Spreading rumors and mocking someone's
appearance may seem like schoolgirl behavior, but new research finds women can also
bring that attitude into the adult world. The study calls this type of action
"indirect aggression."
Tracy Vaillancourt, the study's author, recently
told the "CBS This Morning" co-hosts that this type of hostility is
used without getting caught; it is underhanded and not direct.
"We do things like we exclude people from the
peer group, we give the silent treatment - you know that customary I won't
speak to you for three weeks and then you have to figure out why I'm mad at
you," said Vaillancourt. "We'll spread rumors about the person, so
we'll disparage their appearance, we'll suggest that they're promiscuous, those
sorts of things."
She explained that while men may use "indirect
aggression," they do not do it as much as women.
"When we aggress against somebody, we do it
indirectly," she said. "When men aggress against others, a lot of
times it's direct, it's verbal."
An authoritative study published by the Royal
Society has explored the scientific basis for “competition and aggression”
between women, and found that they have most likely evolved to be mean to one
another.
Dedicating a whole journal issue to the theme and
inviting international evidence from across disciplines, the research found
that the “constraints of offspring production and care” meant that it favored
the female of the species to resort to low-risk forms of aggression.
Scientists said that since Darwin first put forward
his theories on reproductive competition, extensive research has been done on
how more expendable men developed larger body size, use of weaponry and
ritualised displays of aggression.
Little work has gone into the equivalent for women,
however, with studies more likely to focus on more direct reproductive traits
such as mate selection.
“Despite a history of being largely overlooked,
evidence is now accumulating for the widespread evolutionary significance of
female competition,” the report’s authors Paula Stockley and Anne Campbell
explained.
Writing in the introduction to December’s issue of
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, they described their work as
a first step in “a new expansion of interest in female competition”.
“Females compete for resources needed to survive and
reproduce, and for preferred mates,” Dr Stockley said.
“Although female aggression takes diverse forms,
under most circumstances relatively low-risk competitive strategies are favored.”
The scientists added that they found “coalitions or
alliances may reduce risk of retaliation” – a theory to explain why groups of
women gang up on others – as famously documented in the 2004 Lindsay Lohan film
Mean Girls.
Professor Campbell, an evolutionary psychologist at
Durham University, nonetheless told the website LiveScience that while meanness
has traditionally been seen as a female weapon, it can be used in just the same
way by men.
