Original ArticleThe baby effect and young male syndrome: social influences on cooperative risk-taking in women and men
Introduction
Suppose you were out walking with a potential long-term mate, and the opportunity arose to take a bet with a street performer. Assuming you would share the winnings with your partner, do you take the bet? Now suppose, instead, that you were walking with a child when you encounter the street performer—do you take the bet? These scenarios are representative of many domains where risk-taking has social consequences. They further demonstrate that the social consequences may vary in terms of reproductive context, that is, whether the context involves a reproductive opportunity (or threat) or an instance of parental care. Though it is well accepted that, in many domains, men take more risks than women (e.g., Byrnes et al., 1999, Weber et al., 2002), the exact reasons for this risk asymmetry are not well understood. Elegant efforts to explain these differences from an evolutionary perspective have been remarkably insightful (e.g., Baker and Maner, 2008, Baker and Maner, 2009, Daly and Wilson, 1994, Wang et al., 2009, Wilson and Daly, 1985). Following this evolutionary approach, the current paper reports an experiment that extends these previous findings by testing two foundational predictions of parental investment theory (Trivers, 1972), in particular, that females will take fewer risks when in the presence of young children and that males will take more risks when paired with other males (even when these males are potential allies).
Parental investment theory (Trivers, 1972, Williams, 1975) attempts to explain how individuals should expend their resources to maximize their reproductive fitness. Noting that, across many species, one sex invests more (the ‘limiting sex’) and the other invests less, the theory explains that “Individuals of the sex investing less will compete among themselves to breed with members of the sex investing more, since an individual of the former can increase its reproductive success by investing successively in the offspring of several members of the limiting sex” (p. 141, Trivers, 1972). This statement lays out the two ideas central to understanding the evolution of risk-taking in humans. First, one sex (females) invests more in offspring and therefore has more to lose with the loss of any individual offspring. Second, the nonlimiting sex (males) should risk more (through competition and display) to maximize its reproductive opportunities with the limiting sex (i.e., females). Before describing our study, we discuss these evolutionary views on risk-taking individually and in more detail.
Section snippets
Parental care and female risk-avoidance
The central observation on which parental investment theory is based is that the sexes invest different amounts in offspring (Trivers, 1972). For humans, females invest more in their offspring than males. This is in part due to their higher parental investment during gestation and more limited opportunity for children in the future. But it is also because the female does not share the male's paternal uncertainty or the male's opportunity costs associated with seeking additional offspring with
Reproductive competition and male risk-taking
In comparison with females, males often take more risks in both social and nonsocial contexts. Much of the evolutionary research on risk-taking has focused on explaining this observation. In particular, male risk-taking is at its height during the earliest reproductive years, before marriage (Wilson & Daly, 1985, 2001). One of the principle explanations for this rise in risk-taking is termed the young male syndrome (Wilson & Daly, 1985). The young male syndrome stems from the predictions of
The current study
Here, we examine the role of social influences on risk-taking in males and females by employing a modified BART task (here called the Social BART), similar to that used by Baker & Maner (2009). In the BART, participants make gains by pumping up a fixed number of balloons, but they also risk losing any gains they have already made for each balloon if that balloon pops before they stop pumping. Thus, the BART combines both gains and losses in one task. In the Social BART, we manipulated the
Participants
Eighty undergraduate students (40 males and 40 females) participated in this study at the University of Basel for partial fulfilment of course requirements as well as a small monetary compensation that was based on their performance in the Social BART (2.60-7 CHF). Sessions lasted approximately 45 min.
Measure of risk-taking
Risk-taking was assessed with the Social BART, which is an adaptation of the BART (Lejuez et al., 2002). In the BART, people are presented with an on-screen balloon and a balloon pump. By pumping
Results
We used a hierarchical linear mixed-effects model, grouping data by subject, with participant gender and condition (nonsocial, child, female, or male faces) as within-subject factors and log average number of pumps per unexploded balloon as the dependent variable (a test of normality in averaged pumps found that the data were substantially long-tailed: Shapiro–Wilk test, W=0.94, p<.001). Results indicated a significant main effect of gender [analysis of variance (ANOVA): F1,78=5.86, p=.02] and
Discussion
What are the conditions that drive males and females to take different levels of risk? Our findings are consistent with the hypotheses that the main causes of differential risk-taking between males and females are a consequence of reproductive context. In our experiment, males were primarily driven to take risks in situations that were associated with competition among other males (young male syndrome). Women, on the other hand, were indifferent to contexts involving reproductive opportunities
Acknowledgments
We thank Timothy Pleskac for providing the automated BART and Marin Puskaric for his support in adapting the automated BART to the purposes of the present study.
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