Men's historical dominance of the workplace may, in part, be because of their ability to reconcile with enemies after conflict, a new study suggests. Researchers examined the aftermath of same-sex sporting events and found that men spent longer talking, touching or embracing their opponents than women. These efforts to patch things up ensure the males can then co-operate more successfully in the future. The authors believe that this trait has been carried down through the years. Researchers have long been puzzled by the abilities of male chimpanzees, who constantly bicker and fight, to put aside their differences and co-operate and work together in struggles for territory with other groups. Studies showed that male and female chimps acted differently in the aftermath of fights, with males much more inclined to engage in reconciliation behaviours. Psychologists wondered if the same habits were true for humans - and decided to analyse high-level, same sex sporting competitions for these reconciliation traits: they looked at recordings of tennis, table tennis, badminton and boxing involving men and women from 44 countries. The authors conclude that men in these sports are doing exactly what the male chimpanzees are doing - investing more time in patching up their differences so that they can potentially work together down the line. http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-36969103
Of course, the male chimps who fail to reconcile end up killing each other and being unable to hunt or fight as a team, while estranged female ones just don't share grooming or babysitting anymore. Very different consequences: that may account for the evolutionary difference . There may also be a variance in how strongly the competitors feel about winning and losing - how much they have invested in the first place. As to sports, the male bonding rituals have been in place since apehood, while women have only recently begun competing in high-profile sports. Maybe they don't want to appear "emotional" or "soft" by overt shows of affection in public; want to be taken seriously. How does that relate to the work-place? Since women have only been allowed any kind of status in most workplaces for a couple of generations, and it's still far harder for them to get ahead, maybe a comparison of how much time they spend loving one another is premature. I have seen groups of men and women at work (health care, not office or factory), and my (unmeasured, unscientific) impression is that women, on the whole, do less jockeying for position or status, are more co-operative and slightly less inclined to criticize a colleague's effort and more apt to notice and sympathize if a team member is tired, preoccupied or stressed. So, maybe they have less to make up for? Not contradicting the study - just questioning its assumptions.
A bromance is a hundred times more adorable than the friendship between two women (there's no name for it!).
It's not especially compelling beyond observation of culture. http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(16)30663-7
The only thing I like is that the are using the Akaike Information Criteria, but that's because I'm a little bit of a Bayesian statistics nerd.
