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Individual differences in socio-political attitudes can reflect mating interests, and attitudes can also shift in response to mating market cues, including mating competitor quality. In four experiments, we tested whether competitors’ attractiveness (Experiments 1F&1M) and income (Experiments 2F&2M) would influence socio-political attitudes (participants’ self-reported attitudes towards promiscuity and sexual liberalism, traditional gender roles, and the minimum wage and healthcare). We collected data from American participants online through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (total N = 787). In all experiments, each participant was randomly assigned to one of four experimental treatments in a between-subjects design (three levels of mating competitor quality and a control group), and to one of five stimuli within each treatment. Overall, the experimental treatments largely did not predict participants’ socio-political attitudes. The fifteen unique experimental stimuli, however, did significantly affect participants’ perception of their competitors’ quality. That perception, in turn, affected some socio-political attitudes. Namely, individuals who perceived their competitors to be of high mate-value were more supportive of traditional gender roles and, only for men in Experiment 2M, more opposed to promiscuity and sexual liberalism than individuals who perceived competitors to be of low mate-value. These results only applied to sexually unrestricted, but not restricted, women. Perceived mating competition did not affect attitudes towards the minimum wage and healthcare. Experimental cues of mating competition shifted participants’ perceptions of their competitors’ mating quality and these perceptions in turn shifted some socio-political attitudes. We interpret these results considering broader arguments about plasticity in socio-political attitudes.

Laughter is a nonverbal vocalization occurring in every known culture, ubiquitous across all forms of human social interaction. Here, we examined whether listeners around the world, irrespective of their own native language and culture, can distinguish between spontaneous laughter and volitional laughter—laugh types likely generated by different vocal-production systems. Using a set of 36 recorded laughs produced by female English speakers in tests involving 884 participants from 21 societies across six regions of the world, we asked listeners to determine whether each laugh was real or fake, and listeners differentiated between the two laugh types with an accuracy of 56% to 69%. Acoustic analysis revealed that sound features associated with arousal in vocal production predicted listeners’ judgments fairly uniformly across societies. These results demonstrate high consistency across cultures in laughter judgments, underscoring the potential importance of nonverbal vocal communicative phenomena in human affiliation and cooperation.

For over two decades, researchers in the field of human social neuroendocrinology have been using single-dose pharmacological challenge protocols to determine the causal effects of testosterone on psychological, behavioural, and neural processes. Most of these single-dose administration studies have so far used (1) single-sex samples and (2) varying modes of testosterone administration (intramuscular, transdermal, sublingual, and intranasal) that produced vastly different dose-response curves. Moreover, whereas studies with male participants increased men's testosterone concentrations within the high normal physiological range, studies with women typically increased testosterone concentrations to supraphysiological levels. The purpose of this study was to develop a single-dose administration protocol using intranasal testosterone that would produce a proportionally similar rise in testosterone for both sexes. We found that an 11 mg intranasal testosterone dose in men and a 0.3 mg dose in women raised testosterone concentrations to the high normal physiological range for each sex, producing similar dose-response dynamics in both sexes. This paradigm will allow researchers to design studies with mixed-sex samples that test physiologically plausible sex differences/similarities in the causal effects of testosterone. It will also provide a replicable protocol to examine the possible adaptive functions of acute increases in testosterone in both sexes.

Sociopolitical attitudes are often the root cause of conflicts between individuals, groups, and even nations, but little is known about the origin of individual differences in sociopolitical orientation. We test a combination of economic and evolutionary ideas about the degree to which the mating market, sex, age, and income affect sociopolitical orientation. We collected data online through Amazon's Mechanical Turk from 1108 US participants who were between 18 and 60, fluent in English, and single. While ostensibly testing a new online dating website, participants created an online dating profile and described people they would like to date. We manipulated the participants' popularity in the mating market and the size of the market (i.e., the number of ideal partners in the market) and then measured participants' sociopolitical attitudes. The sociopolitical attitudes were reduced to five dimensions via Principal Components Analysis (Sociosexuality, Benevolent Sexism, Wealth Redistribution, Nonconforming Behaviors, and Traditional Family Values). Both manipulations affected attitudes toward wealth redistribution but were largely not significant predictors of the other dimensions. Men reported more unrestricted sociosexual attitudes, and more support for benevolent sexism and traditional family values, than women did, and women supported wealth redistribution more than men did. There was no sex difference in accepting nonconforming behaviors. Younger people and people with lower incomes were more liberal than older people and people with higher incomes, respectively, regardless of sex. Overall, effects were largely not interactive, suggesting that individual differences in sociopolitical orientation may reflect strategic self-interest and be more straightforward than previously predicted.

Attitudes toward sexual relationships can have evolutionary underpinnings because these attitudes often serve, or at least reflect, the attitude holder's mating self-interest. Sexually restricted individuals, for example, hold conservative attitudes toward same-sex and opposite-sex sexual relationships because conservative attitudes benefit their mating strategies (e.g., monogamy). Certain mating market cues, however, can shift attitudes. In two experiments recruiting Americans and Australians (total N = 1298), we took a data-driven approach to test whether experimental manipulations of (1) promiscuity among either homosexuals (gays and lesbians) or heterosexuals and (2) the financial amount that either homosexuals (gays and lesbians) or heterosexuals invest in weddings would shift attitudes toward same-sex marriage, dating, and romantic spending. In Experiment 1, we did not replicate previous findings that homosexual promiscuity affects attitudes to same-sex marriage, nor did we find any effects of priming heterosexual promiscuity. However, priming participants with the notion that either homosexuals or heterosexuals were highly promiscuous increased support for traditional relationship norms among sexually restricted Australian (but not American) men. This effect was smaller when we controlled for participant sexual orientation, because primes of high homosexual or heterosexual promiscuity increased support for these traditional norms in exclusively heterosexual Australians, but decreased support in non-heterosexual Australians. Experiment 2 found that American and Australian men's opposition to same-sex marriage increased when they were led to believe that either homosexual or heterosexual weddings were cheap, even when controlling for participant sexual orientation. Overall, results provide some support for the argument that mating market cues affect attitudes toward sexual relationships.

Laughter is a nonverbal vocal expression that often communicates positive affect and cooperative intent in humans. Temporally coincident laughter occurring within groups is a potentially rich cue of affiliation to overhearers. We examined listeners’ judgments of affiliation based on brief, decontextualized instances of colaughter between either established friends or recently acquainted strangers. In a sample of 966 participants from 24 societies, people reliably distinguished friends from strangers with an accuracy of 53–67%. Acoustic analyses of the individual laughter segments revealed that, across cultures, listeners’ judgments were consistently predicted by voicing dynamics, suggesting perceptual sensitivity to emotionally triggered spontaneous production. Colaughter affords rapid and accurate appraisals of affiliation that transcend cultural and linguistic boundaries, and may constitute a universal means of signaling cooperative relationships.

Author(s): Bryant, GA; Fessler, DMT; Fusaroli, R; Clint, E; Aaroe, L; Apicella, CL; Petersen, MB; Bickham, ST; Bolyanatz, A; Chavez, B; Smet, DD; Diaz, C; Faněoviěova, J; Fux, M; Giraldo-Perez, PP; Hu, A; Kamble, SV; Kameda, T; Li, NP; Luberti, FR; Prokop, P; Quintelier, K; Scelza, BA; Shin, HJ; Soler, M; Stieger, S; Toyokawa, W; Van den Hende, EA; Viciana-Asensio, H; Yildizhan, SE; Yong, JC; Yuditha, T; Zhou, Y

The authors note that Table 1 appeared incorrectly. The corrected table appears below. (Table Presented).