Why Do People Refuse To Accept The Truth About Men & Women ~ Chris Williamson

most people get wrong when it comes to understanding sex differences?

I think that that's a long list of things. I'm working on a new book, actually, and it's going to be focused on sex differences. Hell yeah. And I think... Okay, so the two big things I think that people get wrong, and the one that probably people are going to be expecting me to say, and that I do say in this new book, is that people often think that there are no sex differences or that there's no innate push toward sex differences. To the extent they exist at all, they come almost solely from culture, and I think that's one big mistake. But I do also think people make the opposite mistake as well. So there's also a tendency to exaggerate the magnitude of human sex differences. I think both of them are mistakes that people fall into. I think these days, probably, they more often fall into the first mistake, the minimizing and denying. mistake. But people do make both, and I think both potentially cause problems.

Is it a narrow tightrope to walk along to actually get the amount of sex differences right? Is it? I think it is.

I think it is very, it is difficult because I think people, it's just very easy to swing to one extreme or the other. And And then if you just sort of start opening the door, okay, there are some evolved sex differences. And then I think we maybe quite easily spin to the extreme of thinking that they're massive and that they're huge. And in some species, they are. But I think that as mammals go, we have relatively modest sex differences. And actually, that's another thing I think that the alien would be puzzled by. It would say, okay, we've got these sex differences in this weird species, but they belong to the big group. called mammals, and in a lot of mammals, the differences are much larger.

What are your favorite psychological sex differences in humans?

Let me think. Okay, so let me start with the one I think is the biggest one,

the single biggest psychological sex difference. I don't suppose you can guess what it might be? Desire for sexual novelty?

That's usually about a medium effect size. So about 0.5, maybe a bit bigger. The one I'm thinking of is much, much bigger than that.

Fuck. I give up. Tell me.

It's one that as soon as I say it, you'll recognize it and you'll recognize that it's huge. I think it's so obvious to us that we take it for granted and don't think of it. It's the fact that the vast majority of men are primarily sexually interested in women and the vast majority of women are primarily sexually interested in men. So it's interesting. That is a massive difference and that does show that natural selection can create huge sex differences in our species. And then most of the time it creates sex differences that are nowhere near that magnitude. It's interesting though, if you look at summaries of sex differences and evolved sex differences, very often that one is just left out. And I just think it's just because We take it for granted so much that that's the case, that we don't even really think of it when we're listing them.

That's like the physics of sex.

Yeah, exactly. And there's a clear evolutionary rationale, of course, for it as well.