Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, 02138, USA.
Département de Psychologie, Université du Québec à Montréal, Montréal, H3C 3P8, Canada.
Sci Rep. 2023 Mar 18;13(1):4498. doi: 10.1038/s41598-023-31816-0.
Human males are considered to be more competitive than females. However, females must also compete for resources necessary for their own and their offsprings' survival. Since females use more indirect forms of competition than males, comparing observable forms of competition may be misleading. One critical driver of competition is resource asymmetry. Since competition occurs primarily within sex, reactions to resource asymmetry with same-sex peers should provide an important measure of competitiveness. We asked 596 married participants, 25-45 years of age with at least one child from three different countries to evaluate how same-sex individuals they know would react to a target individual who had a valuable resource that the same-sex individuals did not have. Half the participants evaluated reactions to same-sex targets, while the other half evaluated reactions to other-sex targets. Participants reported that women would react more negatively than men to resource asymmetry with same-sex targets, but not other-sex targets. These results suggest that women may be even more competitive than men in contexts when important resources related to reproductive success are at stake.
男性被认为比女性更具竞争力。然而，女性也必须为自己和后代的生存所需的资源而竞争。由于女性比男性使用更多间接的竞争方式，因此比较可观察到的竞争形式可能会产生误导。竞争的一个关键驱动因素是资源不对称。由于竞争主要发生在性别内部，因此对同性同伴的资源不对称的反应应该提供竞争力的重要衡量标准。我们要求来自三个不同国家的 596 名已婚参与者，年龄在 25-45 岁之间，至少有一个孩子，评估他们认识的同性个体会如何对一个拥有同性个体没有的有价值资源的目标个体做出反应。一半的参与者评估了对同性目标的反应，而另一半则评估了对异性目标的反应。参与者报告说，与同性目标相比，女性对资源不对称的反应会比男性更负面，但对异性目标则不会。这些结果表明，在与生殖成功相关的重要资源处于危险之中的情况下，女性可能比男性更具竞争力。
