Perceptions of Income Inequality and Women's Intrasexual Competition.

Income inequality has been empirically linked to interpersonal competition and risk-taking behaviors, but a separate line of findings consistently shows that individuals have inaccurate perceptions of the actual levels of income inequality in society. How can inequality be both consistently misperceived and yet a reliable predictor of behavior? The present study extends both these lines of research by evaluating if the scope of input used to assess income inequality (i.e., at the national, state, county, or postal code level) can account for perception discrepancies and if actual/perceived inequality is associated with female intrasexual competition. Female participants recruited online from the general US population (n = 691) provided demographic information, measures of perceived income inequality, and measures of intrasexual competition attitudes and behavior. Actual and perceived income inequality (at any level) did not predict negative attitudes toward other women or female weighting of physical appearance as a desirable trait. Perceived income inequality and actual county-level inequality was, however, predictive of female competition in the form of self-sexualization clothing choice. Further analyses found that age and importance placed on physical attractiveness also predicted women's clothing choices. Perceptions of income inequality were predicted not by actual Gini indices, but by beliefs about the levels of poverty and income gaps. These results highlight the importance of better understanding the proximate cues by which people perceive environmental features such as inequality, and how those cues are used to adjust interpersonal behaviors.

Sex, and other important things: Tracking ratios of ecologically significant categories.

The ratio of males and females in a population (the sex ratio) has been documented as an important factor in calibrating mating behaviors. This implies mental processes of attention, perception, categorization, and memory to obtain these environmental sex ratios. Although recent work has indicated that sex ratio information can be processed quickly, accurately, and with little effort, there are still open questions about whether sex ratio information is cognitively privileged or prioritized, relative to other environmental information. The present experiments used an ensemble coding paradigm with larger, more complex matrices of stimuli and with a more feasible range of ratios (between 7:13 to 13:7) than many prior studies on sex ratio perception. Experiment 1 found that sex ratio estimates are sensitive to actual seen ratios (of a 4 × 5 matrix of faces, shown for about 500 ms), and that those judgments are more accurate than similarly presented ensemble coding judgments for vehicles (ratios of cars and truck) or for animals (ratios of cats and dogs). Experiment 2 found that sex ratio estimates and hair color ratio estimates are about equal in accuracy. These results together suggest that faces are a privileged content for frequency tracking, relative to other aspects of the environment. Further research can extend this work by disambiguating factors such as complexity and discriminability of various facial cues and the stage of processing at which those cues are being used. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Convergent evidence for a theory of rapid, automatic, and accurate sex ratio tracking.

It is presumed that people track the sex ratios in their environment (the number of males relative to number of females) in order to adaptively adjust their decisions and behaviors, but this actual tracking ability has not been established. The relevance of sex ratio information, drawn from evolutionary biology and studies of human relationship decision making, is integrated here with memory research (on frequency encoding), perception research (on ensemble coding), and neuroscience research. A series of four experiments provide empirical results to help fill research gaps and facilitate this theoretical integration. In particular, these studies connect details from memory research on relatively automatic frequency encoding of both items and categories, perception research on summary statistics from ensemble coding, and theoretical ideas about the function of these abilities (specifically applied to human sex ratios based on faces) from social and evolutionary approaches. Collectively this research demonstrates an evolved psychological mechanism for functional, fast, and relatively automatic human abilities to track experienced sex ratios in the social world. This sex ratio information is theorized to underpin documented facultative adjustments in relationship dynamics as well as perceptions of social group characteristics. This integrative approach highlights how the coding, memory, and judgments about population sex ratios can both account for a number of existing findings and point towards key further research.