This will be a highly monologuic post, at least more than the previous ones. I came across this article today. In short, some researchers have found that women in all ages tend to like male faces that's more "testosteronized" than the opposite and that women in all fertile ages tend to deride female faces that are percieved as "pretty".
The good old female chauvinist pig in me immediately started to find flaws in the protocol of this experiment, such as using "attractive" as a general definition while I would say that this is a feature of high variance depending on whom is the judge. But then, the biology nerd in me started referring to nature: if all other mammals are allowed to have differences between the sexes and differences depending on their developmental status, environment etc. why should that not account for us as well?
It's a strong but stupid urge that almost all of us possess; i.e. the urge to take sides. But do we really have to do it in every single case that we come across? In this case, humans are definitely driven by our biology BUT as with all other living things (perhaps even more) we are highly dependent on environmental factors. You are born with the ability to be scared of dogs, but if you never encounter a dog behaving badly you'll never develop this feature. In addition, depending on whether you meet a angry dog when you're 3 or 30 years old the result may vary quite differently.
So, back to the faces-study. The thing is, I can relate to not liking "pretty" girls, or at least finding exuses not to feel entusiastic about their presence whenever someone else is talking about them. But is it nessecary so that I was born destined to feel this way when I began my fertile age all the way to menopause? Could it not be the environment that I'm born into that has formed the perfect settings for this behaviour to appear? Many factors could affect this, such as seeing how much attention these "pretty" ones get's from the opposite sex, or hearing how older females talks bad about other females. This does not mean that it's an innate behaviour.
What I do think that these types of studies could be good for is to make us take a step away from ourselves and see how we react. Thereby we can become more aware about the personalit(y/ies) that we have derived from the thousands possibilities present for us at birth. And we could try to stop behaviour that is not necessarily helping us in the society we have today. In a naive way, I believe by doing so, we might be closer to a nicer world. At least a world without cat fights.
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Is a world without cat fights really a better world? I may have a slightly biased viewpoint on that ...
I agree, these kinds of studies are very self-illuminating. Even though it "feels" like we own all our thoughts, studies like this come along and show how parts of our personality follow a statistical slope. Makes you want to do a double take, and see why you really think some of the things you find it natural to think.
Yeah, I suppose it would be a hard hit to our egocentrical core if we became aware that we are not as driven by our consciousness as by our unconsciousness as we would like to believe (puh! long sentence). We prefer to sit in our shadow world, instead of stepping out and take a look at what's causing the shadows :)
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