Men behaving nicely: Public goods as peacock tails

Abstract

Insights from sexual selection and costly signalling theory suggest that competition for females underlies men's public good contributions. We conducted two public good experiments to test this hypothesis. First, we found that men contributed more in the presence of an opposite sex audience, but there was no parallel effect for the women. In addition, men's public good contributions went up as they rated the female observer more attractive. In the second experiment, all male groups played a five round public good game and their contributions significantly increased over time with a female audience only. In this condition men also volunteered more time for various charitable causes. These findings support the idea that men compete with each other by creating public goods to impress women. Thus, a public good is the human equivalent of a peacock's tail.

Sexual selection and the evolution of altruism: males are more altruistic and cooperative towards attractive females

“…The present study provides some support for the sexual selection hypothesis that altruism and cooperation may serve as sexually selectable traits as participants behaved favorably towards the person in the attractive image, particularly among males. The reason why this effect was stronger for males is because males have been found to engage in courtship displays more than females, especially towards females they find attractive (Van Vugt & Iredale, 2013).…”

A Critical Test of the Assumption That Men Prefer Conformist Women and Women Prefer Nonconformist Men

“…If one were to draw exclusively on the psychological literature, one might presume the former. For example, studies have found that women conform more when their mating drives are primed (Griskevicius, Goldstein, Mortensen, Cialdini, & Kenrick, 2006), that attractive women report higher levels of conformity (see Segal-Caspi, Roccas, & Sagiv, 2012), and that (unlike men) women do not try to separate themselves from the crowd in the presence of an attractive, opposite sex audience (Van Vugt & Iredale, 2013). Furthermore, men become more nonconformist after a mating prime (Griskevicius et al, 2006) and men low in agreeableness report having more casual sex (Urbaniak & Kilmann, 2006).…”

Expectations of Fairness and Trust Co-Evolve in Environments of Partial Information

“…This idea has been discussed under the terms biological markets [6,55] and competitive altruism [35,68], and it has been empirically demonstrated that partner choice increases prosocial behaviour through competition [63,69,80]. However, whilst partner choice explains why trustees would offer a higher return, such work does not describe why an individual would reject all available profitable-but-unfair offers.…”