Tend and Befriend - Gender Differences in Tend and Befriend

Gender Differences in Tend and Befriend

Tend and befriend has been heavily studied in females. One reason for this fact is that estrogen enhances the effects of oxytocin which, as noted, is believed to be an important biological underpinning of tend and befriend.

There are evolutionary bases for believing that female responses to stress may be better characterized by tend and befriend than those of males as well. In early human history when the human stress response evolved, work was largely sex segregated, with women responsible for child care. Accordingly, selection pressures for responses to threat that benefit both self and offspring would have been greater for females than for males, favoring social responses to threat in women. Research shows that women are, in fact, more likely to seek the company of others in times of stress, compared to men.

Male behavior under stress may be better characterized by the fight or flight response. Although both men and women show the biological fight or flight pattern of arousal (e.g., elevated heart rate and blood pressure), men's behavior under stress is better characterized by fight (aggression) and by flight (social withdrawal, substance abuse) in response to stress.

Women have higher life expectancies from birth in most countries where there is equal access to medical care. In the United States, for example, this difference is almost 6 years. It has been hypothesized that one reason may be that men's responses to stress (which include aggression, social withdrawal, and substance abuse) place them at risk for adverse health-related consequences, whereas women's more social responses to stress are healthier behaviors. Whether these gender differences in responsivity to stress help to explain the gender gap in mortality is not yet known (other possible factors abound, such as estrogen stimulating the immune system while testosterone suppresses it, or the evolutionary pressure to withstand the stresses of near-constant pregnancy in pre-modern cultures leaving modern women with generally untapped reserves).

However, it should be noted that this phenomena is considered by many in the field of psychology to be inaccurate and unfounded. There is little evidence to suggest that either one of these responses is significantly more likely to occur in a particular gender, and has brought into question the validity and motivation of Shelley Taylor's original research (as the results she found have only infrequently been replicated in subsequent experiments) and on some level, her tend-and-befriend vs. fight-or-flight model is sexist, by falsely categorizing the personality types of both men and women.