Women Have Evolved to Be “Mean Girls,” Researcher Claims

Psychology professor Tracy Vaillancourt with the University of Ottawa in Canada maintains that, from an evolutionary standpoint, it makes sense for women to spread rumors about one another and resort to backstabbing and shunning on a regular basis.

Otherwise put, the specialist claims that women have evolved to be “mean girls.”

In a paper published in yesterday's issue of the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Tracy Vaillancourt explains that both men and women have been competing with one another since the dawn of mankind.

Whereas competition among men has evolved to take the form of physical conflict or overt aggression, women have evolved to favor indirect aggression.

The researcher believes this happened because, unlike men, women deliver and nurse children, and therefore cannot afford being injured.

Unlike over aggression, indirect one makes it possible for a woman to eliminate competition without putting her physical wellbeing in danger.

“Women do compete, and they can compete quite fiercely with one another,” the psychology professor says, as cited by Live Science.

“The form it typically takes is indirect aggression, because it has a low cost: the person [making the attack] doesn't get injured. Oftentimes, the person's motives aren't detected, and yet it still inflicts harm against the person they're aggressing against,” she adds.

Being shunned or badmouthed might not be all that big of a deal today, but, given the fact that ancient women heavily depended on each other to raise children, social exclusion must have been a serious issue back in those days.

Thus, a woman and her children's survival chances would have been dramatically affected by her being shunned by the rest of the community.

According to Tracy Vaillancourt, this theory that being a “mean girl” makes sense evolutionary-wise also explains why women who simply aren't interested in dating and those who have passed the age when they could become mothers spread rumors and/or shun others significantly less than other women do.