Department of Psychology, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306-4301, USA.
J Pers Soc Psychol. 2012 Nov;103(5):819-29. doi: 10.1037/a0029428. Epub 2012 Jul 23.
There are sizable gender differences in aggressive behavior, with men displaying a much higher propensity for violence than women. Evolutionary theories suggest that men's more violent nature derives in part from their historically greater need to compete over access to potential mates. The current research investigates this link between mating and male violence and provides rigorous experimental evidence that mating motives cause men to behave violently toward other men. In these studies, men and women were primed with a mating motive and then performed a noise-blast aggression task. Being primed with mating led men, but not women, to deliver more painful blasts of white noise to a same-sex partner (but not an opposite-sex partner). This effect was particularly pronounced among men with an unrestricted sociosexual orientation, for whom competition over access to new mates is an especially relevant concern. Findings also suggest that mating-induced male violence is motivated by a desire to assert one's dominance over other men: when men were given feedback that they had won a competition with their partner (and thus had achieved dominance through nonaggressive means), the effect of the mating prime on aggression was eliminated. These findings provide insight into the motivational roots of male aggression and illustrate the value of testing theories from evolutionary biology with rigorous experimental methods.
在攻击性行为方面存在相当大的性别差异，男性表现出比女性更高的暴力倾向。进化理论表明，男性更具暴力本性部分源于他们在历史上更大的需要竞争潜在伴侣的机会。目前的研究调查了交配和男性暴力之间的这种联系，并提供了严格的实验证据，证明交配动机导致男性对其他男性表现出暴力行为。在这些研究中，男性和女性被激发了交配动机，然后执行了噪声爆炸攻击任务。被激发交配动机后，男性而不是女性，会向同性伴侣（而不是异性伴侣）发出更痛苦的白噪声爆炸。对于社会性别取向不受限制的男性来说，这种影响尤为明显，因为对于他们来说，竞争新伴侣的机会是一个特别相关的问题。研究结果还表明，交配引起的男性暴力是出于对其他男性的支配地位的渴望：当男性收到与伴侣竞争获胜的反馈（因此通过非攻击性手段获得支配地位）时，交配诱因对攻击的影响就会消除。这些发现为男性攻击的动机根源提供了深入了解，并说明了用严格的实验方法检验进化生物学理论的价值。
