Gender: War, Mating Linked in Men's Minds

A team of Hong Kong-based researchers led by psychologist Lei Chang of Chinese University conducted four experiments that suggest a link between the motivation to mate and a man's interest in, or support for, war.

The first featured 111 students (60 men) at a college in China. Each was shown 20 full-body color photographs of members of the opposite sex. Half viewed images of people who had been rated attractive; the other half saw pictures of people classified as unattractive.

Afterward, “participants responded to 39 questions about having wars or trade conflicts with three foreign countries that have had hostile relationships with China in recent history,” the researchers write. Twenty-one of the questions “tapped the willingness to go to war with the hostile country,” they noted, while 18 addressed “peaceful solutions to trade conflicts.”

The results duplicated those of a pilot study: Male participants answering the war-related questions “showed more militant attitudes” if they had viewed the photos of attractive women. This effect was absent in answers to the trade-related questions, nor was it found among women for either set of questions.

In another experiment, 23 young heterosexual males viewed one of two sets of 16 photos. One featured images of Chinese national flags; the other focused on female legs. They then performed a computer test to see how quickly they could respond to common, two-character Chinese words. Half of the words related to war, while the others related to farms.

If they were motivated by nationalism or patriotism, the young men would have presumably responded to the war words more rapidly after having viewed the flag. But in fact, the researchers write, they “responded faster to war words when primed by female legs.”

For more, see War, Mating Linked in Men's Minds by Tom Jacobs, March 28, 2011 at Miller-McCune.