Well, I made a video on why a person will behave aggressively, and now we're going to see why men are more associated with aggression. Are you going to get a clear answer? No.
Are you going to take things? Certainly. Well, I advise you to watch the previous video on aggression, because the two overlap on important factors.
But, to avoid typing up too many videos, I won't make much reference to them. But normally, if you followed the previous model carefully, you could potentially replace everything we are going to talk about today. But first, since the subject is controversial and a lot of people are going off on a limb in the comments without even listening to the videos on these subjects, we are going to address several small points.
The first is that you can immediately forget the “it’s organic, it’s society” debate. You no longer have any serious researcher separating the two, and you will understand this clearly in the explanations which follow at the end of the video. Understanding behavior is a constant mixture and interactions between different factors.
There are no longer any researchers who will say that a biological characteristic will lead to a behavior, and you have no guy in the human sciences who will deny that your body influences all the processes, physical and social, that it experiences. So if you still believe in this specter, forget everything you know. And if you have the reflex, in the video, to say to yourself "Ah but yes, that's what explains everything!
", well you can forget, because it's potentially a mixture of everything we're going to say . Second point is that whatever the reality and the why and how that we find in the research, it changes absolutely nothing about your political positions and the fact that you want to improve society or not. .
You don't care if men are more violent, because yes, we'll see in the stats that it's somewhat true. Well, whether it's biological or not, we don't care, because you know that whatever happens, you're going to have to learn to calm down. Because yes, your biology depends on what you learn.
And if you think that men are violent anyway and that we have nothing to do about it, whether it's biopsychosocial, who cares. And that's great, well ah, you can decide to do nothing. I 'm going to summarize a hundred articles that I've read.
What people want to do with it doesn't depend on the research results. Research will tell you, ultimately, what is effective to change, if you want to. But she's not going to tell you if that should change or not.
That's a political choice. Differentiate between the two when you respond in the comments. And the third point, as it is difficult to distinguish between the biological and the social in these questions, when I talk about animals or very biological data, I will talk about male-female.
As soon as researchers talk about more global phenomena, I will say man-woman. So, like this, we will be very clear whether I am talking about a study on small rats or on a human being who has lived his entire life. Now that that's said, we 'll first see how aggressiveness is defined in studies, and you'll understand that it's already a mess.
Then we'll do the bio factors, then psycho, then social, and during all these parts, I'm going to lose you. But in the end, I'm going to offer you a way of looking at things that might satisfy you. I'm going to start with organic, because that's where we hear the most bullshit, and where I learned the most things, so it amuses me the most.
And by saying that we were going to start with organic, I am not going to start with organic, since we are going to start with the data on aggressiveness. So overall, around the world, men are more aggressive, but not in the same way. The more violent the manifestations of aggression, the more the difference between men and women increases.
For example, on verbal violence, such as insults or relational violence, for example plotting behind people's backs or cyberharassment, we observe more or less the same level of aggressiveness among men and women. On the other hand, as soon as we move on to more violent ones, like sexual assaults, hitting people, the difference increases, and it peaks on murders, where we have 95% of murders committed by men. There are just infanticides where women are more represented, but are too few in number to reverse the trend.
So, already, all research on the subject should take into account the type of aggression we are talking about. We should not study aggression and gender differences without discussing that it is not the aggression that we should question, but the type and severity of the aggression. Will most research take this into account?
Well, you'll see that it's not. Furthermore, researchers posit that the type and severity of the assault should not be the only criterion that should be taken into account in this. For example, in biology, we identify several types of aggression.
You have competitive aggression, where you will attack someone to grab a resource, or defensive aggression, where you will attack to keep a resource. And the two types have neurocircuitry, potentially different, and therefore we should interpret the results between men and women differently. In psychology, we also differentiate between impulsive aggression, where you lack self-control, and manipulative aggression, where you have self-control, but you clearly decide to attack someone, like a pervert or a psychopath would do it.
Do all the studies I've read make a difference? Well, almost none. Do most studies make conclusions about humanity without taking this into account?
Yes, well yes, I'm exaggerating. Let's say that the average person draws conclusions about humanity by taking this into account. Most researchers know that their study does not mean the whole answer for all of humanity and the entire animal kingdom, and all this means that we can have very different results and that researchers must unravel why they have different results.
In short, overall, men attack more, and overall, in animal species, males attack more. But we must see that it depends on the aggression, and that it also depends on the reasons behind the aggression, for which we have very little data here. So, keep in mind that in all the data that I am going to present to you, you will be able to ask yourself the question: "No, but as a result, he says that men are more aggressive because of that, but as a result, it works how about the insults that men and women practice equally ?
What is the difference? What is the researchers' explanation? Well, most of the time you won't.
Well, we'll start with the biological factors, the male-female differences that could affect aggressiveness. And before explaining, we're going to debunk the big, very simplistic idea: it's the link between testosterone and aggression. Well, at the beginning of the research, it made sense to link testosterone and aggression.
Men are more aggressive, they have more testosterone overall, so presto, it's testo. In addition, we have done some experiments where we inject Testo, and the animals become more aggressive. That's it, we found it!
Except that after decades of study. . .
Well, the Conclusion, there they are. We have no proof that Testo causes aggression, no direct link, but why is it that there are so many studies which are happy to say that "but yes, that's probably it"? Well, we're going to learn things by explaining why here.
First, it is entirely possible that it is not testo that is biologically involved in aggression , but that testo is a part of a system that is involved in aggression. In the video on premenstrual syndrome, the fact that the week before the period appears full of problems, I explained that changes in sex hormones were not the problem, but the problem would come from a system supposed to regulate this increase in hormone, but which would not succeed, well, not regulate the increase in hormone, since the hormones increase, but this system supposed to regulate the symptoms of this increase of hormone. And there are a lot of contradictions in the testosterone literature.
For example, we see that testosterone also increases when a guy has to take care of a child, whereas if testosterone increased aggression, he would rather beat up the kid. Testo also increases when you hug someone. The testo is weaker in people who multiply conquests and stronger in people who keep only one partner.
In some studies, this doesn't make sense at all. Researchers then propose other systems that would make it possible to explain aggressiveness, such as in the theory of steroid-peptide social bonds, which would make it possible to respond to the observed paradox. In fact, in this theory, testosterone would not be the hormone linked to aggression, but to competition.
And I use the conditional tense, because when someone links a hormone to a behavior, often, 40 years later, we say that it is not that much the case. So, in this theory, we oppose competition, that is to say the obtaining or defense of territory, to "ance" (I don't know how to say it in French) which would rather be the development of this and the strengthening of the network created. And as a result, the test would not be linked to behavior, but rather to the context, in this case, potentially.
Because you could very well say to your child: “Come on, let's play football together”, because you are in an attitude of strengthening bonds, and it is more linked to low testosterone. Or, you could have the same attitude, but it's because you're paranoid and you think your kid is being harassed at the football club, and in this case, the behavior is more linked to the high testo. So, you see that we cannot think in terms of hormones and behaviors, because potentially, the same result can be caused by opposing hormonal changes.
And again, I say “hormonal changes” that create the behavior, but there is a duplicate. Sometimes, we see that it is the situation that creates the change in hormones and testosterone. So, the question remains, for example on this question, is there a difference between male and female in this steroid-peptide system?
But there is a whole literature to be done, since male-female difference in testosterone, it is good to ask the question. And there is a lot of delay for another reason that I will also explain to you. At the start of the research, how to link aggression and male?
There are many studies that have focused only on males. In 1984, you had a researcher, whose name I would be delighted to tell you, but I took my notes haphazardly for the video, the reference is lost in all those that I gave you in description, but well, it's sure there, because I found it a week ago, but I forgot it again. Well, this guy, in 84, he said that there was a big problem when we only focused research on aggression on males.
Basically, we forgot half of the individuals of a species to study aggressiveness, and that poses a big problem, because in fact, as soon as the researchers took the females into account, well, they obtained different results. For example, one of the hormones potentially involved in aggression is arginine vasopressin, except that the effects are different in males and females. Under certain conditions, they increase aggression in males and they have the opposite effect in females.
So, basically, if a male happens to attack someone, it's not the same thing in his brain as a female. So, clearly, we must abandon the idea that this or that hormone, androgen or not, explains this or that behavior, since the same hormone can give rise to opposite behaviors depending on the situation and the sex. And here, I'm talking to you about animals, but it's even worse in humans, and we see that hormones don't have the same effect depending on the condition.
Humans being overly sensitive to their context. To finish on the hormone level, there are some super interesting studies on certain pathologies. We might expect, for example, that a woman at the same androgen hormone level as a guy would reach the same levels of aggression, but in fact, that's crap.
And this is seen in females with lots of testo, or in women suffering from a certain form of congenital hyperplasia (well, the doctors will tell me if that's really "nomon" in French, I don't know if I I have the correct translation). And therefore, these women have the hormonal system close to a male since the fetus in one of the forms of this pathology. So she should reach the level of violence of a guy, but not at all.
Well, on the other hand, in biology, we don't just have hormones that can explain the difference between men and women. We also have other theories. One of them would be that very early in childhood, male brains would be more likely to be sensitive to stress.
This is called male vulnerability. There are actually quite a few studies which show that boys are more vulnerable to stressors. We will see some explanations later.
This sensitivity would make the brain more able to over-react to events and threats. And the more threatened you feel, the more likely you are to be aggressive. Researchers would speak of different neuroplasticity between males and females.
Female brains would potentially have more capacity to resist difficulties and therefore not to overreact violently, and to learn overreaction. There are other biological hypotheses linked to physics. This is because males, being often larger and more muscular, will potentially be more likely to use their dominant aspect when attacking.
As we have seen in the general model of aggression, a potential aggressor constantly calculates the means he has to attack the person opposite, and the more means he has, the more likely he is to attack. Like, for example, when someone has more power in a relationship, they are more likely to use it to assault the person. And some studies have linked size and tendency to dominance.
So, the physique of males, statistically general, larger and more muscular, could play on the stats, because in a situation where he could become an aggressor, he could release his aggression by feeling stronger than the other. In short, we have reason to think that there would be biological factors which will favor the aggressiveness of males, on the one hand because in many species, this is the case, that the male-female differences on violence is found in many human societies, and that biological researchers tend to have potential differences between male and female brains, and that this difference could potentially play on aggression. Except that, well, we don't know at all which ones play on aggressiveness.
Yet precisely that research is hyperbiased and often does not take into account the different types of aggression in biological systems, that we often do not know in studies the chicken or the egg between behavior and hormone, or behavior and the neuro, and that humans are ultra sensitive to their context, that it changes their biological system. In short, currently, understanding whether there would be a fundamental difference between male and female which would affect violence is not a given at the biological level. And again, you see how complex it is already to answer the question, and we haven't seen all the other factors which will show even more avenues and interaction.
So, to make the transition, we're going to talk a little about mixing organic and psychological. It's called neuropsy, the study of how your brain processes information. In studies on attacks, we see that there are two main characteristics in individuals during an attack.
The first is impulsivity, that is to say short-term thinking, and/or lack of control over one's behavior. And the second is sensitivity to negative emotions. And when we do the neuropsy tests, yes, we see that men are more impulsive and often more negative, at least they react more to the negative.
So why? We don't know yet. We'll come back to this at the end.
But we also see that guys have less capacity for emotional management, less capacity for empathy, which can affect the greater chance of choosing risky methods for themselves or for others. So, there are quite a few neuropsy studies that look for differences between men and women and which could explain why they are more violent. But there are two big problems that prevent us from drawing big conclusions.
The first problem is that there are very few cross-cultural studies in neuropsy on this, or based on the age of the participants. So, it's difficult to say if the results are not just linked to Western culture or that we are not generalizing too much from studies on young students. Because in neuropsy, we know that age changes how your brain works, and therefore it is very important to know at what age you had the experience.
And then, another problem is that in neuropsy, the differences found between men and women are not huge. They are, even, very weak, even very weak, or even disappear depending on certain conditions. Like, girls have lower mental rotation scores on average.
But there is an experiment which showed that if we replaced the squares with real objects, well, the difference disappeared. And there we have a problem. This is because the differences in aggressiveness, particularly in violent crimes, are enormous between men and women.
So the very small differences in neuropsis are not enough to explain all of this. It's a bit the same as with personality tests. In the end, we observe very little difference between men and women.
Moreover, men would be a little less sensitive to the negative on average in personality tests, which then has no [ __ ] meaning compared to the neuropsis test. So, one of the psychological theories which says that, nevertheless, we should continue the trail, is that, instead of looking for a difference in the psychology of men and women which would explain a lot of things, we should add up the small differences which would ultimately make a big difference. This is a potential hypothesis, but since the idea is very young, we are very far from having convincing intercultural models of how all these small differences fit together.
We have a bit of the difficulty of the youth of the discipline in neuropsy. For example, the conclusions of studies on the brain, they are still very contradictory. Sometimes we see that the areas supposed to manage emotions are weaker in men, sometimes not.
Sometimes, we say that we find a difference between men and women on MRI, but that doesn't change behavior. There is almost no comparison between people of different cultures. In short, the link between male-female brain and aggression, neuropsychology, is really not the panacea for the moment.
But the discipline is very young, knowing that in psychology alone, we have other explanations which come from older studies. Another explanation is that of learning. Because human behavior, well, it can be learned.
And aggression can be learned. Whether you have a biology that predisposes you more or less easily to aggression, you can learn to derive it differently over the years. And there are several avenues which show that aggression among men, well, it is already learned between them.
Since we see that from primary school, boys mess around together to enjoy playing more aggressive games, therefore getting used to being more violent. By the direction given by adults, since we have seen that a girl who is pushed to play like the guys becomes more aggressive, by just physicality. Since male faces are perceived as more threatening, and when you feel that you are threatening, well, you have more likely to want to accentuate your dominance.
We noticed many effects of potential learning, particularly in the attitude of parents. For example, it was noticed that a mother spent more time talking about emotions with her daughter than with her son, which could lower the emotional intelligence of guys and increase aggression. So even if you want to assume that 3 year old boys would naturally be more physically aggressive, they don't self-harm each other.
There is evidence of progressive learning of violence that leads to conduct disorder or antisocial and narcissistic personality disorders. Another psychological explanation is managing your identity. Basically, know that you become a little bit the group in which you find yourself.
For example, you feel good in your music group, well, you will start to take on attitudes, thoughts from this group. Obviously, this works for male-female groups. For example, after transition, we see that trans men start to drink more alcohol, well, because alcohol is more associated with men.
Well, since men are associated with aggression, we find ourselves in a vicious circle where guys are aggressive, so we say that guys are aggressive, and the more aggressive the guys become. So, I know very well that there, in Internet conversion, things go wrong, but no, it's not the stereotypes, it's just the nature of men. So, the video is a little long, so I'll repeat it.
Biological researchers know that identity and context effects exist. They know that, themselves, their research has been biased by the idea of associating aggressiveness and maleness too much, and above all that, when we study the factors which make a man aggressive, we see that these results are modified by the vision that this man has men. The more a man thinks that violence is masculine, the more violent he is.
As I said, there is nothing that is organic or psycho. If there is a biological effect of male male aggression, stereotypes about what a man is and how masculine you feel will play into your aggression, regardless of the initial biological difference. We have other effects also linked to identity.
For example, tall men may have a stronger tendency towards dominance, but short men will on average be angrier and more prone to aggression because of what is called male fragility. Basically, we have shown that when we confront a man who values his identity as a man, for example, when we call him a female, he becomes even more inclined to stereotypes linked to men, to aggression, an effect that is not found in women. This is an effect that we can find in social groups where, if you are told that you are not right or left enough, you will extremize yourself to stick even more closely to your reference group.
. And short guys, falling into the physical stereotypes of guys, would compensate with aggression. Well, obviously, on the psychological side, we also have contradictions to manage.
For example, we talked about the theory of men's greater sensitivity to the negative, which generates anger and impulsivity, and greater sensitivity to threat. But we also see in studies that an insensitivity to threat in men could lower their empathy and make them take risks. So, the opposite of what we just said.
There would be impulsive aggressors and rather psychopathic, thoughtful and manipulative aggressors. In both cases, there are apparently more among men. One of the ways to resolve this contradiction in relation to the theory of vulnerability would be that young boys, being more sensitive than girls to adversity, would push more towards the extreme to be able to adapt.
That is to say, more sensitivity to violence on the one hand, but also more insensitivity to it on the other side, because in fact, cutting oneself off from these sensations or having exacerbated them , these are normal consequences after having undergone violence. We also have another problem with the conclusions on studies on aggression, since there are quite a few studies which are based on prisoners and not on the general population. That may explain why we were more interested in impulsive violence than controlled violence, because people who have controlled violence, like for example your perverted boss, but in fact, he doesn't get caught, he doesn't go to prison , so we don't study it.
This can also explain that in fact, we have studied the big differences in violent crimes between men and women, but that we do not study why men and women insult in an almost identical way. So, at the psychological level, we mainly locate the difference between men and women on the question of impulsivity and sensitivity to the negative in men, but also on the learning of behavior according to our reference group and according to how society teaches us this or that behavior. Okay, and the transition is ready, since, at the societal level, we actually have major explanatory factors.
Because yes, the difference between men and women diminishes or increases depending on the country and culture. So here, we are going to do a lot of repetition of videos that I have already made, such as on the profile of sexual attackers or on violence. So society will influence the rate of violence in several ways.
The first will be through the presence of permissive thoughts. Permissive thoughts are the thoughts that will make you lose control of yourself in the context of aggression. Here, we could talk about the justification of violence which means that instead of inhibiting our desire to be violent, we let it go.
This is a very important phenomenon in group conflicts, since each social group will come to justify the violence it inflicts on others. This is, for example, what we see in war propaganda. We're going to explain to a whole bunch of people that throwing phosphorus bombs at kids is completely justified.
So, are men more sensitive to these thoughts than women? Well, potentially in certain cultures, since there are cross-cultural studies that have been done on the extent to which a population believes in certain permissive thoughts, and we have seen that the distribution of men and women who believe in them depends on the culture. To reach the psychological side, another way in which a society will increase the difference in violence between men and women is through the construction of identity.
The vision we have of men and women varies greatly depending on the culture, and this vision will influence how we behave towards this or that gender, also how we construct ourselves and how that will guide our behavior, and this obviously plays on attacks. We noticed that overall, so when I say overall, it's because most studies show this result, but in such complex subjects, you always have one or two studies that say the opposite, but the more egalitarian a state is. at the male-female level, the more the difference in violent crimes between men and women decreases.
So egalitarian, in the studies here, that means the difference between how much men and women earn and their proportions according to certain professions or certain places. So, they looked at why, and one of the big mediators was identity. In this study, we see a decline in men's violence, and this decline is explained by the decline in the belief that guys should be aggressive and dominant.
We come back to the idea I talked about in psychology. So, the more a population thinks that it is men who must be dominant and violent, the more the difference between men and women increases. And the studies I spoke to you about which showed the opposite try to see how we can insert the different data.
For example, one study showed that women hit more in some countries. They proposed the idea that we should add a factor: are men and women separated in their education, because it could potentially change the way they are constructed and the way men are going to be violent? How we don't really know, but apparently it could be an important factor.
A third way would be the life strategy that society values or not. For example, in some circles, lying to sell a product is valued, in others, it is very frowned upon. Here, we would have societies in which male violence would be more accepted than female violence.
A boy would then be less criticized when he is violent than a girl, which prevents him from learning to control himself. This would explain part of the differences in violence, because ultimately, in terms of relational violence or insults, there would not be that much difference in valuation between men or women. Fourth way would be the social conditions.
For example, we know that the socio-professional category affects the violence of children, the category of parents, and therefore, the more people are in poverty, the more violence increases in a society, and if we combine this with a more great vulnerability of boys to the adversities of life, the gap would then widen further in disadvantaged living conditions. Favorable for the child, whether this vulnerability is biological, with a different neuroplasticity in males, or whether it is due to the fact that we will give in less to boys, because [ __ ] he should not shit like [ __ ], whatever the reason, more social violence could lead to more violent boys. 5th way would be social position.
The more power you have, the more likely you are to use it. We see it in social psychology studies: when we give power to men in a group, they are more dominant than women. When we reverse power in experience, women become more dominant than men, and as in many societies, men are in a position of power due to the status of the father or the professions of power, for example, it would be then necessarily more inclined to domination of the other and a violent exercise of aggressiveness.
So, if we now try to conclude on all this, do you have a model which takes all the data that I gave you and which would tell us: "So at 5 years, this is what matters at 5 %; at 10 years old, that's 25%"? Well, I haven't seen any, if so much I take, because I would have loved to have a model like that and my video would have been much simpler to make and I wouldn't have taken months to make it. But as I haven't found a model and waiting for someone to provide me with one very nicely and kindly, and I mean a model which takes into account everything that has been said so far, for example example, who pretends to avoid half of reality so that we try to have a conclusion that can tell you something or try to make you understand, we will try to explain by taking all that into account and we will draw inspiration from the models we use on how we manage our personality, including aggressive behavior, since these models take into account the bio-psycho and social side.
Be careful here, very important, this is not a model that comes from research, it's just a way that I found to make it easier to explain to you what it could be. So, I'm not saying that this is happening exactly as I say here, I'm saying that this is the type of response that a current model that reads the bio, the psycho and the social could provide. But not everything I'm going to say is necessarily true.
I'll give you an example to see what it could look like, it's inspired by models, it's not a model. Well, we're going to start with a 2 year old kid who lives in a poor environment. So, we know that there is what we call male vulnerability.
Boys react more difficult to difficult events. This can be biological, depending on the neuroplasticity of males to adversity, which will make him overreact to the threat, or it can be due to the fact that we are less empathetic with them because of the stereotypes associated with them. This vulnerability will mean that they will be more angry in the playground, will therefore play more violent games, they will find friends who will like it, perhaps because boys are more stimulated by competition, or perhaps because they are all vulnerable, but also because their parents push them to be more easily, through the sports they offer them.
Guys who follow this path are not going to be stopped by mistresses, while girls, yes, because playing football on concrete, at the risk of blowing your arm, is fine, but doing gym, at the risk to bang your arm, oh no, you have to stay on the bench. The girls, a true story that I saw happening in schools, these boys who love all that the most will then choose games, sports, YouTuber groups to follow who value that the most, and they will be able to create an identity for themselves. positive around this.
During adolescence, he will then be more aggressive, either partly because brain development in males is slower than in girls, particularly in the frontal areas, which are supposed to inhibit your behavior, or also partly because we have never properly educated them to work on certain areas of the brain, through learning emotions or inhibiting behavior. Then, once the identity is well established, the machine goes into overdrive, since the men who are the most fragile about their identity, which we have seen in certain studies, mean that the more we question them, the deeper they sink. in environments that tell them that’s what it’s like to be a guy, which makes the violence worse.
If society and the people who frequent him tell him that to be a guy, you have to be violent, this fragility of the ego, which can come from stereotypes, as perhaps from a hormonal development that pushes towards domination . . .
Well, for the moment, we don't know which biological system would do this in humans, but why not. And there, already, you have a good base which is ready to worsen towards violence depending on the dynamic situations of the person's life. In short, we are talking about small biological or psychological differences which will gradually create a big difference depending on how society guides individuals.
And this is how, for example, we explain that certain personality disorders develop more or less according to cultures, according to countries and according to types of education, in narcissistic and antisocial personality disorders . which we find more in men. Now, is this model or this type of model that can be applied to the difference between men and women on violence?
I don't know. As I told you, but it can give an idea of how researchers think when they create a model to take into account both the biological, the psychological and the social. So, with that, I wish you a good day.
