#75 Andrew Thomas: Human Mating, Sex Differences, and the Concept of Gender

The Dissenter - A podcast by Ricardo Lopes

------------------Support the channel------------ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thedissenter PayPal: paypal.me/thedissenter ------------------Follow me on--------------------- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thedissenteryt/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheDissenterYT Dr. Andrew Thomas is a Lecturer in Psychology at Swansea University, UK. His research is concerned with the differences in mating strategies within and between the sexes. This includes environmental and social factors which contribute to this variance and whether mating preferences themselves are reactive to environmental changes over short term periods. He also has a secondary interest in cyber-psychology and online interaction; particularly how one represents oneself using internet avatars and aliases. In this episode, we talk about some of the knowledge coming from evolutionary psychology about the mating preferences of men and women, and also about some of the research from Dr. Thomas on that matter. More specifically, we discuss if the idea of more than 2 genders has any scientific plausibility, and if sex and gender are two distinct entities; the model of Males Compete Females Choose (MCFC) that is still dominant in evolutionary psychology, and the alternative of MMC (Mutual Mate Choice); and we end up addressing some of studies done in cyberpsychology, namely in online games and social media, and their limitations. Time Links: 00:33 Sex differences in mating strategies    06:47 Are there more than two genders?  15:40 Are sex and gender two separate things? 19:16 Do males compete and females choose?    27:14 Do women invest more than men in their offspring?   32:13 Do people care about the number of people their partners slept with?    36:16 Cyberpsychology, and can we generalize from virtual to real-life situations?  43:54 Studying sex differences on social media and dating websites  47:38 Do virtual environments properly emulate real-life situations? 50:36 Follow Dr. Thomas’ work     -- Follow Dr. Thomas’ work: Faculty page: https://tinyurl.com/y9ymb8f9 And a couple of papers. Mating strategy flexibility in the laboratory: Preferences for long- and short-term mating change in response to evolutionarily relevant variables: https://www.ehbonline.org/article/S1090-5138(17)30017-X/abstract The Ape That Thought It Was a Peacock: Does Evolutionary Psychology Exaggerate Human Sex Differences?: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1047840X.2013.804899 -- A HUGE THANK YOU TO MY PATRONS: KARIN LIETZCKE, ANN BLANCHETTE, JUNOS, SCIMED, PER HELGE HAAKSTD LARSEN, LAU GUERREIRO, RUI BELEZA, MIGUEL ESTRADA, ANTÓNIO CUNHA, CHANTEL GELINAS, JIM FRANK, JERRY MULLER, FRANCIS FORD, AND HANS FREDRIK SUNDE! I also leave you with the link to a recent montage video I did with the interviews I have released until the end of June 2018: https://youtu.be/efdb18WdZUo And check out my playlists on: PSYCHOLOGY: https://tinyurl.com/ybalf8km PHILOSOPHY: https://tinyurl.com/yb6a7d3p ANTHROPOLOGY: https://tinyurl.com/y8b42r7g