You talkin' to me?

Accidental science, my first ever viral tweet, and a weird partisan-gendered difference that I've stumbled across.

I’ve covered partisan differences in attitudes towards gender before, set to a kickass musical soundtrack. Well on Tuesday, Britt (@tweetsbybritt) asked:

“Men, please help me out here: this blew my mind when I heard it, and I have ZERO idea if it’s true. Does every male interaction with another male come with the threat of violence, no matter how small? Like even with friends and family there’s always a slight chance of violence?”

It would seem that it is possible that this Jordan Peterson thought was on the brother’s mind, and it was definitely on the conversants’ minds: that there is an “underlying threat of physicality” in “real conversations” between men which “keeps the things civilized to some degree.”

I happen to personally feel that threat on an instinctual, gut level, so I responded,

“Yes. Every male I meet gets automatically categorized by my brain as 'they'd have no chance against me, I'd have no chance against them, or it'd be close.””

I kind of assumed that every male did this and we all knew we were doing it, but 105k+ views and responses later, apparently not.

My experience reminds me of of how we stumbled across knowing that some people think in pictures and other people think in words, numbers, or patterns. Apparently there’s a whole world of weird subjective realities we all live in that we falsely assume everyone else lives in as well.

Sizing up other males for potential violence as part of situational awareness is one of them. It seems to be a primarily male behavior, but I’ve been asking my classes about this and apparently some women do it too. My female students who said they do this are a soldier, a bodybuilder, and an athlete, meaning that they all have higher than average levels of testosterone.

19 people insinuated that I had a psychiatric problem which required therapy, called me pathetic or gay, or insisted on wanting to fight or eat me. Looking through these profiles most appeared to belong to smaller, Leftwing, people who hold pacifist positions. One of them actually engaged in a conversation and he argued that hypervigilance is a mental health condition that shouldn’t be normal. But with 305 likes and 10 retweets, apparently it’s pretty common. Other threads in that conversation showed that while it’s more common than not, it’s not a universal male behavior.

---

So 2 Thoughts:

1. What is this behavior? and

2. Why do people who don’t engage in it medicalize those who do?

So far I have 4 possible Independent Variables that contribute to this behavior: Conservative partisanship, increased muscle mass and higher levels of testosterone, exposure to violence and trauma, and military or police training.

While I have no military or police training, different political tests put me as a moderate/centrist liberal or a moderate/centrist conservative, I was exposed to violence at a young age and am subsequently hypervigilant (which is very common for people with my background), I didn’t start sizing up males until I got into weight lifting and martial arts in my 30s (my therapist at the time said it was a normal side effect of boosting my testosterone).

Further, I tried testosterone injections for 10 weeks in 2022, and holy shit, I felt like I could time travel back in time and whoop Iron Mike Tyson’s ass back in his prime, grab a light snack, take on a hockey team, get a massage and a pedicure, and then kick the crap out of every single cop, rodeo cowboy, and special forces soldier who ever existed, all before dinner.

Theriouthly, bro. Obviously my rational mind stopped me from indulging that bodily urge to fight people 3x my size for no reason whatsoever, but the point is that testosterone is really powerful stuff.

Late in the conversation my academic Twitter peeps started sending me peer-reviewed articles, including:

Sell, Aaron. "Male adaptations to assess fighting ability." Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science (2021): 4681-4691.

Sell, Aaron, Daniel Sznycer, and Matt Meyers. "The implicit rules of combat reflect the evolved function of combat: An evolutionary-psychological analysis of fairness and honor in human aggression." Evolution and Human Behavior 43.4 (2022): 304-313.

Durkee, Patrick K., Aaron T. Goetz, and Aaron W. Lukaszewski. "Formidability assessment mechanisms: Examining their speed and automaticity." Evolution and Human Behavior 39.2 (2018): 170-178.

So my hypothesis is that there is some basic human hardware that exists to scan situations for violence-capable males, identity threats, come up with plans for ‘fight’, and find exits for ‘flight.’ Partisanship, which contains known biological and neurological differences, makes this system more emergent, as does previous exposure to violence, training, and having increased muscle mass and higher levels of testosterone.

This system can be always dormant, always be active, or dormant unless provoked. Many people spoke of only feeling this way around drunk people, or walking late at night, or in the presence of dangerous people.

Philosophically, it looks like there’s an Aristotelian median virtue of ‘appropriate awareness’ between the extreme vices of hypervigilance and hypovigilance. Not everything is a threat, and you can wear out your neurobiology by always being on high alert, but some things are actually a threat, and it’d be a maladaptation to be naive in an actually dangerous situation.

The physiological differences between Left and Right has been well-documented by Hibbing, Smith, and Alford (2013), although the conservative hyperattention to threat literature is based on some questionable science, so we’re not sure what’s going on there.

---

Point 2 - Why did so many smaller, often Leftwing, people who see violence as an aberration to natural peace and cooperation, react by thinking that peace was normal and scanning for threat was mental illness?

This question is harder. I wrote my Master’s Thesis on Thomas Szasz’s ‘The Myth of Mental Illness,’ which basically argued that society deals with difference by medicalizing those who don’t conform and giving Aesculapian authority to doctors to treat non-conformists

Conservatives tend to score more or less equally on the Moral Foundations Theory Test, while liberals emphasize ‘caring’ above other competing moral values, so my hypothesis is that it’s a combination of caring and authoritarianism. While frequently overlooked in academia, leftwing authoritarianism exists, and me and my colleagues have some upcoming peer-reviewed articles and book chapters coming out on the subject.

From what we can tell, based on the work of Moghaddam (2018), it appears that both Leftwing and Rightwing authoritarianism are rising in response to geopolitical concerns (war, economy, etc.) and each other.

By medicalizing this phenomenon, they put themselves in the place of doctors with Aesculapian authority over me, and thus are able to write off my position as the rantings of a lunatic, as opposed to exploring the subject or engaging in any kind of debate. There are countless examples of Leftwing students and professors, and the occasional Dean, shutting down speakers and debates rather than engaging them (a practice known as ‘deplatforming’).

So it would appear that some, perhaps many, on the Left are too anxious or neurotic to engage in debate, and medicalizing or pathologizing their opponents allows them to ‘win’ from a place of caring without having to take any risks.

Righties, of course, engage in similar behavior, writing off their opponents as not serious people and responding to challenges with slurs and childish insults.

---

Finally, it should be said that those of us who do situational awareness, know that our instinct isn’t fool proof. Size and strength matter, but little guys can fight too, and even an 80 lb. asthmatic in a wheel chair can pack heat, not to mention even if one wins a fight there can be all kinds of legal ramifications.

The instinct is there to prevent violence, not instigate it.

And since I’m on the topic of not writing off smaller fighters, here’s one of my favorite MMA fights of all time:

So while it’s a cross-gender phenomenon, it’s still primarily males. And to my fellow males I apologize for sharing a secret…

Ladies, this is totally what us guys do when you’re not around:

Happy Weekend, Everyone. :)

-Dr. Nathanial Bork.