"Modern social science models are increasingly acknowledging the benefits of an evolutionary-integrated approach where evolutionary explanations don’t replace cultural ones, but contribute to a fuller understanding of how behaviours develop."

Is singlehood different for men?

How evolutionary theory can help explain sex differences in singlehood experiences

unromanticprof.substack.com

What can evolutionary theory tell us about what singlehood is like for men? In a guest post at The Unromantic, Immy Harrison explores this question: unromanticprof.substack.com/p/is-singleh...

Is singlehood different for men?

How evolutionary theory can help explain sex differences in singlehood experiences

unromanticprof.substack.com

"If we deny the existence of sex differences that everyone can see with their own eyes, most people won't believe us anyway. They'll just stop trusting scientists on politically charged topics. And they'll be right to do so; the scientists won't be trustworthy."

A Billion Years of Sex Differences | Swift Press

In A Billion Years of Sex Differences, evolutionary psychologist Steve Stewart-Williams tackles some of science’s most controversial questions: How do men and women differ? Where do the differences co...

swiftpress.com

"even subtle sex differences, when aggregated, may contribute to the persistence of gendered patterns in behavior and life trajectories"

The power of many small sex differences in cognition, personality, and interests - Scientific Reports

Scientific Reports - The power of many small sex differences in cognition, personality, and interests

nature.com

I wrote about the philosophy behind the new Oxford Handbook of Singlehood, especially how building an interdisciplinary area of research requires the right culture. unromanticprof.substack.com/p/introducin...

Introducing the Oxford Handbook of Singlehood

A passion project comes to life

unromanticprof.substack.com

"Why evolutionary psychology is comparatively resistant to junkification... Hypotheses must be linked to plausible selection pressures, fitness-relevant outcomes, and mechanistic pathways shaped by natural or sexual selection"

Frontiers | Research “junkification” is caused by researchers, not journals

Concerns about declining research quality have increasingly been framed as "junkification", whereby academic output expands in volume while declini...

share.google

"Contemporary problems ranging from allergies, myopia, and obesity to chronic anxiety, loneliness, and ultralow fertility can be understood as consequences of evolutionary mismatch intensified by the polycrisis" www.mdpi.com/2076-328X/16...

New from my stellar coauthors and me in Evolution and Human Behavior. Courtship in cross-sex friendship: novel tests of male financial provisioning as a signal and cue of mating interest. Part of the journal’s special issue on “friendship”. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Courtship in cross-sex friendship: novel tests of male financial provisioning as a signal and cue of mating interest

Cross-sex friendships are often characterized by psychological and behavioral patterns consistent with underlying mating motivations, and many romanti…

sciencedirect.com

Fantastic news to wake up to. Our paper on courtship in cross-sex friendship has been accepted at Evolution and Human Behavior. Coming soon in the journal’s special issue on friendship.

"As Symons would sum up, there is a female human nature and a male human nature, and those natures are painfully different."

Sex on the Brain: In Memory of Don Symons

Don Symons's book "On the Evolution of Human Sexuality" has had a lasting impact on evolutionary psychology.

psychologytoday.com

Use of an AI dating simulator may help single men who struggle to connect. They experienced a reduction in anxiety, loneliness, & distress related to their sex lives. https://www.psypost.org/therapists-test-an-ai-dating-simulator-to-help-chronically-single-men-practice-romantic-skills/

Therapists test an AI dating simulator to help chronically single men practice romantic skills

A recent study published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior suggests that artificial intelligence could help men facing chronic singlehood. Researchers found that practicing romantic skills with a guided conversational program reduced feelings of loneliness and psychological distress.

psypost.org

Cross-sex and intrasexual theory of mind..."Men overestimated women's desire for sexual variety...Unexpectedly, women showed similar biases when estimating the desires of men...both men and women overestimated the sexual desired of their same sex peers." www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

The interdisciplinary journal "Culture and Evolution" brings all the scientific tools for studying culture and evolution to the same table…publication fees waived for papers submitted by Dec 31, 2026; registered reports and replication studies welcomed! submit.akademiai.com/cultev/index...

Incels capture extraordinary public attention not because they are especially numerous or violent, but because their stories tap into deep-rooted psychological biases that make them unusually memorable and shareable. https://www.psypost.org/the-psychology-behind-societys-fixation-on-incels/

The psychology behind society’s fixation on incels

Despite their small numbers, incels loom incredibly large in public consciousness. A new study explains why: their stories hit our deepest evolutionary panic buttons regarding sex, status, and societal threat.

psypost.org

Evolutionary psychology distinguishes between two broad mate retention strategies Benefit-provisioning Cost-inflicting (derogation, restricting autonomy) The manosphere advocates the latter Research consistently finds cost-inflicting tactics are used more often by lower mate value individuals.

As of 2024: 81% of US women have kids by their 40s, down 9 points from 1976. 79% get married (seven-of-eight of them have kids). 21% don't get married (half of them have kids). Since the 1970s, married with kids dropped about 20 points, while never-married with kids increased 10 points.

Coming soon…

If anyone is interested in an alternative to this “just so story” (ironic) about how evolutionary psychology derives hypotheses and its conceptualisation the environment(s) of evolutionary adaptedness that shaped our psychological mechanisms, then I suggest you read for yourself.

Samantha Joel@datingdecisions.bsky.social · 5mo ago

In the chapter on ev psych and gender roles: "This vision comes from the minds of (male) academics of the mid-twentieth century who closed their eyes, leaned back, and imagined a natural state of the human condition that looked a lot like their own home life". This book is so good OMG.

See Buss and Schmitt (2019) Annual Review of Psychology. Mate Preferences and Their Behavioral Manifestations. labs.la.utexas.edu/buss/files/2...

William Costello@williamcostello.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Remarkable to characterise evolutionary psychology as solely interested in self report when it’s been triangulating diverse sources of evidence for hypotheses for decades, including substantial cross cultural evidence for the behavioral manifestations of mate preferences.

Remarkable to characterise evolutionary psychology as solely interested in self report when it’s been triangulating diverse sources of evidence for hypotheses for decades, including substantial cross cultural evidence for the behavioral manifestations of mate preferences.

Samantha Joel@datingdecisions.bsky.social · 5mo ago

"Evolutionary psychologists had developed a robust science around what people *say* they would do or *say* they would be attracted to. But natural selection does not act on what people say they would do in a hypothetical scenario." 🔥🔥🔥

"14,532 participants across 42 societies...sex similarities and differences in the strength of social motives across adulthood and sociocultural contexts, employing generalized additive models that account for spatial autocorrelation" royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

🎯"[T]here are so many who are ideologically motivated to dismiss evolutionary psychology... There are those who think that we should not bother defensively correcting misconceptions and instead just focus on improving our field. I think we can and should do both."

Evolutionary psychology is unfalsifiable? New scientific paper aims to kill this "zombie idea"

Critics have long dismissed evolutionary psychology as “just-so stories.” A new conceptual review challenges this view, arguing the field generates rigorous, falsifiable predictions—some of which have...

psypost.org

Evolutionary themed valentines cards in our house. Saff couldn’t decide so got me two 😂

"In placing human agents—and their evolved interests—at the heart of cultural dynamics, the ecological approach to culture [...] reclaims the original power of inclusive fitness theory that grounded the evolutionary study of behavior"

Reconciling Our Three Traditions: Human Behavioral Ecology, Evolutionary Psychology, and Cultural Evolution - HBES

– by Nicolas Baumard & Jean-Baptiste André The evolutionary social sciences are grounded in the idea that evolutionary theory provides a unified framework to explain human behavior, including social n...

hbes.com

Just a reminder. (From the evolutionary psychology FAQ I wrote as a grad student back in the 90's). 🧪 grasshoppermouse.github.io/evpsychfaq/

As the perceived time available to make a sexual decision decreases, men's odds of saying yes increases—a scarcity effect. https://www.sexandpsychology.com/blog/2020/2/17/men-are-more-likely-to-agree-to-a-hookup-when-their-phones-battery-level-is-low/

Men are More Likely to Agree to a Hookup When Their Phone's Battery Level is Low - Sex and Psychology

We’ve long known that scarcity plays an important role in sexual attraction. For example, in a classic study, research assistants approached people at a bar at different points during the night and asked them to rate the attractiveness of other patrons.What they found was that, for men and women alike, perceived attractiveness increased as the night went on and the bar got ready to close. This finding has been replicated a few times and has been dubbed “the closing-time effect.” Basically, it means that as our opportunities for finding a hookup decrease, our standards change.

sexandpsychology.com

vilifying victims is an effective strategy for perpetrators seeking to avoid blame"

Bad victims: Moral transgressions against immoral victims are judged less harshly

Four preregistered studies find that perpetrators who commit moral transgressions are judged less harshly when their transgressions impact individuals…

sciencedirect.com

People don't like individuals who vigilantly monitor and reprimand wrongdoings at work. These "hall monitors" are seen as less moral and hyper competitive (the only people who like them are other vigilantes). www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

The belief that evolutionary psychology makes unfalsifiable hypotheses is old, but deeply misconceived: New paper by @costellowilliam @ProfDavidBuss et al. psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

Risk of contracting sexually transmitted infections may be elevated for women during the days when the endometrium is receptive to embryo implantation (“the implantation window”).

Decreased Sexual Motivation during the Human Implantation Window - HBES

– by James R. Roney A lot of research has investigated shifts in women’s psychology and behavior across different phases of the menstrual cycle. One pattern that has emerged in multiple studies is an…

hbes.com