Alice Eagly, Northwestern University, Ilinois

"Sex Differences in Human Behaviour: What are Their Origins?"

Variability in human sex differences across cultures and ecologies reflects humans’ sensitivity to local circumstances. Humans are endowed with this flexibility because they evolved in diverse environments with changeable conditions that impinged in differing ways on their reproduction and survival. Accommodating successfully to such challenges required behavioral flexibility, enabled by an evolved capacity for social learning and the cumulation of culture. Such evolved capacities underlie the varying social roles of men and women, which are responsive to local ecologies and social conditions and reflect the costs and benefits that men and women perceive to accompany activities associated with reproduction and survival in a given setting. These costs and benefits are framed by the sexes’ evolved physical attributes and related behaviors, especially women’s childbearing and nursing of infants and men’s greater size, speed, and upper-body strength. This biosocial perspective on sex differences has been tested in relation to human mating preferences, especially in the study of mate preferences across cultures, across time periods, and across individuals within cultures. These studies show that mating practices are flexibly emergent from bio-social factors reflecting the evolved physical attributes and related behaviors of men and women within social and ecological contexts.

Biography

Alice Eagly is Professor and Department Chair of Psychology and James Padilla Chair of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University. She is also a Faculty Fellow in the Institute for Policy Research. She has held faculty positions at Michigan State University, University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and Purdue University and has held visiting appointments at Harvard University, University of Illinois, University of Tuebingen, the Murray Research Center of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and University of Amsterdam.

Professor Eagly has published widely on the psychology of attitudes, especially attitude change, attitude structure, and attitudinal selectivity in information processing. She is equally devoted to the study of gender, with a focus on the social behavior of women and men and a special emphasis on the study of leadership and on evolutionary issues. In her research areas, she has carried out primary research and meta-analyses of research literature. She is the author of two books, Sex Differences in Social Behavior: A Social Role Interpretation (1987) and (with co-author Shelly Chaiken) The Psychology of Attitudes (1993), and the co-editor of four books. Eagly is also the author of over 130 journal articles and chapters in edited volumes and numerous notes, reviews, and commentaries.

Professor Eagly has received several awards, including the Distinguished Scientist Award from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology, the Donald Campbell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Social Psychology from the Society of Social and Personality Psychology, the Carolyn Wood Sherif Award from Society for the Psychology of Women for contributions to the field of the psychology of women, the Gordon Allport Award from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, a Citation as Distinguished Leader for Women in Psychology from the Committee on Women of the American Psychological Association, and the Distinguished Publication Award of the Association for Women in Psychology. She also received an International Visitor’s Award from the Dutch Scientific Association, a Sabbatical Award from the James McKeen Cattell Fund, and a Visiting Professor grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and served as McEachern Memorial Lecturer at the University of Alberta and Distinguished Fellow of the UCLA Center for Society and Genetics. Professor Eagly’s leadership positions in psychology include President of the Midwestern Psychological Association, President of the Society of Personality and Social Psychology, Chair of the Board of Scientific Affairs of the American Psychological Association, and Vice President for the United States and Canada for the Interamerican Society of Psychology.

Professor Eagly received her A.B. summa cum laude in Social Relations from Harvard University (Radcliffe College) in 1960. She received her M.A. in Psychology in 1963 and Ph.D. in Social Psychology in 1965, both from the University of Michigan.