William Costello

women showed the bias to a stronger degree than men did so i think if you put those two together i think women might be like advocating for women to signal to one another i'm on your team yeah yeah i think that's exactly right tanya and to add a few more evolutionary perspectives to that i was listening to the podcast from the journalists who did the research and i was just banging my head against the wall thinking there's so much evolutionary psychology at play here you can't

see it and there's also an error management perspective so everything in evolution is a trade-off and between costs and benefits and for most of our evolutionary history women were making the trade-off that they were benefiting by selecting men who would be able to provision them with resources and be able to protect them now those are no longer as salient as benefits to modern women who are

earning their own money, achieving their own status, and living in a pretty safe world, even if they don't always feel it's all that safe.

So those are no longer really key benefits that men can provide.

So they're looking for men to provide other benefits that they're just not stepping up to the plate to do.

So if you think about it from an error management perspective, the costs of selecting a bad mate still are exactly the same as they were throughout ancestral history for women,

but the benefits just so that basically the juice is not worth the squeeze for modern women.

So like I read the article and our lab focuses on sexual conflict and one of the solutions to sexual conflict that we always kind of promote is to try and encourage cross-sex mind reading.

For the last number of years, I've tried to get people to see it from the men's side that, oh, well, imagine how it would feel to suddenly be asked

to provide value in ways that you don't really know how, that your status, you're being outpaced in status, and you can no longer add value in those domains.

But now I'm trying to put the cross-sex mind-reading hat on and imagine it from the woman's side, and...

from a trade-off perspective in terms of mating they're living up to their side of the bargain men value physical attractiveness far more than women and that was one of the key benefits that women provide as a mate when modern women look better than ever right and they're bringing more to the table they're actually contributing resources and status as well and it's not like men hated those things and only liked physical attractiveness they just didn't the bonus

It just wasn't as key a benefit as it is to women.

So men are getting more and more from women, whereas women are getting less and less, and they're looking for different things.

And that was the key thing that came through, is that the traditional benefits that men were providing were no longer ones that modern women were looking for.

They were looking for things like shared political ideals, emotional intelligence,

things like that, even humor and stuff.

And I think that modern men are just a little bit lost, but there is a way back for them to provide value in different ways.

But it's just the case that modern women are happier to choose singlehood than risk choosing a costly mate.

And if you look at modern relationships, there's this pathway towards