On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 10, 2014 4:30 UTC (Fri) by alankila (guest, #47141)
In reply to: On the sickness of our community by jackb
Parent article: On the sickness of our community

Innate sex differences could be at play. Women appear to be more fearful than men. This sort of thing could be because women's weaker physical strength. Evolution could drive such change by making you take potential threats more seriously.

There is also a debate involving neurochemistry here. Are people who are unable to resist temptations somehow weaker in will power, or is it just that they experience the temptations strongly? Similarly, if a person appears to be courageous in face of danger, is he brave, or just incapable of feeling appropriate level of fear?

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On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 13, 2014 16:58 UTC (Mon) by b3nt0box (subscriber, #98698) [Link] (3 responses)

Wow. Arguments like that are abstract thought exercises at best.

Social influences are far more impactful on people's responses. The innate differences between the sexes that you mention sound more like rationalizing social norms than some real evolutionary diference.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 16, 2014 10:28 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

> thought exercises at best.

NO NO NO.

My wife has Parkinson's. It upsets her perception of reality. That's basically a shortage of the nerve-signalling chemical dopamine, and it has well-recognised effects.

Testosterone makes people more aggressive, and presumably is very important both in that and in controlling peoples' response to aggression. Put two testosterone-fuelled people in a room and you probably won't get a fight, but the atmosphere will be very aggressive.

I don't know enough about oestrogen to make the equivalent comment but gender differences are very important. I suspect if you did a profiling exercise, you'd actually find are far better match of the passive/aggressive spectrum with testosterone levels than with gender, but then you find a fairly close match with testosterone levels and gender.

You can't say "individual differences are more important than gender" when gender provides a massive bias to those individual differences. You're almost certainly right to claim that gender is not a DIRECT influence, but it has a very strong second-level influence.

Which is why Lennart could shrug it all off - he's probably high testosterone. Kathy couldn't - and she could well have had less testosterone than the average female. (Which is why some - high testosterone - women don't have any difficulty coping.)

(And it wouldn't surprise me if many of these assholes are beta or gamma males - they're high-testosterone in the company of an even-higher testosterone individual.)

Cheers,
Wol

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 20, 2014 15:51 UTC (Mon) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link] (1 responses)

>Testosterone makes people more aggressive

Nope. Aggression *causes* increased testosterone production, so they are strongly correlated, however testosterone does *not* cause aggression.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 21, 2014 16:02 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Quite. Threaten someone's children and you'll probably trigger an aggressive response, even -- perhaps especially -- if female. (Of course, women do have some circulating testosterone, just as men have circulating oestrogen, but the levels are *much* lower.)