Notes on 《How the Mind Works》Ch.7 —— Family Values

This chapter is about the psychology of social relations. It explores the distinct kinds of thoughts and feelings about kin and non-kin, and about parents, children, siblings, dates, spouses, acquaintances, friends, rivals, allies, and enemies. Meanwhile, several controversial opinions and ideas are discussed and presented, which should be cautiously seperated from the morality's standpoint. When you finish this chapter, you will know, in short, people's social motives are strategies that are tailored to the tournaments they play in.

The characteristics of Kinship:

1. Kinship is digital: you are either kith of somebody or not, can't be in between.
   
2. kinship is a relation.
3. kinship is topological: Everyone is a node in a web whose links are defined by parenthood, generation, and gender.
4. kinship is self-contained.

The theory of parent-offspring conflict：

• In essence it is sibling rivalry: siblings compete among themselves for their parents' investment, whereas the parents would be happiest if each accepted a share proportional to his or her needs. Put into another way: children want to take more than what their parents want to give.
• It offers a straightforward explanation to Opedial complex & Electra complex: Delay the day of their baby brother or sister coming by competing with fathers for their mothers' attentions.
• It also subverts the biology-culture distinction theory: Personality is not a product of socialization by parents, actually, it is proved that about 50% of the variation in personality has genetic causes.

Why is there sex to begin with?
The best theory is that sex is a defense against parasites and pathogens: Sexual reproduction is a way of giving its offspring a head start in the race against the germs.

The cause of sex differences --the theory of parental investment: The greater-investing sex chooses, the lesser-investing sex competes.

1. Male competition for access to females
2. Female choice in males: men vary in their ability and willingness to invest in their children

Why people developed marriage?

1. Men and women live together in large groups, men need to compete for sexual access to women
2. Men invest in their offspring, women need to compete for men's ability and willingness to invest
3. In marriage a man and woman form a reproductive alliance that is meant to limit demands from third parties for sexual access and parental investment.

From reproductive success point of view:

• A part of the male mind should want a variety of sexual partners to increase reproduction.
• Another part of the male sexual mind is an ability to be easily aroused by the faintest hint of a possible sex partner.

Polygyny v.s Monogamy:

• Inequality has allowed a kind of polygyny to flourish.
• Under polygyny, men vie for extraordinary Darwinian stakes—many wives versus none.
• Marriage arrangements are usually described from the man's point of view, not because the desires of women are irrelevant but because powerful men have usually gotten their way.
• Polyandry is vanishingly rare. It only happens in very harsh environments, but the arrangement collapses when conditions improve.
  
• In a freer society polygyny is not necessarily bad for women, on financial and ultimately on evolutionary grounds, a woman may prefer to share a wealthy husband than to have the undivided attention of a pauper, and may even prefer it on emotional grounds.
• Legal monogamy historically has been an agreement between more and less powerful men, not between men and women.
• Laws enforcing monogamy would work to women's disadvantage.
• Rootcause: a single difference between the sexes--men's greater desire for multiple partners.

The sex difference in adultery/jealous:

• A woman has an affair because she feels that the man is in some way superior or complementary to her husband.
• A man has an affair because the woman is not his wife.
• Women should squirm at the thought of their husbands or boyfriends giving time, resources, attention, and affection to another woman.
• Men should squirm at the thought of their wives or girlfriends having sex with another man.
• Women's jealousy appears to be under the control of more sophisticated software, and they can appraise their circumstances and determine whether the man's behavior poses a threat to their ultimate interests.
  
• Men's jealousy is cruder and more easily triggered.
• men may be upset about affection because it could lead to sex;
  
• women may be upset about sex because it could lead to affection.

Status:

• Status is the public knowledge that you possess assets that would allow you to help others if you wished to.
• The psychology of status was driven by four "pecuniary canons of taste":

1. Conspicuous leisure
2. Conspicuous consumption
   
• It is counterintuitive because squandering wealth can only reduce it, bringing the squanderer down to the level of his or her rivals. But it works when other people's esteem is useful enough to pay for and when not all the wealth or earning power is sacrificed.
• It works when only the richest can afford luxuries.
• People at the top of social ladder try to look different from the people below them.
• People try to mimic and look like the people above them.
• The style trickles downward from upper classes to lower leads to the fashion.
3. Conspicuous waste
4. Conspicuous outrage.

Friendship:

• Cooperativeness can evolve when the parties interact repeatedly, remember each other's behavior, and reciprocate it.
• The point of friendship, in evolutionary terms, is to save you in hard times when it's not worth anyone else's trouble.

War:

• War is a game that benefits men (natural selection favors traits that increase fitness on average) more than women.
• The coalition acting together can gain a benefit that its members acting alone cannot, and that spoils are distributed according to the risks undertaken.
• Men are willing to fight collectively only if they are confident of victory and none of them knows in advance who will be injured or killed.
• People's mind is equipped to volunteer for a risk of death in a coalition but only if we do not know when death will come.