Your career has taken you some places where few researchers would gladly go.
Yes, I spent a few years working with gangs in New York, mostly with the girls but also talking to the guys. The result of that was a book called The Girls in the Gang (Blackwell, 1991). Before that, based in Oxford, I studied pub violence. I鈥檝e worked in women鈥檚 prisons and young offenders鈥� institutions and spent a lot of time talking to boys and girls about fights.
So how are men and women different in the way they get involved in violence?
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I don鈥檛 take the conventional view. It is true that men are responsible for 99 per cent of same-sex homicides. Female violence may be rising slightly in the UK, but the greatest proportion it ever reaches is around about 20 per cent of all recorded violent offences. And the more serious the form of violence, the lower the female percentage. So you鈥檙e more likely to find females involved in things like verbal assault rather than anything involving physical violence. The behaviour of men and women is different, but I think a common argument about why males get into trouble should be turned on its head. The common view is that young males have 鈥渁 taste for risk鈥�, as Daly and Wilson, authors of Homicide, put it. Murder is just at the far end of that continuum of risk taking.
To me 鈥渁 taste for risk鈥� implies that men really go out and look for risk. That does not square with the work I鈥檝e done with gangs and young men who get into fights. They always say something like: 鈥淚 was never looking for trouble but how dare he treat me like that? Somebody had to sort him out.鈥� They believe trouble comes looking for them. My view is that men don鈥檛 look for risk 鈥� they just don鈥檛 have the brakes to hold back when the situation gets risky.
But how easy is it to really separate these two views? An appetite for risk and an inability to stop usually end up with the same result.
I鈥檝e tried to find an answer by bringing together psychology, underlying brain mechanisms and an evolutionary view. From an evolutionary perspective, you would expect that getting into fights with other men may have both benefits and costs. There may be a pay-off if I hit somebody who is putting me down, but there is also a risk that I will get hit too. The decision to get violent depends on the balance of two emotions: anger, the kind of emotion that just makes you want to go 鈥渟mack him one鈥�, and fear, which says 鈥渉e鈥檚 going to smack me back鈥�. Fear is effectively an inhibitor on violence, and anger a cause. Or you could say that pay-offs are measured in anger and costs in fear.
How can this explain why men and women are so different in their willingness to turn violent?
This is where it gets really interesting. The big difference between men and women is in their level of fear. Men鈥檚 lower level of fear gets them into trouble. It is not anger, because there has been massive documentation that there is no difference between the sexes in terms of the anger they experience. If you ask people to keep diaries in which they have to report when and how intensely they get angry, there are no sex differences. But there are sex differences in fear which show up most strongly in studies where people have to actually carry out a risky behaviour rather than just think about it.
So my view is that violence occurs when you鈥檝e got to the point where your anger is greater than your fear. What pushes men that way is not that they get angrier but that they are less inhibited by fear. But such psychological evidence is not enough. We need to look for sex differences in the brain that might support this view. There is a lot of work on serotonin pathways that act as inhibitors, particularly in relation to aggression. People with low levels of serotonin are likely to commit impulsive acts of aggression and they are more likely to commit suicide as well. It is as though they don鈥檛 have brakes. And men generally have lower levels of serotonin in the frontal lobes.
So men just lose control too easily?
Yes. But women can lose control in style. I have done lots of studies where I鈥檝e asked men and women to tell me about acts of aggression in their life and how they felt. There is one universal finding: women always talk about aggression in terms such as: 鈥淚 don鈥檛 know what happened, I just went mad, I know I was screaming.鈥� If women have a better inhibitory capacity then men, then maybe they are able to contain their anger for a longer period of time, but then when they blow their anger it is at such a high level it will be a mess.
But why would women be more fearful?
That鈥檚 where we have to go back to an evolutionary view, but once again we need to turn conventional arguments upside down. The usual argument starts as follows: men are competing with one another because they are competing for reproductive opportunities 鈥� for sex. Women don鈥檛 compete with one another because they don鈥檛 need to. The guys are queuing up to have sex with you! You don鈥檛 have to fight one another to get it. But think about it 鈥� this argument is daft. Of course women are the resource for which males compete, but women have resources that they need to compete for too. They have to raise offspring to maturity. They need access to food, to safety, freedom from harassment and so on. Women have lots of reasons to compete. The real issue is why women aren鈥檛 violent when they have more to gain by violence than men.
The answer is that mothers are much more critical to the survival of infants and children than are fathers. Women 鈥� or rather care-takers 鈥� have to be more careful of themselves. And I say care-takers for a good reason. In some primate species 鈥� titi monkeys and owl monkeys 鈥� it is the male that looks after the babies and infants. A famous study on longevity by the primatologist John Allman shows that it is the care-taking sex that lives longer. That is the female except for these unusual examples. To sum it all up, men hold their lives less tightly in their hands because they have been more marginal than women in ensuring the successful survival of their offspring. Men have to compete so much only because they are so much less important.
Turning to sex differences more generally, there has been a long battle between those who think they are innate and those who think they are imposed from outside the child by societal pressures. What鈥檚 your opinion?
These battling views haven鈥檛 taken us very far. Let鈥檚 take the line that these early sex differences are simply learned, that they are shaped by reward and punishment. That view doesn鈥檛 fare terribly well in the light of current research. The real crunch came with a huge meta-analysis by that looked at 172 studies worldwide on how parents treated sons and daughters. They could find virtually no differences whatever. The only real difference was in the toys they were given.
But in the case of toys, it might well be that the children really are doing the choosing. We carried out studies that showed sex differences in toy preference in children as young as one 鈥� these kids were still in high chairs! We showed them pictures of toys on screens and looked at their fixation time, and they were already showing clear preferences. Boys preferred objects like blocks, construction vehicles and guns, and the girls things like dust pans and brushes. Obviously, it seemed absurd, we could not believe it. But others found similar choices at 14 months, so this wasn鈥檛 just a freak thing.
The idea that at one year old they know which toy is male or female makes no sense at all. They clearly had no way of knowing what the toys are for. You can鈥檛 have an evolved preference for a gun because guns were invented only a few hundred years ago. So you have to accept that there is something intrinsic about the shape, the colour, the texture or whatever that makes an object more attractive to a boy or a girl at one year old.
So what is going on?
There have been studies that have tried to tease out what these intrinsic factors might be. One study found that if you make a toy more dangerous, dirty and angular, boys prefer it, and if you make it more soft, clean and safe, girls like it. By the age of two, infants know that hearts and butterflies are feminine and bears and angry faces are masculine. They seem to understand something about the metaphorical deep structure of toys.
Where do we go from here?
The ways boys and girls are treated cannot account for early sex differences. A more sophisticated theory says that girls are more likely to model themselves on their own sex and boys on their own, so that each picks up different information even if they are treated the same. But that doesn鈥檛 really work either. These and other more cognitive theories all have a problem: to know who you should be learning from or imitating, you have to know which sex you are. But different sex babies start behaving differently long before they can recognise themselves in a mirror, let alone know what sex they are.
This is getting very tricky, isn鈥檛 it?
Yes. It just seems to me such a tortured way to find an explanation. It seems so much simpler to say a kid is born enjoying some things and not liking others. Now if we said that for the species as a whole no one would object. Kids don鈥檛 like being pricked with pins when you change their nappies and they like being tickled. Everyone says, 鈥淥f course, naturally.鈥� But the minute you say that you think girls have a particular liking for X whereas boys have a particular liking for Y people go 鈥淲hat?鈥� But boys who like tearing around and jumping on top of people don鈥檛 have to say I鈥檓 a boy and boys do this, I鈥檝e seen Dad do it all the time, that鈥檚 why I am doing it. They just know what they like doing. What is so radical about this view?
Do you feel in any danger of attack by those feminists who argue that admitting any fundamental differences between men and women will be used against women?
I devote the first chapter of my book to demolishing 鈥渂iophobia鈥� and explaining why fears of evolutionary approaches to sex differences are groundless. My view is that if we disregard differences between men and women we just end up saying that women鈥檚 natures not only can but should be the same as men鈥檚. I conclude: 鈥淲e should give people the maximum freedom to be whatever they want. With that freedom, women鈥檚 nature can take its own course.鈥�
