducts, like, men are bigger, but their nipples are smaller. Because when selection doesn't favor a trait, and it favors it in one sex and not in the other, then it tends to be vestigial or rudimentary in the sex where it's in not an adaptation. And if you think about the sort of phenomenology of female orgasm, if anything, it's bigger than it is in males, less frequent. But that could be, it makes complete sense if it's functions in choosing us.

I had Carol Hoven on the show a little while ago, and she was explaining about what happens when people take testosterone and transition from female to male and then some people de-transition and go back. And she spoke about sexual desire and sex drive and stuff like that, but she also spoke about subjective orgasm quality and spoke about the difference between natal women, as she calls them, and the sort of full body, much longer lasting, sort of warm feeling, then taking testosterone, transitioning to being a male or a man, at least not transitioning to being a male, transitioning to being a man, and then having a more sort of localized,

higher peak, less duration, and then detransitioning back and going, oh my god, I've seen both sides of the fence here. That is fascinating, and I would love to talk to those people. I sort of also have some anecdotal evidence from just sort of talking to people. And one account was that this was also a second hand. I got this. So friend of a friend transitioned, you know, female to male and started taking testosterone and said before I started taking testosterone, I could masturbate after I started taking it, I had to. Just like a necessity.

So anyway, yeah, that's interesting. Thinking about this sort of, you know, physiology underlying some sex differences. And I'm sure that some of it is sort of, some of the differences in sexual desire, response, and so on are sort of direct effects of sex hormones acting on the brain, including patterns of gene expression in the brain. And then some of it, of course, is also the effects of those sex hormones on anatomy. Right? I mean, you know, penises and clitoruses are aroused in different ways. And, you know, so yeah. Okay, so previously, I think the, when I first started getting into evolutionary psychology,

the first explanation I had beyond it just being a bi-product or some vestige of it being a, the orgasm being a bi-product of the manige of it being a, the orgasm being a bi-product of the man was for bonding, was the fact that there's this flood of hormones that gets released after that, how much contribution do you think there is with regards to the oxytocin and the feel good and the closeness and stuff that females have after sex? Yeah, I go ahead. After orgasm after sex. Right, right. Yeah, so that is an interesting, I mean, we really don't know a whole lot about this hormone

that's released in the brain from sexual arousal and also especially after orgasm, but oxytocin does in experimental, you know, laboratory mammals. It does have an effect on sort of bonding, pair bonding behaviors and socially immunogamous rodents. And there's some evidence in people too, although it's just harder to do a well-designed experiment in people. But I think that it must have some kind of an effect like that to make women feel more emotionally close to their partner. And and also there have been a couple of studies that have treated women with oxytocin and look at what happens to a sperm-like fluid, a semen-like

fluid. It was the same viscosity as semen and radio labeled and so some women were happy to participate in the study like this, but it was treating women with oxytocin and looking at what happens to this semen-like fluid after oxytocin treatment. And the answer was that it's always brought into the it's always brought into the uterus. But the question is does it go up into a

phlopian too, because that's where fertilization takes place, right? When the egg is released from one side, from one ovary, then there are generally sperm waiting there. If fertilization is going to happen, then they'll be sperm waiting there, sort of embedded with their little heads embedded in the epithelium there, and then they can, you know, one of them can fertilize the egg. So you have to get sperm there. And sperm swim, but a little bit, you know, it's just like they have a little, they're tiny and they can't get very far on their own. The way that they move up toward the egg is through parastoptic

muscular contractions of the female reproductive tract, is the female tract that's moving them muscular contractions of the female reproductive tract is the female tract that's moving them upward and these That this fluid was moved toward the into an overduct and the closer that the women in the study got to ovulation the bigger their follicle was that so closer to bursting and releasing an egg the more Transport you had just into the overduct where an egg was going to be released. And this was just after oxytocent treatment. So that's kind of, to me, that's kind of strong evidence that if you do an experiment and

you treat some women with the hormone that's released especially after orgasm, and its effect is to move sperm or a sperm like fluid toward and up the oviduct where an egg is going to be released and the Closer you are to ovulation the more fertile the more of that transport just goes up into that oviduct I mean that suggests that orgasm also has that function because why else would Oxytocin play this role, you know this this hormone that's released during sexual ralasal, but especially after orgasm.

The price that people pay for science, those women, happy to have a semen-like substance put inside of them, then be treated with oxytocin, then have it tracked to see whether the sillier wave in it along and get it into the right philopean tube, dear God. But how do we not know, if that's the case, how do we not know that female orgasm is not just a mediator between the active sex and the release of oxytocin? How do we know it's not a mediator? It's not, I mean, that that's not just the only function for it. All it is is just like a gatekeeper that says, oxytocin is what's to go.

It's got nothing really to do with anything else. It all it is is just we're releasing oxytocin. That's going to improve fertility. Oh, it could be, but then the question is, I mean, add a sort of, I think that's the hypothesis, is that it plays that role. But then the question is, why, why do, why is it necessary to have an orgasm? And why does it happen sometimes, you know, like in other words, why would selection have favorite having an orgasm, sometimes and not others? Why does it happen so infrequently? If selection just said, look, a natural selection that

is said, look, it's what's favored by selection is having more offspring than you would expect have an orgasm every time with sex, because that increases your chances of fertilization, that increases the number of offspring. But if it was more like, well, but having it, being pregnant all the time is not a good idea if the mates are of differing quality, then select ones that are more investing, more caring, more loving, more have better genes for your offspring, whatever, then it makes

sense to have this mechanism that increases the odds of fertilization be dependent upon those characteristics, you know, be dependent upon the quality of a male. And we know for sure that it's not necessary. Like women, plenty of women, you know, have kids that have never had an orgasm in their life. So I think if anything, it's just increases the, and given that it's something that doesn't happen all the time, and there's also some evidence that measures of male mate quality increase affect the probability

of women having an orgasm. It seems like it has that function to mean, but I want more evidence. You know, I can imagine a study where I, so I gave you circumstantial evidence that orgasm increases the odds of conception, but what would be really great is to do a study, like we have some idea of the fertile window, because people have participated in studies where they recorded when they had sex with their partner and then later found out when they got pregnant and then you can sort of model that and say,

okay, so these are the days that are fertile. The day of ovulation and it looks like the five days before, if women had sex during those days, they had a non-zero chance of conception. So you can sort of say, these are the probabilities of the conceptions on different days of the cycle. You could do a study like that, but also have participants record whether they had an orgasm with their partner, and then see how that influences the sort of daily conception risk. And that would be strong evidence that

orgasm increases the odds of conception, but that kind of research, I would love to do it someday. I've just got so many, you know, whatever, irons in the fire, I haven't sort of taken steps. So what I do is whenever I talk to somebody about this, they say, this is a good study. Somebody should do it. I don't know if I'm going to do it. So what you would be able to do there is split test sex

from orgasm and non orgasm to see just how much of a fertility tool. Boost or something. Yeah, it is. It is to do that. Okay, so talk to me about the relationship between dominant men and orgasm success. Well, so we published one study about it 10 years ago where we had women and their heterosexual women in their male partners participated as couples and they but they answered all the where we had women and their heterosexual women and their male partners participated as couples. And they, but they answered all the questions separately about sexual response and that sort of thing.

Then we made sure that, you know, they were, they understood when they were going in, that they were not gonna find out the answers that the partner provided. And we found that women whose partners, who rated their partner, we sort of measured several variables related to the masculinity and dominance of their partner, including taking facial photos of the guys and measuring objectively how male typical the face was, how masculine it

was, or how feminine it was, having those faces rated by unfamiliar people, having women rate their partners on sort of, you know, dominance and masculinity. And we found that those things correlated pretty well and that women whose partners were more masculine that those women had the earlier orgasm. Where more like, you sort of, it took less time to have an orgasm during sex

and more likely to have an orgasm. So we thought, well, there's a lot of literature that suggests that traits that require high levels of sex hormones to produce, that those are indicators of underlying genetic quality. And so our prediction of, well, if female orgasm functions in part to recruit good genes for your offspring, then women should more easily orgasm and have earlier, you know, earlier timed orgasms with putative good genes, males, in this case, sort of more masculine and dominant. And that's what we found. You know, I'm happy with the study, but it's, I'd like more data, you know,

what one study doesn't prove anything. Well, did not be possible for men to overshoot dominance. I've had a bunch of conversations about ancestral leadership and stuff like that. And it seems like the tyrant dominant male actually ends up being killed pretty quickly because people don't like that in a small tribe of 150 people.

So did you find dominance topping out at all? Is there a way to overshoot on dominance? That is a great question. And I think I don't recall looking at it although a sample size, you know, that so when you're starting to look at both linear and pervilleneer effects, then you'd like sort of the more effects you look at the bigger

sample you'd like and I just now I'm wondering if we still have those. I don't think we look at that but that's a great possibility and I think you're absolutely right about that and in fact I think that that's something that characterizes other primates too but in humans that we've sort of, so in our ancestors, our males probably competed via contest competition by threats of aggression and actual physical aggression in one mating opportunities that way. But we engage in a lot less frequent fighting than, say, our closest living relative chimpanzees. I mean, human males are more likely whether they're boys or men, more likely to fight and get engaged in some kind of physical altercations than females, but it's about 1% as frequent

as it is in chimpanzees. And I think a lot of that has to do with exactly what you said, that maybe around two million years ago, one and a half million years ago, and around homeoeireptus that we got really good at killing, including each other and the predators. We became sort of hyper predators around that time, probably. There's evidence of sort of increased carnivory, increased brain size, changes in shoulder structure that would suggest throwing. And that once we became very deadly, then it became important not to get out of hand with your...

Because you can easily escalate a small disagreement to one that becomes lethal. Yeah, despots can be killed by anybody. And so it's more important, and then of course there's also co-alitional aggression in humans and in chimpanzees, but warfare is something that seems to have happened throughout human evolution. And that requires some sort of, you know, group cooperation and competition against other groups as well. So anyway, I'm sure that you're right about that, that, you know, there's a lot of emphasis in human groups on prestige, which is freely

conferred social status, that you get social status by conferring benefits to the group. You have to be careful with the dominance, with coerced status because we're deadly. Dude, I tell you what would be an awesome study to be able to do. To look at the local ecology of the situation that the particular tribe is in. If the tribe was in a time of more stress, i.e. potentially there are external tribes that are going to war with them, there is more male aggression between tribes. That is a time, it seems like anthropologically where it is useful for a more dominant leader rather than a prestigious leader. People want the person that's going to just get shit done, the more psychopathic traits,

maybe a little bit better. I wonder if that would be reflected in female orgasm rate and mate choice. Great idea. It's a completely simple, superbly simple study to do, obviously. I could be completely simple, superbly simple study to do, obviously. Yeah, I could imagine doing it a big, it would be huge, right? A big cross cultural study, hopefully getting some data from sort of non-western societies as well. Yeah. How cool would that be to work out whether female mate choice, Wayne sort of swings between prestige and dominance preference based on what's going on Situationally, I think you could do a study like that

Both with sort of stated preferences, you know, you could ask people what they're after but also Yeah, looking at at orgasm as a potential mate choice mechanism as well. I think that would be yeah, that'd be a pretty cool study I've you know, we're in my lab, we've recently done some cross-cultural work and it is, if you want to get a good representative, you know, set of societies, it's a ton of work, but I think it's well worth it. I think mostly what people are interested in human evolution, one-to-know, is sort of about humans broadly, not American undergraduates or British undergraduates or something, and so it's nice to sort of look at how

some of these mating, mate choice, mate competition patterns are similar across societies, how some sex differences are similar, and how they change as well. What are some of the socioecological variables that predict those differences? And can you predict those things based on evolutionary theory like you're doing now? So yeah, I love it.

Okay, so you mentioned there about contest competition. And this was the first time that I ever got introduced to the idea of it was reading your work. And when we think about sexual selection, a lot of the time we consider sort of the ornaments of sexual selection, sort of the peacock's tail type thing. But when it comes to humans, there are a bunch of, and I'll also other animals as well, but when it comes to humans, it seems like there are a huge number of other types of competition that are going on. So what do you think have been the primary mechanisms of sexual selection when it comes

to humans? Okay. So, right. mechanisms of sexual selection when it comes to humans? Okay, so right, so when people who study sexual selection, which is the kind of natural selection that favors traits that win mates, when they think about that, they sort of tend to categorize into different modes or mechanisms, right? Ways that you could win mates. So there's contest competition, which favors, you know, size, strength, aggression, weapons, it's the use of force or threat of force to win mating opportunities.

There's a mate choice, which favors, you know, ornaments and sexual displays, but there's sperm competition, sometimes two males mate with the same fertile female, and then the male who produces more sperm or more viable sperm or more motile sperm is more likely to fertilize. And sexual coercion is another one that happens across many animal species that, you know, males can use force not just to get to each other, but also against potential mates to win mating opportunities. And if I had to sort of rank mechanism to sexual selection, operating on human males over recent evolutionary history

Let's say in the past you know a couple hundred thousand years. I'd say probably contest competition then mate choice and then Not sure between coercion and sperm competition, but but between those first two Contest competition and mate choice When I when I started studying this stuff in grad school, the literature, everything I was reading pretty much talked about how male traits, like if we talked about, say, beards or deep voices or facial masslet or anything like that, it wouldn't sort of talked about that trait as if it were a sexual ornament for attracting females. And I started doing research on the voice.

I can remember sitting on a bus in Pittsburgh thinking about, what am I going to do for my dissertation? I wanted to have one of at least two characteristics. Either it has some obvious sort of utility and helping humanity. Like it has some medical relevance or something like that or and or it opens up sort of a new Area research that hasn't kind of been done yet and it just I think I was I remember sort of having that debate with myself about You know, what what should my dissertation be and and what characteristics should it have and I thought back to Doing some holiday shopping at a mall in Pittsburgh and hearing two guys behind me who seem to be competing to talk in a lower

voice pitch with one another. I don't like this. It's not like what is going on. And it turned around and noticed oh there was a cute young woman near them and they were probably trying to show up. And so then I'm sitting on the bus thinking about this and I thought, you know, voice has to be a sexually selected trait, right? I mean, it's like the deep voices of human males were a little bit bigger than females, but our voices are way lower than you'd predict. Like, human males are about seven or eight percent taller. So they're vocal folds, then should be about seven or eight percent longer, but they're 60 percent longer.

They're like 10 times as long as you'd predict based on the size difference and voice pitch, you know, it's half the fundamental frequencies, like an octave lower in males, it drops at puberty when sexually selected traits tend to appear. They don't sort of, you know, antlers don't grow in a deer until they can do some, they have some function. They're not competing for mates when they're juveniles, but when they achieve sexual maturity,

then they start competing, and then those costly traits can sort of pay for themselves in terms of winning mating opportunities. And so anyway, I just thought about voice and I thought, yeah, that's got to be sexually selected. And I kind of went into that thinking, based on the literature that I had been reading, it must be about female choice. Like, it's got to be a sexual ornament

to attract females. And once I started doing research on it, I discovered that sure women prefer the voices a little bit lower than average, but the effect of the same pitch manipulation, what I manipulated sort of the masculinity of a voice, the effect of the same manipulation on other men's perceptions of a guy's fighting ability was 15 times as big as the biggest effect that it had on women's preferences, that women kind of cared a bit, but it just had this huge effect on perceptions of dominance. And I thought, you know, form follows function.

Like we can sort of infer ancestral selection pressures by looking at the traits, those selection pressures designed. And men's voices look like they're much better designed for intimidating other guys than they do at attracting women. And then I started thinking about other traits and in the literature on them. And every study, sometimes it's kind of swept under the rug in the paper, but it studies that look at, say, the manipulating the same trait, like facial hair,

on women's preferences and appearance of dominance. It always has a much bigger, positive effect on perception of dominance than attraction to women. That got me thinking about the design of men's phenotypes. They're male phenotypes. I just kept finding out more studies and more evidence that men's phenotypes really look likely were designed primarily to either win fights or intimidate their same sex competitors more than to attract

females. We don't look like sort of peacocks with sexual ornaments as much as we look like a typical mammal and really a typical eight. I mean if you look at all of our closest relatives, you know, males fight each other for mates and they don't really have any clear sexual ordinance but they have large bodies and aggression and you know one K19. Yeah, there's some of the other differences. What are some of the other ways that males have developed in a unique pattern that gets explained by this contact contest competition? Okay, let me think here. Well, there are many traits and I mean if we go back to say

traits that have probably been around for a couple of tens of millions of years that we share with, you know, all of the other great apes. Large body size, you know, males, human males have about, say, 35% more fat-free mass, and about 60% more muscle mass. And there's skeletons indicate of a primate that's about maybe 45 to 50% larger than females. And aggression, you know. I mentioned that there's less frequent aggression in human males and there is among say chimpanzees or closest relatives, but it's equally lethal and so that means that, you know, if human males fight each other 1% of the time then it's a hundred times as lethal among humans

Weapons so that the typical weapon and primates is long canine teeth. And you see that even in socially immunogamists like Gibbons and Syemains, they have long canines because it's useful to have a weapon to use against conspacific, same-sex competitors, but predators as well. And then we lost our long canine teeth. And that, you see that in the first hominins, so the first bipedal apes, about seven million years ago, that there's a reduction in canine size,

with the evolution of bipedalism and adaptations of the hand that look like it's good for gripping something. So there's a ton of sort of speculation and theorizing about this among anthropologists. But to me, Darwin was probably right, that we evolved bipedalism to use tools and that once we did that,

our primary weapons that became not K-9 teeth, but rocks and wood or whatever for millions of years until we developed more sophisticated weaponry. Well, why why try to bite someone? Why why have to get your head so close if you can just put a rock in your hand and smash them over the face? That's right. Yeah, like we we don't have the typical primate weapons, but we have way way better ones. Yeah. Have you read a bill on hippels work on this? Oh, I I'm sure that I have I came out about three or four years ago. It's really, really great.

He just, he says the same thing. He suggests that it seems like, and really, really cool insight I got from that was that if you give toddlers a playground, and on the playground, there's a couple of appropriately sized rocks. There is something in them that drives them to go over and just pick it up and practice throwing. I was like, it's so fucking interesting.

So there's another, right? Now there are big differences in throwing. So there's about a one and a half standard deviation male advantage in targeting that seems to exist even if you control for differences in practice. Hang on. Hang on. Hang on. Hang on. There is a one and a half standard deviation in accuracy, yeah, targeting accuracy of throwing even if you have the same level of training between men and women. So the research that's been done on it has tried to control for practice and actually Melissa Hines, it seems to be driven in part by Androgen, by exposure to Androgen

like testosterone. Melissa Hines showed that women with congenital adrenal hyperclasia, which is a condition where the adrenal glands produce elevated Androgens before they're born, that they had sort of targeting accuracy that was intermediate between unaffected females and males. Now, who knows exactly whether that's effects of sex hormones acting directly on the developing brain, and the regions that are involved in targeting,

or whether it's more involved in what you like to do and spend your time on, and whether you like to engage, whether you wanna go and pick up a rocket. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, the first place that I'm going to hear is that proponents for the WNBA are probably slightly unhappy to find out that there is no way that you can level the playing field between the two groups.

It would be very difficult to level the playing field because there are certain things that men have a predisposition to be better at than women do. And it seems like throwing is one of those. I've never watched women's baseball, but if they use the same size, whatever it's called, area, the area that the throw is actually permitted in, strikes on. I would guess that the number of balls that are thrown in the women's MLB will be greater than the number that are thrown in the women's MLB will be greater than the number that are thrown in the men's MLB. Yeah, well, so that I don't know if there's softball,

I mean, women tend to play softball, which is a little bit different, it's underhand pitching, but it's like, I watch that, it's fucking vicious. It is so far, and they're closer as well. Apparently the pitch is, the actual time that you have on the pitches is way shorter because they throw pretty much not far off as quick and

it's super short from the mount to the bat. Yes, so it's so vicious. Yeah, and I don't know too much about that, but for sure, you know, if somebody has gone through male puberty, then that gives them certain physical advantages in physical competition that are difficult to erase. And the evidence suggests that you can't completely. You know, that even, like, say, removing testosterone, you know, there's some changes that have already happened that are. But I want to say about throwing that there's also a even larger sex difference in throwing velocity.

And that is present very early on. So I mentioned the one and a half standard deviation sex difference. There's a one and a half standard deviation of throwing velocity by age three. And by age 12, it's three and a half standard deviations, which is one of the biggest, you know, when you think about the sex difference in height is about two standard deviations. And it's easy to see that males on average are taller, of course, they don't laugh. And if you look at the WNBA, you can see there are lots of tall women. But there's a pretty big sex difference in height, but it's nowhere near the size of the

sex difference in throwing velocity. He is the thing that no one's speaking about when it comes to the discussion about men and women in each other's sports and the trans leagues and stuff like that. No one is talking about, almost everybody is using velocity, right? Everyone is talking about the ability to generate power. Nobody is talking about the predisposition to be more accurate or more precise with particular types of movements. That's really interesting. It is. Given that some studies have tried to control for both participants' own reported practice with throwing activities, but also in one study I'm thinking of,

tried to select and throw to throwing targeting behaviors that nobody had much experience with like underhand throwing of a ping pong ball or something or remember what it was exactly but it was something that like if you're playing typical throwing sports you wouldn't have practiced this anyway to try to control for differences and experience. So that suggests that some of the sex difference isn't due to just what you like to spend your time doing, but either way, those sex differences also are ones that are consistent with an evolutionary history of sort of males targeting each other, but it's also the case, like I mentioned, that somewhere it seems like for the first, say, four million years or so of hominin evolution,

we were typical eight omnivores, where we ate a lot of plants and had some meat in our diet. Chimp's, you know, red-collar dysmonkey, something, they ate meat too. They just not as much, mostly frugavores, eat fruit, you know. And our early hominin bipedal small brain, like chimpsized brain ancestors, for the first several million years probably, we're not eating a ton of meat. And then maybe became better scavengers, three and a half million years ago. But by the evolution of our own genus homo, around two million years, one and a half

million years ago, we got really good at hunting. And we know that. And so it's not clear how much of the sex difference in throwing velocity and targeting has to do with male, male competition and targeting each other versus targeting prey. Because we also know when you look at modern hunter-gatherers that there's a big sex difference in subsistence strategy that males hunt more and females forage more and that if only one sex hunts in this group, it's males. If one sex hunts bigger game, it's males. I'm just describing something I'm asking how it should be.

Yeah, but it makes sense. It makes sense that it probably was ancestral as well. Exactly. It makes complete sense about why the men would have this overpowered throwing ability if it was mostly them that were having to go out and throw stuff at other animals. So I mean this is the interesting thing about the male male aggression and how much that's driven sexual dimorphism and the traits that we see in men and how they're different in women. How do you separate out the traits that men have that have been developed

to be effective at whatever dominance and aggression toward the men rather than just straight up survival or ornaments or wilderness survival. Yeah, you can't in many cases, and the reality is that for any trait of any organism, there are often many selection pressures operating on it simultaneously. And sometimes those pressures work in opposition. Like, for stature, for height and human males, probably there's sexual selection favoring a taller height than is the average.

And there's ecological selection or survival selection favoring a shorter height, because it's costlier to produce this. You have to have more resources to produce and maintain that kind of phenotype. And so those are sort of body sizes, one of those traits that probably sort of ordinary natural selection or ecological selection and sexual selection

are working in opposition. But any trait has sort of multiple selection pressures operating at the same time. And so that's true of sort of typical masculine characteristics in human males. There's almost certainly been female mate choice, male contests, and ecological selection at a minimum operating on it. And so it can be really hard to say how much of trade X is because of male contest.

But if you do careful experiments and you look across societies and see similar patterns and say, wow, you know, this trade looks like it functions much more efficiently at function X that does Y or Z than that that suggests that, you know, that's been a stronger selection pressure. And when you look at human male traits, it's just that they look like they function better. And the experiments that have been done and also sort of correlations with, and sort of more naturalistic type studies, correlations with outcomes as well. It just looks like male traits function better for contest competition. And many of these things existed way before there was, say,

specialized hunting in humans. Like, you know, all of our closest living relatives have male, male competition and fighting and stuff. So large body size, muscularity, aggression, those things have existed probably for tens of millions of years in our lineage way before there was anything like, you know, specialized hunting. So, yeah. I heard that the brow ridge, the increased brow ridge that men have would maybe be one

of these particular traits that as soon as you have hands, especially amongst men, bigger hands that can be balled up into fists that you can punch each other in the face with, it is adaptive for you to have basically an extra little bit of armor that runs men bigger hands that can be balled up into fists that you can punch each other in the face with. It is adaptive for you to have basically an extra little bit of armor that runs across here. Is that something you've come across? Yeah, it is. I know that I suggested it in a paper in 2010 and I don't remember if I was plagiarizing somebody I hope not and I know that a guy Dave Carrier has published more on it and sort of talked about the evolution of

of hominin skulls in that in that light. So human males have a more prominent super occipital torus, isn't it, for this super orbital torus, is that it? Yeah this super orbital torus, is that it? Yeah, super orbital torus, occipital, what am I talking about? And more robust mandible. And it makes sense that those would provide some protection against fractures of the face and the mandible. They're fairly grass-yle, they're much less robust than they were on our ancestors,

a million, two million years ago. But still the sex difference, yeah, I mean, it makes sense to me that a slightly larger brow ridge could protect eyes from punches or hits from other things too, you know, a rock or a club or something like that. And same thing with a jaw, I mean, that's like, you know, young males get way more job fractures than anybody else. And it's the most commonly report other than car accidents, which are evolutionarily novel. Across studies, the most common cause is, you know, hit with a blunt, a fister blunt object, you know. so that's how they

get the, despite having a thicker mandible. So it makes sense that in our ancestors, if you broke your jaw, you couldn't have your jaw wired shut and feed through a tube, that would just possibly be catastrophic, right? I mean, life, life ending. Um, and so it makes sense that selection would favor a bit more robust um,. That said, there has been a sort of reduction in overall skull robusticity and over the past few million years. And I wonder how much of that has to do with changes in our weaponry going more toward cutting and puncturing. Yeah, a big think, Brown makes very little difference if you've put them on.

It's got nice to, yeah, to hominins, you know, five, six million years ago when they were only bashing. And there was huge sexual dimorphism in the shape of the skull as well, that thing. When it comes to talking about this male-male aggression that we're discussing here, how does that help men get mates? Surely there's still the female that is an element of this.

I understand how it helps you win a fight, but it's not necessarily apparent how it would make you better at getting a mate. Yeah, that's something that I've wondered about a lot, because for one thing, we're not a species like elephant seals where males fight for a piece of real estate on a breeding beach. They exclude all of their males and then the the beach master, the dominant male has exclusive sexual access to all the females in the spot of real estate that he's been able to defend.

We're not like that. We live in multi-male, multi-female groups. And there's almost certainly been lots of scope for mate choice. And so how does dominant competition translate? And into mating opportunities. And there are a few ways. One of them is co-alitional aggression, which is something, so I've mentioned that, like,

in small-scale societies, you probably, you know, people who study this is still called warfare. This happens in our closest living relative, chimpanzees as well, that groups of males will attack other groups, or especially single individuals from other groups, and take females from those groups. And that's something that seems to, you know, in the historical records and there's even archaeological evidence that that's something that has happened in human groups over a time that sort of males attacking other groups, killing some enemies and abducting females.

So that's one way that male, male aggression could result in mating opportunities. There's within groups fights over, you know, when two males are after the same female, you know, Frank Marlow was an anthropologist who studied the Hodza. They're one of the last hunter-gatherer groups in the world and only about a thousand and then left. And he talked about how in the Hadsat's free mate choice, unless two guys are interested in the same woman, and then one might kill the other one with an arrow,

which kind of constrains the scope for mate choice. But that's something that happens. And male aggression often occurs when two, when male aggression happens, it often occurs when two guys are interested in the same female. And also defensive mates is another way. And Napoleon Shagnon was an anthropologist. You said the the Yamama who are a horticulturist from South America and he talked about how when

one male suspects another one of tristing with his wife then he can sort of challenge him to a fight. And that sometimes results in death as well, but there's sort of you know, a way of fighting, translating into retaining him, but then really I think the threat of all these things. You know, like I mentioned that human males are not unabatedly at one another's throw. It's fighting all the time, but there's the sort of potential for it. And the threats of those things can deter rivals from trying to win the same mate that a male is gonna try to get or to cheat with another guy's wife or mate or something like that.

So, but then also it's the case that across BC's when males compete through contest competition, females often evolve preferences for dominant males or males of high status and the traits that win status. Because, when you think about it, it's for females, if they just let males do it out, males are imposing strong selection on one another to see who's the fittest or whatever. And so females can sort of then just sit back and say,

oh, well, that guy must be successful. So that happens in many species, and it could be the case, too, that social status is highly attractive. And you can sort of let males decide who's high status among themselves and then pick that, you know, the winners. I had a conversation with Rob Henderson last week and he taught me about this study that had been done where men and women reported based on the faces of the people that they saw the relative attractiveness and dominance. So the men judged the ad dominance

and the women judged the attractiveness. And they found that over the next year, all of the men whose photos they used then self-reported the number of sexual partners that they'd had. And the men that were judging the dominance were more accurate at rank ordering the faces based on how many sexual partners they would have. Dominance was a better predictor of sexual partners than attractiveness from women. So it seems like the men were better able to predict the number of sexual partners that the men would have than the women were, despite the fact that women are

the market for what these men were going for. That is an awesome study. And at first I wanted to know, is this a study that he did because it also, it sounds like one that, okay, I think it's one that I did. Anyone might be able to study. I think you're describing a paper that we published in Evolution and Human Behavior

a few years ago where we had, we wanted to study this phenomenon and to try to understand whether success in male male competition was a better predictor of mating success than success under female choice. And so we said, look, what this would have looked like over most of human evolution was probably not a whole bunch of strangers, rating strangers faces and voices and whatever. It'd be like people mostly knowing each other. And so why don't we get a bunch of guys who know each other to assess the prestige and dominance and so on of guys

that they know and then have women who know the guys based on everything. There's sense of humor, their intelligence, how nice they are, but also whatever, you know, how good looking, how dominant, what are, how attractive they are. And then use that information to predict guys' number of sexual partners. And what we found was that, oh, and what do we, how do we do this? We recruited two of the largest social fraternities at Penn State. And then they're socially affiliated sororities to participate in this study. And we found that guys were able to,

their sort of average rankings of guys dominance, predicted guys' number of sex partners. And when we put those in a statistical model with how attractive the women who knew the guys said the guys were, that the attractiveness ratings didn't explain any additional variation in number of sex partners. You're hitting me. You're hitting me. Yeah, on dominance.

And, you know, it's funny, I just lectured on that. And I took it out of my lecture this year because I'm behind on things. And I thought, it's one study in American undergrads. And, you know, I can cut it out. But often when I do in past semesters when I talk about that particular study, I sort of presented to the classes like, how does this happen? Because doesn't it feel like what's really determining a guy's sort of mating success is whether women find him attractive?

I mean, doesn't that really have, don't you have that strong feeling in this society that's the primary determinant? And I'm not sure exactly, but it could be things like, you know, in bars and parties and wherever the sort of mating relationships are formed that dominant males are not challenged. If they're trying to attract a female, subordinate males or guys who are clearly wimpier would never impose themselves and inject

themselves into that conversation and say, ah, I'll talk to me. Whereas a dominant male would have no compunction about getting in the middle of this wimpy guy is talking to this really good looking woman and have no problem just out of the way. And so I don't know that's one possibility but I'd love to study sort of the actual causal connection there. I would also be very interested to find out how online dating in the modern world is changing this. Right.

You know, how easy is it to show dominance or prestige really over a Tinder profile or an Instagram account? You know, what cues is a high follow account and a blue tick? What did they give off? Does that show prestige? Does it show dominance? Is there a way that you could construct a bunch of fake Instagram accounts and the kind of photos that were being taken and the kind of language that was being used in the follow account? Is there a way that you would be able to work that out? Because you know, the environment now of whatever you're talking about here, like almost mate guarding in a way or a potential mate guarding when you're chatting somebody up in a party that doesn't work anymore.

Anybody can message anybody on Tinder. That's right. Yeah. And my guess is if you did a study like that, I mean, just based on the sort of research that's already been done, I just don't think that very dominant appearing guys are going to be attractive. I mean, I just think that, you know, women tend to prefer sort of somewhere close to the male average for traits. You know, like a little taller than average,

but not too tall, a little more muscular than average, but not too muscular, the faces that manipulate facial masculinity, some find that on average women prefer a little bit to the feminine side of male average, some a little bit more masculine, but surround the average, same with voice pitch. It's like too low is kind of weird sounding, but so a little lower than average, probably. But I really think that, yeah, if you made a guy, it seemed very dominant, you would seem, I don't know, scary, anti-social, something. And, you know, yeah. Think about it this way.

Think about the fact that your study was able to look at what women said that they wanted. That was the stated preference, right? Of this person. Yeah, we had them rate on sort of how attractive a guy would be for a long term committed relationship and also for just sex. But if the men, if the dominance element is somehow influenced by the presence of other men, and then you take those men out of the equation in online dating, what are you left with? Why wonder whether the subjective ratings of attractiveness from women are now less encumbered somehow, whether or not they're able to take less heed of other men's cues of this guy's dominant or not dominant.

I think you're right. I think that's what you would see. And so my suspicion is that these, the sort of dominant traits and dominant behavior is functional in a setting where there are male competitors. And for sure, when women have been asked to rate behavior, like videos of males, they might like dominant behavior directed toward other males, but they certainly don't like dominant behavior directed towards females. So yeah. Okay, so what about the difference

in male and female mental capabilities? We've spoken just there about the ability to throw, I know that on average, I can use how much trouble are you trying to get me in? I know. Maybe we've already talked about transport. But I read something about men are better at spatial rotation and women are better at remembering directions or something. What is it? What are some of the different capabilities?

Yeah, so there are, I mean, if you measure overall cognitive function with like an IQ test, there's no difference. Males and females have the same average. Now that's by design, because IQ tests have similar or composed of similar numbers of the types of questions that women tend to do better at or female tend to do better at and some and and other ones that males tend to do better at. Most cognitive traits don't show a very big sex difference. The biggest ones are in spatial cognition and they're not huge, but about one standard deviation sex difference or the biggest ones. And on average, males do better at mental rotation.

So if you're shown the most gold standard test or the most common test is to be shown a two-dimensional picture of a three-dimensional block figure. It just looks kind of like something like that. Like one of those three by three by three cubes that you take apart and have to put together again, like looks exactly like one of those pieces. And then you're asked which of these,

which two of these fourth other images is just that thing rotated in space. And if you have a bunch of males and females do this, then you get about 0.6 to 1.0 standard deviation male advantage. You get a bigger male advantage when you make the test harder. So if you give them less time to do it, for example, if you give people all the time that they need

that eventually most people can do it. And then there's a female advantage at object location memory. And one test that's been published is the memory game. You know, with the cards, you flip over. You have a bunch of cards face down, and then you flip them over in pairs. And I can remember doing that before I knew about a sex difference like that. I remember doing that with my girlfriend in college.

And she was like sweating bullets as she was destroying me. I was trying so hard to concentrate and she would seem to do it effortlessly. And then later I found out that there's a pretty good size sex difference in female advantage. They're like, ah, I mean, that's. You should have told it to come to the pub and play darts so that you can even do that. Yeah, right. But anyway, so those are the biggest differences in spatial cognition. And also if you, there's a test that is the

rodents are put into called a moris water maze. It's a pool of water filled with some opaque substance like powdered milk so that you can't see and there's a underneath the surface and there's a little platform just underneath the surface. So if you put rats in this thing, just put them in the maze, it's you know I don't know how big a 10 feet across or something like that and you put them in then they would like to not be swimming. They'd like to find the platform and climb up on it and stand on it. And so what you can do is measure and put them in different places in the maze each time. And you can see like how quickly they learn the location of that platform under the water

that they can't see or smell. Oh, they create an abstract map of what it actually is like. And so, you know, there's a sex difference in that that males tend to learn it faster. They tend to find that platform. And so the latency between when you put them in the pool and when they get onto the platform, and it isn't to do with swimming ability or motivation or something, you know, those things have been tested. But if you mess with the cues, like the landmarks within the maze, right inside of, you know,

sort of marks on the border of the maze itself, that messes up females more. And if you mess up, if you manipulate extra maze cues, like things that are better for gauging distance and direction, that messes up males more. So it suggests that they're using sort of different information to navigate. And it's testosterone dependent. If you treat females with early in life with antigen, they solve the maze like a male. And if you cast straight males, they solve it like a female.

And this difference seems to characterize species where males have a bigger home range, that they have to travel over a larger area to locate females. Because both sexes are about the same size and they have a range that they range over the same geographic area just to get food. But then if males are also polyginess and trying to mate with multiple females, then they range over a bigger area, then they need different spatial cognitive abilities, including ones that rely less on local landmarks

and more on direction and distance. Anyway, the sex differences that we see probably existed, like, you know, ancestry in mammals a long time ago, but then we're subsequently shaped by other things like possibly targeting different foraging strategies, more male hunting, ranging over a broader distance to track prey and hunt versus foraging, which is closer to home. What does the, and also targeting? What does the ability to remember cards

like, ancestrally, what is that related to? Yeah, the idea is that it's related to remembering where food resources that are stationary in the environment are located. And that's kind of a stretch, but there was a cool study by Steve Gawne, who was the senior author at UC Santa Barbara that had recruited participants in a farmer's market and had participants at the end after they'd spent time in the market, come back and say, okay, point me in the direction of the honey, point me in the direction of the lettuce or whatever. And what they found was a female advantage and that the higher the caloric returns, the bigger the sixth difference,

I think it was. So you know, it's like the attempt there was to be more ecological to say, to show a sixth difference in object location memory that was more like foraging, you know, remembering the location of food in the environment. Pretty cool study. So that's the reasoning, but it could also just be that if you're ranging over a smaller area, you don't have to travel over such as a large area to get animals or to find mates,

then you a different sort of navigational strategy makes more sense using landmarks. I'm gonna say something incredibly sexist here. I wonder whether this plays into the women are able to be more organized and tidy when it comes to a smaller area like a house, and men are better when it comes to longer, greater distance organization like driving. Like I know it's a total meme, right,

to talk about how men, yeah, how men are better at being able to remember locations and to be able to get directions and stuff like that. But I do wonder whether this would map across, and I have tons of male friends that are up to you, so I'm an end of one here, right? I guess for directions all the time. Yeah, precisely.

But I do wonder if you would be able to look at, it would suggest to me that women would be better able to organize stuff within a smaller location. That's what we're talking about, right? Does this mean that men more often lose their keys than women do? Does this mean that women more often take the wrong route to some place without using satellite navigation than men do?

Like that would be interesting. I don't know about organizing a like a domicile, but I have often in my life attributed that sort of supernatural ability to remember where the keys are. I mean, I've got a wife, two daughters and a son, and actually my son's pretty good at moving this up, but generally, the females know where things are. It might be related to this. And there's another study that has participants look at an array of common objects,

teddy bear, telephone, a barbell, you know, whatever, just some common things that you might see. And then they're shown that same array of objects again and ask which of these things have been moved or removed. And again, there's a big sex difference, favoring females. it seems to be a bigger sex difference. Maybe it only occurs when participants are given a distractor task. In other words, you're told to be doing something else and thinking about something else other than memorizing

where all these things are. And then you test them on their memory and find that women were remembering where those things were better, even when they were focusing on doing something totally different. And I mean, it accords with my experience, but yeah, I would never want to use my sort of anecdotes as a side of the question. And of one, that's a new bro science thing. We don't need to do real science. We've got bro

science. Okay, so you've done all of this work as well about vocal pitch and what voice pitch can do. Did you do a study that looked at, you can tell someone's personality from their voice? Yeah, I was a co-author. I can't claim credit for that. I provided some data and helped with the writing a bit, but it was really a study out of Lars Panke's lab at his at University of Göttingen in Germany. And one of the results to stuck out to me was that there was a relationship between the

sort of dominance characteristic of personality and voice, but yeah, I can't really claim credit for that study, but it's cool and it looks like it's been, you know, cited pretty highly too, so that's kind of a nice thing. We've definitely looked at this idea in our lab. This has been one of those sort of interesting questions driving our recent research is why we would pay attention to voice pitch and other characteristics of the voice like vocal timber, which also shows a big sex difference. Males have a, our larynx descends a full vertebra at lower puberty in the vocal tract, so that our vocal tract sounds longer than it is. I mentioned that males are about 7 to 8 percent taller, so their vocal tract should be about 7 or 8 percent longer, but it's 15 percent longer. So twice that because of this descent of the larynx

at puberty. So really, we have these exaggerations of size. Like, males' voices look like they have evolved to make males seem big and scary. And so then we've asked, yeah, but if that's the case, then why do we pay attention? If it's just kind of a deceptive signal to say, look at how big I am, why is selection favored continued attentiveness to this? Why do we continue to defer resources, mates, whatever to mail us? Because we should have discounted

for the fact that it's already small. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If it doesn't advertise anything. So that's been something we've looked at with personality, but also things like body size, well, there's a weak relationship, but it's not a strong one. But larger males have lower pitch in timber. Testosterone seems to be a bit stronger relationship there.

And especially if you look at cortisol, which is a stress hormone. So guys who have both low cortisol, low stress hormone and high testosterone have especially deep voices and that's kind of a stronger relationship. That's super strong but it's there and it's one of the stronger ones. We've looked at like fighting ability so we looked at MMA fighters to see if their voice pitch predicted their success in fighting and that sort of thing, a little bit of evidence that basically bigger MMA fighters and ones who have more fighting experience had lower pitch voices. to defer to this trait, you know, does it actually advertise, is there a kernel of truth? Does it advertise something relevant about the sort of competitiveness of another male?

That's really, really interesting. I wonder how much of the lower voice is because they've been punched and choked out a lot. I wonder whether you can just, if you get, if you get someone in a reenaked choke enough that I don't know, hypertrophies the vocal chords somehow well then you you'd have a relationship in the opposite direction that yeah a low voice lower voice less success than if you've been choked out too many times yeah that's a good

pounding like we have two effects that yeah so and you know it's not it's not really So, and you know, it's not really, when we first started doing this, I thought the guy who proposed the study, I thought that is the coolest study because, you know, we're never going to get data like this in the lab. You can't get a bunch of guys to come in and fight each other and then you measure their voice and see whether, you know-pitch predicts fighting success. And so I thought that is a really cool way of sort of looking at natural variation and fighting ability, but the reality is that MMA fighters are not typical, right? They're like the best fighters. And MMA is that, I don't know, I don't remember all the details about,

you know, you can do this kind of fighting, but then the ones that we measure, like the professional fighters who, so they're like, you know, the top fraction of a percent or something like that. So there's some issue there with like, there's really low variation in fighting ability, basically. Well, also, I imagine that there are a lot of different ways to win a fight, especially when it comes to MMA. It's not simply the most dominant man that goes in there. It can be selected for all sorts of things, conscientiousness,

industriousness, like openness to be able to try new things. It's like a huge number of different ways that you can be. And you see this in fighting, right? Everybody knows, oh, that's the tactician, the person that sits back a little bit more, or that's the guy that's the brawler, he's the sort of all-out testosterone guy. And what you've actually seen, if you were to track something like UFC over the last 30 years, and it started, you've moved more away from the Chucleadale, Anthony Rumble Johnson's style of just a straight-up brawler to now someone who is much more of a Hitman. Somebody that's incredibly technical with their skill. Okay, well, what's that? What's that selecting for?

I mean, there'll be some dominance in there. There'll be a good bit of testosterone in there, but it's less about the all-out war, and it's more about this sort of very precise selection of routes to success. That's really interesting. Yeah, when we were pushing, we were just sort of coming from the question of, if you do rating studies, if you manipulate voice pitch to make male voices, the same male voices seem lower or higher, then the perceptual effect you get is that if you make a voice lower, the guy sounds like a better fighter. And so then we, and if you look at sort of correlational, just don't manipulate anything

and just have people rate guys' voices, you find that voice pitch predicts. Lower voices are rated as better fighters. So we sort of approach it from that perspective of regardless of how they become a good fighter, whether it's from punching or wrestling or choking out or whatever, but just if they have a lower voice pitch, are they a better fighter?

In other words, it is useful to pay attention to this trait of voice pitch in assessing the verminability of the competitor. We found some evidence in MMA fighters, professional MMA fighters. My suspicion is that there would be a stronger relationship if you just took a random sample of guys, especially because there's probably a bigger variation in everything that you're interested in, including fighting ability, but size and things like that too. So, yeah. You mentioned the story about when you were in the shopping center and the two

guys were competing for who could have the lower voice pitch. Have you actually done any studies on whether or not men and women modulate their voice pitch based on areas of high mating competition that they're in? Yes. One, only one that I can think of right now, and it was actually part of the dissertation research where I had guys come into the lab, they were told that they were gonna be in a sort of a dating

game thing and they could win a lunch date with a woman. She was a friend who I did a video. She turned out to be a good actress and she was the potential date and she was on a webcam, you know, but it was actually recorded so everybody saw the same female. She was supposedly in the next room and there was another guy in a third room, a competitor, and before any of this, I had the guys come in and I recorded, I think it was 100. How many guys was it?

100? Something, 111, maybe 111 guys. One at a time, they came into the lab, and I recorded their voice before they knew anything about those circumstances, and then I recorded their voice when they were talking to their competitor. And you might think that as soon as they start talking to their competitor, they tried

to sound all deep and masculine. But the reality was that some guys lowered their pitch when talking to the competitor and other guys raised their pitch when they were talking to the competitor. And we could predict whether a guy lowered or raised his pitch based on whether he rated himself, the participant rated himself, the speaker rated himself as a better fighter than he rated his competitor, which was the same guy that everybody heard. He was also a friend of mine who was recorded. And so it was the same across all participants. But if guys perceive themselves as less good fighters,

then they're competitive. They tended to raise their pitch from baseline when they spoke to him. And if they perceive themselves as better fighters than they lowered their pitch, which makes sense because you'd expect that, you know, if a voice pitch doesn't just sort of influence dominance relationships, but the dominance relationships also influence how we modulate our voices across contexts. And so, and we, you know, we did another study a few years after that showing that the same people when they were asked to speak on a topic that they were an expert on tended to speak in a lower pitch than if they were not an expert on the topic. So lowering pitch seems like it's a sort of your signaling status, authority, dominance

if that's relevant and probably in male undergraduates, it was very relevant, you know, much more than, you know, older people. Yeah, okay. It's a key of confidence as well that I know what I'm doing here. Yeah, I feel comfortable in this situation. And the reverse is that it's subservience. It's, I am no threat. You don't need to worry about me. Listen to me in my high-pitched voice. I'm absolutely no concern to you. Please don't need to worry about me. Listen to me in my high-pitched voice. I'm absolutely you know concerned to you. Please don't punch me in the face. Yeah, that's exactly right and you know all species where that have this sort of you know fighting for whatever resources or mates or whatever it pays to evolve signals of difference as well because you know it would not benefit everybody to advertise their maximum dominance to every

competitor because that just invites an escalation of competition. And if you're pretty confident that you're not going to win, then you would like to back out and say, no, I'm not signaling aggression here. I'm signaling that you win and let's not fight. It makes sense. It would not have paid our ancestors to evolve signaling threat potential all the time. Well, especially given what we spoke about at the start, which was men specifically are trying to do everything that they can to signal dominance and aggression without having to actually get into the act of being aggressive.

Right. Yeah, and in certain contexts, not others. People modulate their voice across context all the time. Back when you couldn't tell who was calling you, if you're talking in my wife, or you call them, oh hi, honey, you know, my voice goes up, or to kids, you know, we talk to kids in a non-threatening voice, like, you know, so, yeah, anyway. I think voice is probably been a really,

I went into studying it with no special interest in voice, but just thinking this will be a really useful model trait for us trying to understand human mating competition. And it's really paid off as a trait, it eminently quantifiable. It's unlike faces which are hard to measure. It's really easy to measure it. There's a huge sex difference of about five standard deviations or more,

and voice pitch that occurs at puberty when when mating competition becomes more intense and and you know, it seems to be related to mate preferences and dominance competition, including how we modulate it. So, yeah, anyway. All right, David, let's bring this one home. What are you working on next?

What's, is there anything cool that you've got that you need doing right now? Yeah, we're, well, we're working on some studies that we didn't really get too much into those topics, but looking at sort of how sex hormones influence our psychology and behavior. So we have one study where we're looking at people who have a condition where they had low sex hormones, males and females both have this condition, I'm called IHH, where they

had low sex hormone levels from the second trimester of gestation all the way to puberty when they get on hormone or the placement therapy. And so we can look at how having low sex hormones, low estrogens and progesterogens, if your female or low androgens like testosterone, if your male, how that influences psychology and behavior. We're doing another study, looking at women's phenotypes, their psychology behavior, and other and voice over the ovulatory cycle with changes in sex hormones. And then we've got a couple of papers looking at voice across cultural voice study, looking at how voice pitch influences

perceptions of attractiveness and dominance across societies and what sociocultural variables modulate those influences. And another study that's across species comparison, looking at when you see the evolution of big sex differences and voice pitch across primates and how it seems to be related to male-male competition, group size, things like that. A bunch of other things, but those are some of the,

I think most exciting ones who are going right now. That's cool. Why should people go if they want to keep up to date with those studies and the stuff that you're working on? Well, if it's published studies, Google Scholar is always a great place to go. You can search for an author's Google Scholar account and you'll see everything that's published recently. Some studies we might talk about on my lab website at Penn State, but most of the time we don't really say much about a study until we've published it.

All right, David. I published it. So yeah. Alright, David, I appreciate you. Thank you. Thanks, Chris. Good talking to you. you