Citation
© 2012 Vasyl Palchykov, Kimmo Kaski, Janos Kertész, Albert-László Barabási, and Robin I. M. Dunbar, Sex differences in intimate relationships, Science Reports [at Nature.com] 2(370), doi:10.1038/srep00370 (19 April 2012) (at abstract)
Summary of this study’s findings
Aging women appear to alter their youthful, mate-centered, hierarchy of close relationships to a subsequent one that exhibits a notable preference for relationships with their daughters and grandchildren.
Women’s pattern over time contrasts with men’s, whose relationship sets remain stable and exhibit no preference for their daughters over their sons, or for their own children over outside-the-family friends of either sex.
Study’s initial premise — regarding evolutionary fitness theory
The research team hypothesized that:
Evolutionary theory suggests that, even in monogamous mating systems, the pattern of investment in close relationships should vary across the lifespan when post-weaning investment plays an important role in maximising fitness.
© 2012 Vasyl Palchykov, Kimmo Kaski, Janos Kertész, Albert-László Barabási, and Robin I. M. Dunbar, Sex differences in intimate relationships, Science Reports [at Nature.com] 2(370), doi:10.1038/srep00370 (19 April 2012) (at abstract)
Methods
The team started with a telephone log provided by a European mobile phone provider. It included 1.95 million calls and 489 million texts belonging to 1.8 million men and 1.4 million women.
The researchers defined three groups of friends: best, second, and third best. “Best” was defined to the most frequently contacted person. And so forth.
The team included only those calls and texts for which they had gender-paired age data. This filtering reduced the sample sets to:
1.19 million best friend pairs
0.80 million second best friend pairs
0.66 million third best friend pairs
Findings
Until age 50, both genders prefer opposite sex best friends. This characteristic is most prominently displayed by women at 27 and men at 32.
Women, however, focus on reproductive relationships longer and more intensely than men do.
Over a period of about 15 years, and peaking at age 60, women’s focus shifts from their spouse (or boyfriend) to younger women. The team assumed these younger women to be the mothers’ daughters, based on the age differences within the communicating pairs.
Interestingly, the authors found that women shift their relationship rankings more often than men do. They interpreted this to mean that women were more “focused” than men:
Men tend to keep a steadier pattern over a longer period, maintaining a preference for placing their spouse in pole position across time and a striking tendency to maintain a very even gender balance in the second position.
If the latter represent offspring, then the data suggest a strong lack of discrimination.
In contrast, women tend to switch individuals from one position to another in a more exaggerated way, perhaps reflecting shifts in their allegiances as their reproductive strategies switch more explicitly from mate choice to personal reproduction to (grand-)parental investment, particularly after age 40.
Women’s gender-biases thus tend to be stronger than men’s, seemingly because their patterns of social contact are strongly driven by the changes in the patterns of reproductive investment across the lifespan.
© 2012 Vasyl Palchykov, Kimmo Kaski, Janos Kertész, Albert-László Barabási, and Robin I. M. Dunbar, Sex differences in intimate relationships, Science Reports [at Nature.com] 2(370), doi:10.1038/srep00370 (19 April 2012) (at first paragraph under “Discussion”)
The study’s authors noticed that women were more involved with their parental and grandparental “investment” than men. Men’s gender rankings appeared to show a less marked preference for contacting children.
The moral? — A too-little-credited social cement
I suspect that most family men already know that women are the glue that holds society together. Mother-daughter relationships are the key to our evolutionarily derived social fitness.
Patrilineal social organization — which we so often see illusorily demonstrated in the mostly older (white) male faces of our national politics and plutocracy heads — conceals the more important underlying reality.
Which may explain why we men continue to put our spouses in first place, despite their inevitable betrayal of us in their own prioritization of affections.
Tagged: aging women, Albert-László Barabási, allegiances, best, daughters, evolutionary fitness, evolutionary theory, gender differences, gender-biases, genders, intimate relationships, Janos Kertész, Kimmo Kaski, matrilineal, mobile phone use, offspring, patrilineal, Robin I. M. Dunbar, second best, sex differences, third best, Vasyl Palchykov