Priming men with different contest outcomes modulates their dominance perceptions

Christopher D. Watkins and Benedict C. Jones

Behavioral Ecology, 2012, vol. 23, issue 3, 539-543

Abstract: It has recently been proposed that dominance perceptions in men function, at least in part, to reduce the potential costs of within-sex competition for resources, and that sensitivity to cues of men's dominance is greatest among men who would incur the largest costs if they engaged in competition with rivals indiscriminately (i.e., low-dominance men). Consistent with these proposals, we found that men randomly allocated to priming conditions in which they imagined losing confrontations with other men subsequently demonstrated greater sensitivity to dominance cues when assessing the dominance of men's faces than did men randomly allocated to priming conditions in which they imagined winning confrontations. No equivalent effect occurred for perceptions of men's trustworthiness, suggesting that the priming effect observed for dominance judgments may be somewhat specific to competition-related perceptions. Collectively, these findings suggest that men's perceptions of other men's dominance are facultative, changing in response to contextual cues, such as the outcomes of recent confrontations. Such responses could play a critical role in calibrating men's dominance sensitivity according to their recent experiences and are consistent with findings from experiments with other species in which the outcome of prior confrontations modulated competition-related behaviors.

Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/beheco/arr221 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:beheco:v:23:y:2012:i:3:p:539-543.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Behavioral Ecology is currently edited by Louise Barrett

More articles in Behavioral Ecology from International Society for Behavioral Ecology Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().