Psychology using sex difference as basisA Brief Introduction to Procedural AnalysisSome essential mechanisms and strategiesSIMON SHEPPARD |
Procedural Analysis is concerned with male and female strategies but most attention is given to female strategies. This is because in prehistory and until quite recently the male’s strategy was simple: he just struck out. (Shut up woman! – followed by a slap, or at least the implicit threat of one.) There was no need for him to induce false feelings (transduction), mess with someone’s head or employ fancy tactics. His strategy was straighforward and direct.
The reason females abhor violence so much is because this is a battleground on which they invariably lose. Many subtle female behaviours have evolved to compensate for males’ greater aggressiveness and physical strength.
Females obfuscate by behaving irrationally. Perverse and illogical they may seem, but nonetheless that behaviour is purposeful, because it confuses males and masks their strategies. Plus they are more uniform than males. Once these factors are appreciated they become easier to understand. Males and females play the ‘Game of Opposites.’ Paramount in this dichotomy is that females seek to raise the cost of sex, males to reduce it.
Although this page is meant as a very brief introduction to PA, some important late-stage formalizations are included. Notable among these are the major strategies Malign Encouragement, Disguised Defection and Marginal Defection. Some of the following paragraphs appear in All About Women.
Most of history has not been written; it lies within us. Instincts have evolved just as organs to give us advantage in a competitive, often hostile environment. During early human history women were constantly either pregnant or breast-feeding. In the Upper Paleolithic Period (40,000-10,000 BC) the life-expectancy of males was 33.3 years and of females 28.7, with the major cause of female mortality being childbearing and attempts to induce abortions (e.g. putting a plank over a woman’s stomach and jumping on it until blood spurted out of her vagina). Male mortality would have been mainly due to hunting accidents and fights over women. According to Darwin the Best Man tradition derives from him being the groom’s accomplice in the act of stealing a bride from a neighbouring village. Indeed this practice continues in some regions today.
To obtain anything approaching an accurate perspective on human behaviour, and male-female interaction in particular, we have to be aware of humans’ evolutionary history: in the biological jargon, our phylogeny. The great bulk of our evolutionary conditioning took place during our two million-year prehistoric period. It is here that we find the origins of behaviour and the reasons we are what we are.
Probably the three dominant factors at the root of male-female interaction are the following, operating at the primal, the physical and the psychological level:
DEFINITION | EXAMPLES | |
SIGNAL (F) | A gesture, especially a sexual one serving to attract a mate. (Ambiguous.) | The Accident Signal (e.g. spilling a drink) which is a prompt for male aid, from which a relationship and progeny may result. The Open Legs signal, the Wide Eye signal. ‘The female signals, the male responds.’ Signalling is the female strategy; it is passive, safe and ambiguous. The female manipulates the male into making an approach and can always deny her intent. Signals induce neurosis in males, making them confused and yet easier to manipulate. (Neurosis is here defined after Pavlov as the stress induced when one stimulus evokes two or more responses.) Sexual signals are advantageous and heritable. |
MARKER (M) | An unambiguous indication of involvement. | Talking to someone; buying someone a drink. Electricity, telephones, cars and other items of utility are markers discovered, invented or created by males. A female marks a male by choosing or mending his clothes. Primordial marking is leaving scent. Other forms of territorial marking are decorating a flat or leaving something at a table intending to return. |
TOKEN (F) | When one thing means another. (Ambiguous.) | An invitation for a cup of coffee: traditionally, this is an invitation to share in the ritual of its preparation, and to talk. ‘Do you have a light?’ Hints are commonplace examples of the token. A token has different values for the giver and the receiver. The cost of a cup of coffee in a café is a token because the cost of the drink represents the rent of the premises, wages of staff etc., and this is normally understood by both parties. |
HANDLE (M) | A request which evokes a fixed and predetermined response. (Unambiguous.) | Calling someone’s name, having an arrangement to meet, being able to touch or hold someone. Many handles are implicit, for example the request to drive on the right side of the road. A condition in which handles are issued (e.g. knowing someone’s name, being married) is called a handle state. |
Game theory can be applied to human behaviour and here it is applied especially to the male-female game. The model is mathematical (see box), but it is possible to detail its essentials without mathematics. For a fuller discussion of games see Axelrod: The Evolution of Cooperation or Poundstone: The Prisoner’s Dilemma; the former is easier to find but Poundstone’s is more wide-ranging (and entertaining).
These arrays are intended only to illustrate how behaviour can be expressed formally as a game. Procedural Analysis offers the basic building blocks, or models, by which human behaviour can be analysed mathematically as games.
The Protagonist is the main player, who starts the game. In the first array below the payoffs are shown for the Protagonist:–
OPPONENT | ||
PROTAGONIST | Cooperate | Defect |
Cooperate |
Reward
R |
Sucker’s Payoff
S |
Defect |
Temptation Payoff
T |
Punishment
P |
Real-life games are often asymmetric: cooperation and defection take different forms for each player, as may the payoffs. The female can often be cast as Protagonist, because most games are started by females, even if the male is frequently unaware of it. More accurate is the following array, which shows the payoffs for each player:–
MALE OPPONENT | ||
FEMALE PROTAGONIST | Cooperate′ | Defect′ |
Cooperate | R, R′ | S, T′ |
Defect | T, S′ | P, P′ |
The highest payoff (Temptation) is received by a player who defects while the other is cooperating. The lowest payoff goes to the sucker who cooperates while the other defects. (In the celebrated Prisoner’s Dilemma, a symmetric game, T > R > P > S.)
Females play the Tit For Tat (TFT) strategy, a strategy which is good at eliciting cooperation. Formally, TFT is ‘Cooperate on the first move, thereafter do as the opponent last did.’ TFT is imitative, it copies the other player and any attempt to improve on it.
In Disguised Defection the female disguises her defection and collects the Temptation payoff repeatedly.
In Marginal Defection the female acquires power surreptitiously, continually testing the male, seeking to establish a new base from which her power can be further incremented. The female optimally proceeds just below the threshold at which the male is provoked. If she miscalculates in her power-seeking manoeuvres she may provoke a violent reaction and other serious consequences.
Discrimination is an essential human function. To discriminate is ‘to see the difference.’ It is obvious that someone who cannot see the difference between a small opponent and a large one, or between an enemy sneaking up in disguise and a friend, is at a disadvantage. If one kind (sex, race, species, genotype) is exploiting another it is to their advantage to erode their opponent’s discrimination – to discourage discrimination on the basis of kind. This is the Malign Encouragement strategy: encouraging an opponent to pursue an adverse policy. Collectively employed it is ‘What’s bad for them is good for us.’
One important discovery was that it is the male instinct to be racially aware. Anyone who says they are “anti-racist” is really saying they are anti-male.
Malign EncouragementTable: Policy Choices for a Protagonist
Notes and examples from the Table (added 2019)These are extreme examples (always the best for analysis), reading clockwise:
The most astonishing thing about the Malign Encouragement strategy is that despite its obviousness and ubiquity it seems hitherto never to have been formally defined. Procedural Analysis, presented very incompletely here, is a supremely powerful tool which is capable of distinguishing normal from abnormal behaviour and predicting, within natural variation, normal human behaviour. |