#1254 Lynda Boothroyd: How Culture and the Media Shape Gender Differences and Mate Preferences

00:00 Ricardo Lopes: Hello everyone. Welcome to a new episode of The Dissenter. I'm your host, as always, Ricardo Lops, and today I'm joined by Dr. Linda Boofreight. She's professor of psychology at Durham University. Her research focuses on evolutionary and cross-cultural understandings of interpersonal attraction and sex. SELECTION and today we're going to focus on topics like gender differences, mate preferences, how the media influence mate preferences and people's body images and topics like that. So Dr. Boofright, welcome to the show. It's a pleasure to everyone. Thank you. So let's start then with gender differences. I mean this is not a new topic on my channel, but where do gender differences stem from? Are they the result of biological evolution? Are they cultural products, a little bit of both? I mean, how do you you approach that question.

01:03 Lynda Boothroyd: So I think, um, part of the issue is that gender itself seems to be it's a very human experience, that that kind of psychological sense of yourself as being a gendered or sex individual. Um, AND then how that plays out in your your social and cultural context. Um, SO I mean, my, my baseline perspective is that at some point, humans evolved to have that psychological experience of being gendered. Um, BUT I think where I think research has got really interesting in the last few years, is just how much power culture might have to shape that experience. Um. So I er. I, I get a little bit frustrated sometimes with, um, some of the, the arguments people have where they say, oh, well, you know, evolution didn't stop at the neck. And of course it didn't. Of course, our brains are evolved. Um, BUT I think, uh, I think there's been a tendency to assume that we have a bit more sort of hardwired in than we necessarily do. Um, BECAUSE we're so cultural, and we're so, um, we're just like these sponges constantly learning stuff and very, very flexible. That, um, I think, as I think we're going to talk about over the next few questions, where I've come to over the years, um, is that I have had less and less, um, belief that our sort of gendered behaviors are deriving from sort of very hardcore biological differences. And I've come to see them as much more culturally shaped than I used to.

02:51 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. And I mean, but when making that kind of argument, I'm asking this because I think it's very interesting for people to understand when making that kind of argument, what are you basing yourself on when it comes to the science? I mean, why is it that nowadays you think that culture plays a much bigger role than you previously thought?

03:21 Lynda Boothroyd: So I think partly it's that we've got more and better cross cultural data, and we're looking at things that used to be taken for granted in more diverse cultural contexts. So to give an example, um, I used to think that we probably had a fairly biologically wired in sex difference in impulsivity and risk taking. Um, I thought that was probably very robust that testosterone was potentially early in development priming. Neurological systems to be more reactive, um, and to lower perceptions of risk. And to in one on one hand, there still seems to be some evidence for that, right? That, um, if you give people exogenous testosterone, you can down regulate their fear response. So clearly, it's doing something. But by that reckoning, then you should see a consistent, at least small sex difference in that direction consistently across cultures. But then there was some really interesting data that came from the Mozu in China, who are matrilineal, um, where power within the household and the economic power resides with the women. Um. And so then when they were when they were looking at risk taking in children, the the children coming from the matrilineal mozu households, the girls were more risk taking than the boys, um, when they got to school. And then it looked like the more time they spent with children from patrilineal households mixing in school, the more that that went away. And the boys became the more risk taking ones. Um, So that was, that was quite a shock to me. That was where I suddenly went, oh, maybe even the really fundamental psychological mechanism that I thought would then underlie a lot of the other things we see, may not be as hardwired as I thought it was. Um. And, um, to give another example, a few years earlier, um, if we think about sex differences in cognitive abilities, um, there'd been a fairly consistent, um, sex difference in mental rotation and spatial reasoning that looked like, um, there might be sex differences in how Uh, people navigate and, and in sort of abstract mental rotation abilities that made men were performing better. Um, AND then, then two things happened. One is people started being able to show you can get rid of that sex difference by priming people to think that there isn't a sex difference. And then people respond to that sort of pressure. Um, IT was basically reverse stereotype threat, rather than highlighting to women that they're meant to be bad at this, and they do badly at it. You tell people, actually, women are really good at this. And then the sex difference starts to erode. Um. You can give women practice in video games, and then the sex difference disappears. And then there were there were studies in um a couple of different small scale societies. So one, I think amongst the the the Himba, um, where men do a lot of long distance travel and women don't. And they showed what you'd expect, which is the sex difference in in um spatial abilities favoring men. But then there were also data from the Tsimane, where the the geographical movement patterns were much more similar between men and women. So although they they have a division of labor, it's not spatially different. Um, AND there isn't a sex difference in spatial abilities in that paper. So again, one of these things that we thought was probably quite a fundamental low level cognitive difference between men and women, when it came down to it, actually, there's evidence that it's just not necessarily there. And it's emerging because of these different kinds of experiences. So the only sex difference that I Remain reasonably confident about for now is the sex difference in lethal violence. Um, BUT even, but I am now open to the fact that even that we might find is more cultural than we thought, because if if risk taking can flip in the right cultural circumstances and children, then presumably violent behavior can also flip because they're they're quite closely related.

08:01 Ricardo Lopes: Now, that that's really all very interesting. And let me ask you, because in one of your papers you argue that super cultural clustering explains gender differences too. So could you tell us about that? I mean, first of all, explain what is a super cultural clustering and then how it applies to gender differences.

08:26 Lynda Boothroyd: So this was, uh, we were we were responding to a paper which was arguing more broadly, and they weren't talking about gender, but, um, they were arguing that we would expect to see, um, different kinds of interactions between cultural effects and biological effects. So that individual differences, for instance, will play out differently in different cultural contexts. And they were also arguing that, um, we don't tend to think about culture. Um, PROPERLY, but you, you need to be thinking about what is going on with subgroups and, and higher level groups and that, that can actually be explaining quite a lot. Um, SO in the context of our response, um, one of the arguments we were making is that, um, sometimes you're going to see similarities and gender differences in different cultural contexts, because actually, these different cultures are still clustered in some way. Um. So I think one of the examples we used, um, is, you know, so many countries consume Western media. And as, as is important in a lot of the rest of my research, you know, you're you're then you're taking in the same cultural information. Um, AND while you're doing that, what that's shaping your ideas, it's shaping your norms, it's shaping your expectations. Um, AND so the more that The more that people globalize, or the more that they have broader shared cultural ideas, the more that we're going to see these consistencies in different contexts. Um. And um. Yeah. And, and I think that was when we that was the first paper where we started arguing that actually, what's going on in the process of um Globalization, industrialization, and all of that is that it's creating a much more open cultural space for people to find their own role within. Their roles aren't narrowed down and, and determined simply by their local ecology. Um, AND what that means, uh, is that people have a lot of choices. And if people have a lot of choices, then social learning becomes really important. Um. And um, yeah, so when when when everyone industrializes and everyone globalizes, suddenly there's so much choice. And then that shared media becomes really powerful.

10:59 Ricardo Lopes: So I want to ask you about a specific topic when it comes to gender differences, because if I remember correctly, I mean, I started the show back in early 2018, and if I remember correctly, around 2017, 2018, a few papers came out reporting or suggesting that there are or there would be larger gender. Differences in more gender equal countries, like for example the Scandinavian countries you would find larger gender differences in terms of personality traits, in terms of educational and occupational interests, and so on. I mean, uh uh so several questions have those studies been replicated er. And, and what do they tell us exactly? I mean, uh, if those uh gender difference or gender differences are exist and if they are larger in more gender equal countries, is it necessarily because those gender differences are biological in nature or could there be other explanations?

12:23 Lynda Boothroyd: Yeah. So I, I do think there are other explanations. I, I think the argument that was put forward, um, in some of those papers explicitly, and, and also in some of the discussion around them, was that, yeah, you, you create this very gender equal context in which men and women can do whatever they want to do. And then boom, biological urges, other things that are driving you. Um, BUT, uh, But what that's doing is not really grappling with what the actual, I think cultural processes are likely are. Um, FOR starters, uh, these papers tend to treat each country as an independent data point, which they absolutely categorically should not be doing. It's not even enough to cluster by continent, which is the main control you get. Um, THAT'S because of super cultural clustering, which is what we wrote that paper about, because these are not independent countries, you know, Sweden and Norway are not two independent data points, because one of them used to be in charge of the other. Um, SO, you know, all, all of Scandinavia used to be at one stage or another, um, a Norwegian or Swedish colony. Um, And and so you have all these shared norms that then are shaping things. Um, THE second thing is that, um, to stick with Scandinavia as an example. On one hand, it's, it's very gender equal, um, in terms of what women can do. Um, ON the other hand, um, if you have a country, and I cannot remember if it's Norway or Sweden, but if you have a country which gives people Up to 2 years off work after having a baby. Um, AND most of the time, even though they can split it. Um, THE bulk of that is being taken by women, because of breastfeeding. So you're, you've got a situation which is very progressive, but what it's actually doing is further instantiating the, the norm and the practice of women taking more time out to look after their option because they can. Whereas in America, where you're lucky, if you get any time at all paid for, um, women tend to go back much earlier. Um, AND actually do a lot more pumping and keeping going with uh feeding in artificial ways. Um, SO just because something is gender equal doesn't mean it's actually playing out in, in a, in a straightforwardly men and women doing the same things kind of way. There are still structural factors which interact with biological constraints like who has breasts and who doesn't, that then mean that you might find you have these sort of unexpected consequences. Um. And then, and then the, the, the third issue, as I said earlier, is that, um, just because the environment you're in is, even if you do have, you know, your mom and your dad both working, um, There may still be um cultural constraints on which roles people go into. And um there are still there's still that like higher level influence coming from, you know, globalized media and things like that. And within globalized media, there is massive, massive gender differences in what male and female characters do. So even if the people around you are perfectly gender equal, the total cultural information you're taking in is still extremely gendered, and you're still learning, um, that that men and women do different things.

16:06 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, I mean, I've, I've heard feminist critics of some of these studies, and I think that they have some very good points, the main one being that I mean, even though we might consider Scandinavian countries more gender equal than other countries in the world, the culture and the reason why, for example, we have more women who are nurses and more men who are engineers has a lot to do with the fact that the culture is still very much. Patriarchal, even though there's been efforts to make it more gender equal, and also, for example, when you look at housework, it seems that the bulk of the housework is still done by women, even in Scandinavian countries and for example, if I remember correctly, in Sweden. I think it's Sweden and I might be mistaken, but the levels of domestic violence are higher than people would expect for a a supposed gender equal country.

17:33 Lynda Boothroyd: Yeah, I mean, I, I actually don't think we're very good at measuring. Gender equality. Um, IT'S, it tends to be done with a relative with, you know, certain indices, people's responses on things like world value survey, or or European equivalents. Um, AND then, you know, some kind of legal constraints. Can women own property? Um, CAN women initiate divorce, things like that. Um, AND I think actually gender equality is something that's much more Um, complex and and rich than that, and I don't think we have a good national level way of assessing that yet. Um, AND the, the other factor is, um, I don't know if you're aware of the this paper came out last year by, um, I think it's Bergen, and I'm gonna have to go back and open the file again.

18:25 Ricardo Lopes: Oh, yeah, sure, no problem.

18:27 Lynda Boothroyd: There we go. Yeah. So Berger and Berg, um, published a paper last year where they argued that this this paradox that more gender equal countries. Um, HAVE bigger sex and gender differences, um, is actually, um, basically a product of, um, sort of failure to control for the fact that these are non-independent observations. So they, they were, they could demonstrate, um, Even with nonsense predictor variables, um, that you could predict gender differences by by by factors that were nothing to do with, with gender equality and things like that. Um, WHEREAS, oh, here we go. Um, FICTION delusions correlate significantly across countries with, uh, uh, gender differences, uh, individualism, GDP, HDI, cold living, awareness of your own mortality, beliefs in medical conspiracy theories. Um, THESE all correlate just as well or slightly better with sex differences than gender equality. Um, SO their argument is that actually what's going on is that there's there's basically a westernization factor. And that is what's driving all of these correlations, not specifically gender equality. Um, SO I think until we statistically get more on top of this issue, we don't yet have good data either way on whether gender equality really does change people's um. Yeah, people's psychological sex differences.

20:11 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. No, yeah, those are great points. I would like to change topics now a little bit. I mean, um. I, I've heard a lot from er evolutionary biologists and also evolutionary psychologists that er in our evolutionary history, men who were more masculine would have higher er fitness. I mean, is that really, is that really the case? What is the association between male dimmorphism and fitness outcomes in humans?

20:50 Lynda Boothroyd: Um, SO, in terms of, What men say in terms of the number of sexual partners they report, um, then more masculine men say. Or more, more, more body, more muscular, more, more V shaped body, um, greater hand grip strength, taller, more testosterone, uh, deeper voices. I think everything except facial masculinity. Um, WE, we found that the more masculine men said they had more sexual partners. Um, When we so this was part of a meta analysis that um, I did with, um, it was led by my PhD student, my former PhD student, Linda Ludborg. Um. And yeah, so in terms of self report, success in sexual partners, more masculine men were doing better. When it came to actually looking at number of offspring in in high fertility contexts, um, we found, um, a, a very small, but across studies, significant association between measures of basically muscularity and number of offspring. Um, WE did not find any associations with testosterone or voice pitch or um or anything else. Um, SO, do, do more masculine men have higher reproductive fitness? Um, We don't have very good evidence. And I think we one of the things we highlighted in that paper was that there's a slight problem. There's a lot of research done on, um, men's self report sexual behavior or sexual attitudes in low fertility contexts. And that behavior has no fitness outcomes in a low fertility context because everyone is using contraception more or less. Um, THERE'S a small data set on, um, met mor morphological traits and actual number of offspring in high fertility contexts. And there's, there's not much that's sort of crossing between those two clusters. Um, SO, no, at the moment, you. People can say that it doesn't matter what we find now, what matters was what happened, you know, in ancestral populations. My argument would be, if we're not seeing these strong associations in current high fertility contexts across, you know, foragers and farmers, um, as as as well as, um, high fertility industrial contexts. That suggests to me that we don't have good evidence that it was happening. 100, 200,000 years ago. Um, AND that's because humans are, as I've said, humans are very flexible. We live in a lot of different ecologies. So I would expect it to show up in lots of diverse contexts as long as you don't have really good, reliable, um, contraception combined with low fertility norms that lead people to try not to have children while still having sex. Um, SO I, I think there's a little bit of evidence there for body dimorphism muscularity, um, but it's not super strong. And we don't know what's mediating it.

24:19 Ricardo Lopes: OK, and where do mate references in humans uh stem from?

24:26 Lynda Boothroyd: Um, IT'S a really good question. And I don't think we know necessarily. This is another one of those things that I used to think was like straight up, yes, sexual selection has to take down make preferences. And this is all the ways we're gonna test it. And then over time, um, I've seen over and over in my own data, as well as other people's, that experience is really important. Um. And, um, just like with the, uh, sex differences in personality and behaviors data, when you look at cross cultural data, um, The things that predict. Um, MAKE preferences, um, are not necessarily consistent across studies. Um. And, um, we also know that in terms of, for instance, facial preferences, that's really affected by experience. Um, SO what your parents looked like, what the people around you when you were growing up looked like. Um, Thams and Saxton had this nice paper comparing people who'd been to single sex schools versus mixed sex schools, and then they were at university. And so the the women who'd been at all girls schools liked faces that were more feminine than girls who'd been at mixed sex schools. And for the men, if they'd been at an all boys school, they liked faces that are more masculine than if they'd been at a mixed sex school, suggesting that that long term visual experience was biasing what they liked. Um, I think The, the most robust predictor of attractiveness across, um, different kinds of studies and across cultures has been averageness. So the extent to which your face is similar to the sort of population average, um, But there was a, there was a really interesting paper from Doug Jones back in 1993. Um, AND he found that he had 3 sort of industrialized samples in the US, Russia, and Brazil. And then he had 2 forager samples. Um, I think the, I think it was the Ace the Hiwi, um, in Latin America. And every single culture had really strong intracultural agreement about which of the photos he was showing them was the most attractive. But the foragers did not agree with the Americans or the Russians about which faces were most attractive, right? So, so the industrialized samples, they were like, yeah, we all know what's attractive and less attractive. And then the foragers were like, well, we know what's attractive and less attractive, but our rankings and your rankings are not the same. Um So again, that suggests that this, um, broader shared cultural experience that industrialized populations have might be might be changing what we think is attractive. Some people think that industrialization and urbanization itself changes what we we think is attractive. Um, AND a lot of the things that we thought were going to be really robust products of attractiveness don't necessarily come out. In the, the, the, well, the Doug Jones study, but also in some of the more recent studies that have been pushing the boundaries on on the samples we're working with. So, um, for instance, Tamsin Saxton, um, sorry. Uh, Isabel Scott and Ian Penton Vogue, um, worked with anthropologists in a lot of different places. Um, AND they found that like facial femininity in female faces wasn't considered necessarily particularly important in, um, the, the, the forager and and rural farmer samples. Um, WE ran a study in rural Nicaragua. Um, AND we found that for the rural, um, farming and fishing populate communities, um, they likewise did not care about femininity in female faces. Um, AND for such a long time, everyone was like, well, femininity indicates estrogen, indicates fertility. We must have an adaptation that makes us like feminine female faces. But, you know, our participants in Nicaragua didn't care. The people in the capital city, they did like feminine and female faces. They had the same preferences as urban samples in any other part of the world. But the rural participants were looking at these faces, and they, they couldn't tell what we were talking about when we were trying to say, look, Westerners like this face. Why don't you like this face? I'm like, I don't know. Just not very interesting. That that like they we were asking them like, what's the difference between these two faces? And they were coming out with differences, but none of it was to do with what we'd actually manipulated in those stimuli. Um. So, yeah, I think, I think we have good evidence that um looking like what people are accustomed to seeing, um, which

29:35 Ricardo Lopes: accustomed to seeing in your culture, in

29:39 Lynda Boothroyd: your culture, the people around you and the media, if you have it, that seems to predict being attractive. Um, THE Kleisner Ael a couple of years ago had a really nice big cross cultural paper. And averageness was the only thing that was really consistent, um, across contexts was more average faces were were rated as more attractive in all their samples. Um, AND that was, that was the only consistent message from that paper. But anything else, masculinity, femininity, symmetry, um. Not necessarily, yeah. We, we might have been wrong about all those things.

30:20 Ricardo Lopes: Um, AND do, do we know if mate preferences can vary across the lifespan?

30:29 Lynda Boothroyd: Um, SO there's, there's been some studies in, Um, again, urban, uh, globalized Western contexts, suggesting like, um, women's preferences for masculine faces or deeper voices is stronger during the reproductive years than it is when you're an adolescent or when you go when you're going through menopause. Um, THAT'S predicated on the idea that a masculine male face is important when you could get pregnant. Um, BUT as I said, well, in what we found in Nicaragua, what, uh, Isabel Scott found in some of her forager samples is that facial masculinity is not considered important in a lot of other cultural contexts. Um, WE did look at age effects in Nicaragua, and we didn't find any. Um, BUT then we were looking at facial differences that they didn't care about. So possibly if we'd been looking at stuff that they did think was important, we would have found something. Um, ALTHOUGH I don't recall us finding any age effects when it came to things like body weight or body shape. Um, SO. Not, not so sure about that, um. The main thing we have to remember, of course, is as you get older, your, your experience of the people around you changes, right? So, um, You know, when you're when you're 15, and you're just going through puberty, and the people around you are just going through puberty, um, what you think is an attractive potential sexual partner is going to be very different from when you're 30. Um, AND the people around you look older, um, and you look at a 15 year old, and you think they're a child. Um, SO again, I think some of these age effects, it's really just, it's, it's just that you, your perceptions are getting older as you and the people around you get older.

32:22 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, and I mean, I guess that of course this falls outside of the scope of your work, I think, but I guess that as we grow older and depending on the kinds of romantic experiences we have, our preferences when it comes to a potential mate might also be influenced by that, right? Our, our own personal experiences.

32:50 Lynda Boothroyd: Yeah, I mean, you go back to basic um social exchange theory. Um, AND your, your comparison level, what a relationship ought to be like is going to be shaped by by what relationships have been like for you so far. Yeah, I think that that just goes without saying, because we're humans, and we learn.

33:08 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, yeah, sure, um, and I mean, uh, in your work you've also studied specifically preferences for body weight. I mean, how do those kinds of preferences vary and do they depend on the ecological context to some extent or not?

33:31 Lynda Boothroyd: So, um, body weight is a really interesting one to study because we know that there are big cultural differences in the levels of body weight we think is is attractive. Um, WE know there's big changes historically in terms of, um, sort of idealized body weight. Um, AND, um, one of the The arguments was it's because of food access. Um. So I remember I remember this coming up, you know, back in the late 90s when I was an undergraduate, and, um, people would go, well, evolutionary psychology of of attraction is obviously rubbish, because why is skinniness really attractive in Western culture? That shouldn't be something we evolved to like. Um, AND so there were some attempts to try and figure out what was going on with that. Um. And um. There were a couple of papers, so an argument was made that it's potentially because um. We have plentiful food, and if people are hungry, then that adaptation for preferring people whose bodies indicate that they have good food access would kick back in. Um, AND so men who were hungry liked, um, heavier women than Uh, men who were full, for instance. Um, THAT was in like Western samples. Um, BUT we also know that Western media really propagates a thin ideal for women. Um, SO what was really exciting in our work in Nicaragua was that, um, we had communities that were very close by. That might have similar levels of, um, nutrition, but quite different levels of access to media simply because one small village was on the route of some electricity pylons, and the other wasn't. So just by this, this, um, coincidence of geographical location, one of them got electricity and therefore TV and the other one didn't. Um, AND then we had two communities that both had TV, but one was the big community that those pylons were heading to. And, um, they, uh, uh, it was it was a it was a richer community, and they had more food. Um, SO I really thought that what we'd find is that access to media made people like thinness and being hungry made you like heavier bodies, and maybe the two would cancel out, or, um, that when you're hungry, you never like thin bodies. But actually what we found really was that, um, Access to media was so much more important than how hungry you were. So, and, and these, for these communities, it's not like, it's not like being an undergraduate in your college halls, and you haven't had lunch yet, so you're hungry. But these are people who, you know, between field seasons one year, they, people lost on average, um, stone in weight. So about, um, what's that, about 7 kg 5 7 kg. Um, BECAUSE it was a bad fish season. So, so body weight is really important for, for, um, sort of well-being in that context. Um, BUT yeah, they, it, how much media people were watching predicted. Their body preferences, um, and obliterated their actual regular food, um, access as a as a predictor, which I did not expect. Um, SO that that was a really powerful demonstration of, again, this idea that um Western media, which remember, is so evolutionarily novel, might be overriding a lot of our more would have been adaptive behaviors and adaptive preferences.

37:26 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. That's very interesting. Um, I would like to ask you now about body dissatisfaction, particularly in young girls, and I know that for many people, particularly young girls, this might be a very delicate subject because they might struggle with things like body dysmorphia or anorexia or bulimia or something like that. So, do we know which factors play a role in that?

37:56 Lynda Boothroyd: Um, SO I think, I think, I think there are distinct things going on in in in that list. I mean, eating disorders of dysmorphia, these are, these are clinical disorders way over here. But I think, certainly within Western culture, body dissatisfaction is, is much more common. It's something that occurs, um, you know, in nonclinical levels. Um. And um. Yeah, the, the basic definition of body dissatisfaction is that you perceive a gap between the body you think you have and the body you want, and that that gap causes you some form of emotional distress. Um. And, um, so the, the argument that comes out of this idea that that like Western Western, well, Western media, any media that is promoting a particular body type, um, can create an idea, a shared cultural ideal of a body that is an internalized by individuals, um, that might be very difficult to attain. And if it is very difficult to attain, that then inevitably leads to some degree of body dissatisfaction, because you don't have that body. And if you're in a context where you have a reasonable idea of what you actually look like, so you have mirrors, or you have photos or both, um, and you have this internalized, quite restricted, narrow ideal, then you're going to get body dissatisfaction, which then is a potential risk factor for lots of other things.

39:30 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, so, uh, we've already talked about how the media influence our mate references. Let me ask you now, about female facial appearance. Does it correlate with health at all?

39:48 Lynda Boothroyd: Um, So In terms of femininity, we don't have strong evidence for that. Um, SO there was a, there was a couple of papers, um. Way back suggesting that more facially feminine women reported less illness. Um, WE replicated that, but we also looked at, um, There were women were photographed at the start of term. So how feminine they were at the start of their first term at university was correlated a bit with their self-reported health over the last 3 years. But then we looked at basically how ill did they get in that first term at university when they get freshest flu, and they feel quite ill. Um, AND the like we had one, we had one correlation that wouldn't really survive more control for multiple comparisons. So, I don't think we really found strong evidence for that, um. That some people have argued that facial averageness might be associated with better health. Other people have said it's not. Um, SO again, I think. Generally speaking, a good indicator of whether someone is healthy or not is, do they look healthy. Um, AND everything else is, is, is a bit too tangential. Um, I've I've come to the conclusion that basically, if you want to know how healthy somebody is, you just look at how healthy they are. And you don't, we, we probably don't actually rely on all these other cues. Um, THE only caveat being that, of course, in Western culture, we are told that Um, weight is linked to health. Um, CAN be told being heavy is unhealthy. So again, that stereotype might be playing into your perceptions of how you think about a heavier versus a lighter face, um, as well as heavier bodies.

41:47 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, uh, but so accused to health would be something like, I don't know, uh, clear skin, I mean, no signs of, uh, skin disease and,

41:59 Lynda Boothroyd: yeah, so yeah. So you look like um there was the studies looking at like blood oxygenation levels. So um you look like you have a functioning cardiovascular system, you don't have current signs of disease. Um, AND, um, yeah, they're they're probably the main things.

42:21 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah. And in the case of male facial masculinity, I mean, is it a cue to health outcomes in in any way,

42:31 Lynda Boothroyd: you know. I'm, I'm, I am very, very adamant about this one now, um. No, so the, the research, for instance, on testosterone and actual health measures, um, you can find two studies measuring very similar things, finding opposite results. Um, STUDIES on, um, Facial masculinity and health outcomes, um, again, some studies showing that it's correlated with self-reported past health, but again, when we looked at how healthy are you in that first term at university when you're exposed to all these new viruses, um, if anything, the men with more masculine faces reported more illness rather than less, um. And um. Yeah, we just, we just don't have very good evidence that facial masculinity is associated with health in any way.

43:30 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. OK, so I, I think we've already talked about, uh, your studies in rural Nicaragua and how television viewing influences men's preferences for female body size and shape. Uh, I have, uh, one more question about, uh, the influence of television and media. Uh, BUT does, does the presence of muscular males on television influence men's body image?

44:02 Lynda Boothroyd: Um, I think we can conclude it probably does, um, so. I still, I still remember listening to a participant taking part in our research in Nicaragua. And he was actually being asked questions about muscularity. And I remember him saying, oh, yeah, yeah, like in the action films. So he was quite aware of the fact that he wanted to look like action heroes. Um, AND, um, Uh, the, my, my postdoc on the project, Jean Luc, um, Uh, was talking about the fact that when he was having conversations with some men in the community, um, they talk sometimes about buying like weightlifting equipment, um, that, you know, it is expensive, and they'd have to bring it in a boat from town. Um, AND also they don't need it because all of their jobs are very physical. They're fishing or they're farming, and they're using their bodies all the time. So they don't actually need to build any more muscle than they already have. But they were nevertheless spending Important money on weightlifting, because they really like the idea of looking like uh Jean-Claude Van Damme, for instance. Um, AND there's there's good evidence that, um, I mean, I think we've all seen it. Anyone, anyone my age has really seen how action heroes have become dramatically more muscular in the media over the last few decades. And, um, we and, uh, another lab have both shown independently that you can shift men's idea of how muscular men ought to be by showing them muscular images. Um, WE actually found that men's ideas about male muscularity were a bit more malleable in that way than women's were. Um, SO it was, it was easier to persuade men that men should be more muscular than it was to persuade women that men should be more muscular. Um, So yes, for all that a lot of the the discourse focuses on the risks of media imagery for body dissatisfaction in women and girls, um, it's pretty clear that we need to be thinking about it for men and boys as well.

46:16 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, no, no, I mean, uh, I guess I've watched movies from, I guess, every decade and I remember that basically in the, for example, 50s, 60s, 70s, actors have just Average bodies, I guess, some of them were even thin and women liked them the same and even some, for example, musical artists in the 60s and 70s, they were really, really thin and they were very popular.

46:52 Lynda Boothroyd: Yeah, yeah, I mean, like the Rolling Stones and the Beatles had girls fainting in in crowds, and they were all skinny, really skinny. Yeah,

47:01 Ricardo Lopes: yeah, yeah, yeah. So uh let me just ask you one last question, perhaps to like, Summarize all of what we've been talking about here today. I mean, when it comes to gender differences and mate preferences. What, how should people think about them? I mean, according to what, according to the best science we have. I mean when, when people are thinking about, oh, are men and women that different? I mean, are this type of women the kind of woman that all men prefer or this type of men the kind of men that all women prefer? I mean, what is perhaps the most nuanced way for people to address those topics?

47:58 Lynda Boothroyd: Yeah, so I think from a From an academic perspective, if I'm talking to other researchers, I think what I would say is that, um, We've we've clearly evolved from shared common ancestors, where mate preferences and sex roles were like hard coded. Um, BUT that it seems like the more that we loosened all of that hard wiring on our behavior, in order to become the incredibly successful cultural species that we are. The more that we've probably lost those mate and and sex difference related traits, as well as all the other hardwired behaviors that we have lost along the way. Um, SO I think, I think I would turn, I would turn around the argument that, oh, you shouldn't just say evolution stops at the neck. I don't think that. I think that our evolution into a cultural species has gone all the way up through our brains, um, in in in all respects. Um. I think in terms of um sort of public communication of these issues, um. I think it's really important for people to remember that, um, our ideas about sex and gender and attractiveness, just like so many of our other ideas are shaped by our own experiences. Um, AND that we have our own individual preferences and our own individual perspectives that come from a, um, a variety of reasons, how other people treat us, our own particular abilities and skills and preferences. Um. And that The more that we accept sort of the, the, the diversity possible within humans and the diversity that that that exists, um, the, the happier we can be. I suppose existing as our own individual weird selves. I, I, I mainly talk about this in terms of body image. So I always think it's, we've got to accept that we, we are in the bodies we are in. And yes, we are in cultural systems that create pressures for us. Um. But the um, yeah, the, the more that we accept the wonderful diversity of humanity, the more that we can accept that in ourselves too.

50:20 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. No, that's a great note to end on. uh AND uh just before we go, where can people find your work on the internet?

50:30 Lynda Boothroyd: Um, SO I have a lab, uh, web page, um, which I think you can find on a shortcut via www.boothlab.org. And it should shortcut to my, uh, university webpage.

50:48 Ricardo Lopes: Great. So thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. It's been a real pleasure to talk to you and it's been a very fascinating conversation. OK, thank you very much. Hi guys, thank you for watching this interview until the end. If you liked it, please share it, leave a like and hit the subscription button. The show is brought to you by Enlights Learning and Development done differently. Check their website at enlights.com and also please consider supporting the show on Patreon or PayPal. I would also like to give a huge thank you to my main patrons and PayPal supporters, Perergo Larsson, Jerry Muller, Frederick Sundo, Bernard Seyaz Olaf, Alex, Adam Cassel, Matthew Whittingbird, Arnaud Wolf, Tim Hollis, Eric Elena, John Connors, Philip Forrest Connolly. Then Dmitri Robert Windegerru Inai Zu Mark Nevs, Colin Holbrookfield, Governor, Michel Stormir, Samuel Andrea, Francis Forti Agnun, Sverggoo, and Hal Herzognon, Michel Jonathan Labrarinth, John Yardston, and Samuel Curric Hines, Mark Smith, John Ware, Tom Hammel, Sardusran, David Sloan Wilson, Yasilla Dezaraujo Romain Roach, Diego Londono Correa. Yannik Punteran Ruzmani, Charlotte Blis Nicole Barbaro, Adam Hunt, Pavlostazevski, Alekbaka, Madison, Gary G. Alman, Semov, Zal Adrian Yei Poltonin, John Barboza, Julian Price, Edward Hall, Eddin Bronner, Douglas Fry, Franco Bartolatti, Gabriel P Scortez or Suliliski, Scott Zachary Fish, Tim Duffy, Sony Smith, and Wisman. Daniel Friedman, William Buckner, Paul Georg Jarno, Luke Lovai, Georgios Theophanus, Chris Williamson, Peter Wolozin, David Williams, Di Acosta, Anton Ericsson, Charles Murray, Alex Shaw, Marie Martinez, Coralli Chevalier, Bangalore atheists, Larry V. Lee Junior. Old Eringbon. Esterri, Michael Bailey, then Spurber, Robert Grassy, Zigoren, Jeff McMahon, Jake Zul, Barnabas Raddix, Mark Kempel, Thomas Dovner, Luke Neeson, Chris Story, Kimberly Johnson, Benjamin Galbert, Jessica Nowicki, Linda Brendan, Nicholas Carlson, Ismael Bensleyman. George Ekoriati, Valentine Steinmann, Per Crawley, Kate Van Goler, Alexander Obert, Liam Dunaway, BR, Massoud Ali Mohammadi, Perpendicular, Jannes Hetner, Ursula Guinov, Gregory Hastings, David Pinsov, Sean Nelson, Mike Levin, and Jos Necht. A special thanks to my producers Iar Webb, Jim Frank, Lucas Stink, Tom Vanneden, Bernardine Curtis Dixon, Benedict Mueller, Thomas Trumbull, Catherine and Patrick Tobin, John Carlo Montenegro, Al Nick Cortiz, and Nick Golden, and to my executive producers, Matthew Lavender, Sergio Quadrian, Bogdan Kanis, and Rosie. Thank you for all.