Warriors and Worriers - Chapter 4:

When two tribes of primeval men, living in the same country, came into competition, if the one tribe included (other circumstances being equal) a greater number of courageous, sympathetic, and faithful members, who were always ready to warn each other of danger, to aid and defend each other, this tribe would without doubt succeed best and conquer the other. (Darwin, 1871, p. 162)

Aggression is an intensely co-operative process—it is both the product and cause of strong effective ties between men. (Tiger, 1969, p. 247)

"Human males present a paradox: They love to compete against one another—and to cooperate with one another. They do both far more than unrelated women do."

Male Groups

"All-male groups exist in every human culture. Secret societies, college fraternities, entertainment clubs, bars, street gangs, the mafia, sports teams, gambling houses, government, businesses, religion, police forces, and the military classically have been all-male institutions."

Sex differences in food sharing are observed in hunter-gatherer societies:

"Even in the simplest of hunter-gatherer societies, such as the Ache of Paraguay or the Hadza of Tanzania, it often is the unrelated men and older boys of the community who work together to hunt game or search for honey. If one man catches an animal, he shares it with other men, as well as with their families. A woman rarely shares food with unrelated women, channeling most of the plant foods and occasional small game to her own children, husband, and female relatives."

Interestingly, all-female groups composed of unrelated women are relatively rare:

"There are very few all-female institutions that involve genetically unrelated women. Brothels constitute a universal exception. However, in many brothels, either a man is in charge or the women have been coerced. Historically, most all-female institutions were created by men for men. Harems, polygynous households, and women’s jobs during wartime were usually organized by men. Women traditionally have remained closer to their families and dependent children. While women in hunter-gatherer communities often search for fruits and tubers together with older children, they try to take along an adolescent male or older man too. Women are vulnerable to predation or kidnapping by a neighboring community, so they need protection. Social scientists who study human sex differences believe that across cultures, unrelated men engage in group activities more than unrelated women do."

Why do groups of unrelated men form, and why do women rarely form groups with unrelated women?

"Why do unrelated males form groups? Working together of course can reduce one’s workload and increase efficiency, especially if group members contribute different kinds of expertise. But groups require sharing resources and increase exposure to germs and conflicts between members. Women find these risks worth taking with family members, but they must be more careful with unrelated women."

Benenson provides an explanation for why men form groups:

"I suggest that male groups are formed initially because male peers are so drawn to one another, and away from everyone else. They may fight; they usually compete; they prefer others who are physically and emotionally strong and self-confident, who follow the rules and demonstrate some skill. But simply enjoying one another’s company comes first. Their mutual attraction is there early in life, once again suggesting a biological basis. It grows stronger as men enter adulthood. Adolescent boys, with their powerful sexual desires mostly directed toward girls, and strong competitive instincts, nonetheless spend a lot of time in one another’s company. Even boys with behavioral problems, who cannot follow any adult authority’s directions, group together, through graffiti writing, skateboarding, or gang fights."

Benenson emphasizes the strongly social nature of boys and men:

"After the initial attraction to one another comes the appeal of group life. Despite popular stereotypes about the antisocial, status-striving nature of boys and men, my observations indicate otherwise. I believe that if a boy or man could choose between being the lone superhero with no group or a supreme expert working with others united against a common enemy, most would choose the latter. Even Batman needs to work with the Gotham City police force. Even James Bond needs the British secret service. Current warlords have a large retinue of male supporters, or they wouldn’t be where they are today.

This makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. Being an alpha male provides prestige, resources, and females, among other perks. If the alpha male’s community gets overrun by another community, however, neither he nor anyone else survives. Better to surrender some individual status and subordinate personal aims to the greater good than to lose everything. Maximizing the probability of belonging to a victorious group requires not putting your own needs ahead of the group’s goals. This basic assumption underlies the rules of competitive team sports, as well as successful businesses, governments, religions, and most any organization. No one wants a teammate who shows off his own prowess at the expense of the team’s success. The skills that benefit the warrior easily transfer to any type of group."

Human success depends not only on individual achievement but also on group survival and performance:

"Being an alpha male provides prestige, resources, and females, among other perks. If the alpha male’s community gets overrun by another community, however, neither he nor anyone else survives. Better to surrender some individual status and subordinate personal aims to the greater good than to lose everything. Maximizing the probability of belonging to a victorious group requires not putting your own needs ahead of the group’s goals. This basic assumption underlies the rules of competitive team sports, as well as successful businesses, governments, religions, and most any organization. No one wants a teammate who shows off his own prowess at the expense of the team’s success. The skills that benefit the warrior easily transfer to any type of group."

Cooperative competition is a distinctive feature of human social behavior:

"The intuitive desire to punish noncooperators, along with the fear of being punished oneself, combine to push humans where no other species has gone—toward cooperative competition."

Benenson further observes that 

"Policing the community for hinderers, noncooperators, and cheaters may be particularly pleasurable for males."

The Development of Males’ Preferences for Groups

Male infants attend more to groups of animals than to single animals.

"When my students and I showed 6-month-old babies pictures of one cute moving animal puppet (a tiger or a leopard) next to three identical moving animal puppets, the male babies looked more at the group of puppets, whereas girls didn’t look more one way or the other."

Similarly, male infants attend more to groups of children than to individual children:

"Baby boys also prefer looking at videos of groups of children playing together more than videos of single individuals; again, baby girls don’t look more one way or the other."

Testosterone may play a role in shaping these preferences:

"Interestingly, testosterone seems to drive boys’ attraction to groups. Three-month-old males with higher levels of testosterone look more at groups than infant males with lower levels of testosterone. This provides additional evidence for the biological origins of boys’ attraction to groups."

Boys’ early attraction to groups translates into a preference for group-based social interaction rather than solitary engagement:

"If groups are so important to males’ social behavior, then young boys should do more than just look at groups; they should want to interact with them as well. To examine this, I paid a professional puppeteer to interact with individual 3- and 4-year-old boys and girls, either using one puppet or using a group of three puppets. Sure enough, boys smiled and looked more at the group of three puppets than at one puppet. One little boy refused even to look at the single puppet. Instead, he untied his shoelace and retied it around his neck, slowly beginning to strangle himself. Fortunately, when the puppeteer brought out the group of puppets, the boy changed his mind and started talking to the puppets with evident enjoyment. Quite a few of the boys barely looked at the single puppet. Girls of course loved interacting with the one puppet, with one girl gazing at the puppet 99% of the time."

Why are boys and men drawn to competitive sports?

"In most cultures, boys’ enjoyment of team competition explodes in middle childhood. Why do boys and men like sports? One reasonable and common explanation is that team sports mimic warfare. Sports have

all the elements that provide pleasure: play fighting, the presence of the enemy, one-on-one competition, and, critically, intergroup battles. Team sports allow players to display their own unique skills and ally with one another to defeat the other team. Boys who might have been competing to best one another easily become teammates when another team materializes. Even boys who dislike each other intensely will cheer each other on when an enemy or opposing team arrives. Boys seem to be spontaneously attracted to team sports. It’s not that society does not facilitate male team  sports—it does. But thousands of years before society poured resources into equipment and fields and coaches, boys and men were playing team sports."

Boys tend to play in groups, whereas girls more often form dyadic relationships:

"My colleagues and I showed young preschoolers cartoon drawings of a child playing either with one same-sex friend or with three same-sex friends. We then asked them to tell us in which situation the child was happier. The preschoolers uniformly judged that boys would be happier playing with three friends than with one friend. They also judged, though with less certainty, that girls would be happier playing with one friend. By elementary school and continuing through adulthood, children, adolescents, and adults all believe the same thing. In addition, when we asked them whether a boy’s friends were friends with one another too, they responded yes. In contrast, when we asked them whether a girl’s friends were friends with one another too, they said no. In other words, even young children have an intuitive understanding that boys tend to form large groups in which everyone interacts with everyone else."

Groups play a more central role in men’s social cognition and identity than in women’s:

"Groups also are more accessible to the minds of men than women. Male minds store memories about groups in a place where important information resides, and female minds don’t. If men and women read a story about a group, such as a country, university, team, or club, men remember it better and recall it faster than women. Men also report that they are more willing than women to help their group. However, if the word “group” is replaced by the word “individual,” such as a friend, sibling, or teammate, then women remember better than men. No wonder, then, that a man forgets his wife’s and children’s ages and birthdays but remembers the dates of important battles as well as the outcomes of sports games (though statistics about individual team members who led to the group’s victory or defeat also come to mind). Even when women belong to groups they value, such as an academic club or a sports team or a sorority, they do not care about their identity as a group member as much as men do. Instead, it is the friendships with individuals in the group that women care about. Not that men don’t value individual friendships too, but the group itself is more important to the identities of men than it is to women."

Effective male groups rely heavily on hierarchy and specialization:

"Groups that do not delegate the most skilled, experienced, socially astute individuals to those tasks they can best accomplish will lose to a more efficiently organized group. Thus, rank requires continual respect, challenge, and renegotiation. As the context changes, the composition of the group is modified, and individuals’ relative positions must be realigned. Men excel at this, as do little boys. This suggests that boys have an innate desire to demonstrate their leadership abilities. They also are prepared, however, to defer to leaders with the right skills."

Competition serves a central function in enhancing group effectiveness:

"Continual competition across differing contexts requires different skill sets with lots of varying players. This translates into fluid hierarchies that reflect true expertise. Rank must be earned and maintained or it is lost. Constant competition maximizes group superiority as much as it exposes an individual’s strengths and limits. For males, part of the nature of competition is that it is a never-ending process of selecting the most suitable man for the job. Occasionally, of course, tyrants who won’t abdicate their leadership roles can ruin the whole enterprise, or the whole group is up to no good."

Group membership forms an integral part of human identity:

"Boys and men compete and cooperate within their fluid groups. Simply learning that you are a member of one group, and not another, triggers an innate preference for your own group, and often a negative view of the other group. This happens even in 3-year-olds, and it happens across the world. Everyone is both an individual and a member of all kinds of groups. This is true for both men and women."

Conclusion to Part I (Warriors)

"If you belong to a boys’ group, your allies may not remember your birthday, but they know very well if you can run fast, hit well, respect rules, and make good decisions. They may be competitors, but when things get tough, they’re also the ones who will protect you and root for you, and maybe even die for you.

Girls and women don’t demonstrate these traits. Their favorite activities do not include play fighting, targeting the enemy, or competing against one another. They don’t choose friends who are the physically and emotionally toughest and self-confident. Nor do they reify rules or revere expertise."

This leads to the second part of the book, Warriors / Women.

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This chapter concludes the Warriors part of the book. Three additional chapters on Worriers / Women follow. I should note that I enjoyed the first two chapters of the Warriors section considerably more than this one. While the chapter on groups and men’s mental self-association with groups raises several interesting ideas, many of these could have been developed in greater depth. Nevertheless, some points remained particularly salient to me.

When I was a boy, I often browsed an animal encyclopedia with my father. Images of individual animals rarely held my attention, whereas pictures showing flocks, herds, insect states, or coordinated hunts—such as packs of wild dogs pursuing a gnu—were deeply fascinating. At the time, I assumed this preference was idiosyncratic. In light of the arguments presented here, however, it may reflect a more general tendency shared by many males.

Similarly, as a child I was strongly drawn to the World Almanac, densely filled with numbers and descriptive statistics. I was far less interested in exploring the inner world of a single psyche, which is often the focus of pedagogy. This chapter offers a framework for understanding such preferences by suggesting that male cognition may be more strongly oriented toward groups, group dynamics, and the detection of group-level patterns than female cognition. Benenson further links these tendencies to the capacity of men to form effective fighting forces and coalitions.

That said, I found Benenson’s discussion of core male characteristics in Chapter 3 more compelling than her treatment of these themes in the present chapter. For this reason, I have omitted several sections of this chapter from my review.

My primary interest in reviewing this book stems from the fact that its striking title, Warriors and Worriers, has frequently come up in conversations with colleagues. The phrase tends to linger in my mind, encapsulating the idea that culturally valued male traits are associated with the warrior archetype—such as toughness, strength, and a combative spirit—while culturally valued female traits are associated with the worrier archetype, including heightened sensitivity, concern for infants, and the conscientiousness required to sustain care over long periods, even in the absence of immediate emotional reward.

For these reasons, I am very much looking forward to reviewing the next three chapters of the book, which focus on Worriers / Women.