What Use Are Female Friendships? - Dr Tania Reynolds - #580

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Dr. Tania Reynolds. She's an assistant professor in psychology at the University of New Mexico, whose research focuses on women's intrasexual competition, biases in moral evaluations, and social and sexual selection. Ancestrally, men needed to go to war and hunt. Given this, it would be rather useful to be friends with the spear-wielding bloke next to you, so that you know he's got your back. Women's use case for friends, however, is much more subtle and difficult to determine. And today, we try to decipher the underpinnings of female friendships. Expect to learn why women dislike working underneath a female boss, the painful social existence that very attractive women have to endure, why both men and women, bias seeing women as victims and men as perpetrators, why women develop opposite-sex friendships, the most common ways women derogate their rivals, why sexual gossip is a ruthless precision-engineered tool, and much more. This episode is very, very interesting. And it was the subject of today's newsletter, actually. So if you want to go and sign up to that and get a list of 100 life-changing books for free, go to chriswillx.com/books. There's an entire list of them and reasons about why I like them and links to go and get them and little descriptions and stuff. And you can get it right now. chriswillx.com/books. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Dr. Tania Reynolds.
Among over 11,600 US employees, women were less satisfied with their jobs when they reported to a female boss, whereas men showed no difference in job satisfaction based on their supervisor's gender. Why do you think that is?

**Dr. Tania Reynolds** (2:08)
So, I think this goes back to the challenges faced by our female ancestors. Throughout human history, a larger percentage of social groups were patrilocal, meaning that when women were married, they left their families to go live with their husbands. And so, this would have been particularly challenging for ancestral women because they were surrounded by individuals with whom they weren't genetically related. And we know that it's harder to form cooperative relationships with non-kin compared to kin. And so, I've thought about, okay, well, how might women have navigated these relationships? How might they have recruited allies in these contexts? And Dave Geary has made the argument that one way women might have formed cooperative bonds in these contexts is through either reciprocal altruism or mutualism. So, meaning they're forming relationships based on shared goals or exchanging benefits in a tit for tat manner. And so, if you look at what are the context that allow those types of relationships to succeed, it tends to be when relationship partners have symmetrical levels of power and resources. And so, I think one way to think about this might be, what would it look like if, say, there was a huge asymmetry in resources between partners? So, say a famous celebrity tried to form a cooperative relationship with an unhoused person or a homeless person.
This would be very challenging because it would be quite unlikely that they'd have mutually aligned goals. And over time, you would expect that this relationship would devolve into either exploitation or just a unilateral extraction of resources, so leeching on another person's resources. And indeed, that's what mathematicals find, is that when partners diverge in power and resources, the cooperative bonds kind of, they're no longer mutually beneficial. It's one partner taking advantage of the other partner. And so if these are the conditions that uphold reciprocal altruism, what I suspect is that women throughout human history upheld their reciprocal bonds with unrelated same-sex women under such conditions, such that they preferred contexts where they were of equal power and equal resources and too strong of deviations would have led to conflict and kind of corroded their relationship. And so I think that this can become problematic in modern contexts where there are clear demarcations in status and resources or in contexts, say, where we have social media and we could observe the lives of people who deviate strongly from us and their social conditions, that basically these deviations might be more corrosive to women's same-sex relationships if throughout human history our female ancestors were forming cooperative bonds with one another under conditions of symmetry.

**Chris Williamson** (5:20)
Why is that not the same case for men?

**Dr. Tania Reynolds** (5:23)
So great question. Throughout human history, our male ancestors were more often involved in coalitionary contexts. So they were forming larger groups, both for the context of hunting, but also I think more consequentially for the context of warfare. And so when you form these large groups, there tends to be, especially in warfare, there's an advantage to having larger numbers, so a numerical advantage. So having more men kind of on your team is advantageous. And so in these contexts, what helps is a strong hierarchy. This is really useful for organizing large groups, and it's really helpful for kind of a chain of command to organize an attack. So if every man out on the battlefield is kind of going with his own whims, that is really uncoordinated. So if we think of a modern context of warfare, I think the one example might be football, kind of an analog. There is a clear line of command in which there's the coach, and then maybe the quarterback reads the plays, and everyone knows what the game plan is, and that leads to success on the field. So too is the case in warfare where you need a strong chain of command to organize the attack, and so you also need, beyond just a chain of command, you also need specialization. So not every man is going to be equally talented in every role. So maybe there's one guy who's great at throwing the spears, one guy who's great at making the spears, one guy who's great at kind of coming up with the strategy, and so having this role specialization is really useful for large groups because then you can maximize your talent. And so if men throughout human history were more often in competing in these group-based contexts, then they stood to gain from asymmetries in power insofar as that meant their group was going to be more organized and cohesive and successful on the battlefield. And so I think this group component is really important because what that meant is that for our male ancestors, if they were successful, they all lived. And the genetic data suggests they reproduced with the local women, which is not pleasant to think about, but that's what the evidence suggests. And so there were reproductive benefits, but also just survival. And then for the men who lost, it wasn't just losing a football match, it was death. You got slaughtered, potentially the people back home got slaughtered. So there was a lot on the line. And so what that meant is men stood to gain if there were asymmetries in power that led to success on the battlefield. Likewise, they stood to gain by having same-sex peers on their team who may have been more talented and who may have been rewarded with status. So if you were on a football team and your quarterback is phenomenal and he gets more status than you do, you might still be happy because your team wins as a whole, even if he is relatively better off.