Intrasexual Competition, Moral Typecasting, And Victim Sanctification w/ Tania Reynolds

Hello, everybody! This Monday, I bring you an interview with Dr. Tania Reynolds. She is a Social Psychology postdoctoral researcher at the Kinsey Institute. She received her PhD in Social Psychology from Florida State University under Dr. Roy Baumeister and Dr. Jon Maner. Her research examines how pressure to compete for social and romantic partners asymmetrically affects the competitive behaviors and well-being of men and women. Through a joint appointment with the Gender Studies department, Dr. Reynolds offers courses on human sexuality and sex/gender differences. As a collaborative research team with Justin Garcia and Amanda Gesselman, she hopes to examine the dispositional predictors and physiological correlates of individuals’ romantic relationship experiences, as well as how these associations may differ across gender and sexual orientation.

In this episode, we go through several topics of Dr. Reynolds’ research. We first talk about how men and women’s mate preferences influence their intrasexual and intersexual social dynamics. We also refer to friendships, focusing more on same-sex friendships. We discuss a paper about human patrilocality and how woman needed to establish same-sex friendships with non-kin women during our evolution, and how self-deception might have played a role in intrasexual competition. We talk about sexual economics theory applied to mating contests, and also how men use romantic partners as social signals to other men. We also discuss a little bit the evolution of personality traits, before getting into gender bias in moral typecasting. Finally, we explore the topic of the problems in the workplace and science production that might stem from a culture of victim sanctification and harm-avoidance.

https://youtu.be/n6EWA_Wg3xI

Link to podcast version (Anchor): http://bit.ly/2NXC54B