Aggression and Violent Behavior 16 (2011) 420–427

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Aggression and Violent Behavior

Marriage markets and mating aggression help explain societal differences in

violent crime
Nigel Barber ⁎
4229 Silver Ct., Birmingham, AL 35213, United States

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Violent crimes (murders, rapes, and assaults) are higher in countries with a relative scarcity of men according
Received 22 December 2010 to research using both United Nations and INTERPOL data and controlling for economic development, income
Accepted 18 January 2011 inequality, urbanization, population density, police presence, and drug trafficking (Barber, 2009a). This is an
Available online 1 February 2011
apparent contradiction given that males are more criminally violent and I argue that the most plausible
explanation is that there is more direct mating effort, and hence more violent crime, in countries having a
Keywords:
Homicide
relative scarcity of men (or a low sex ratio). Alternative explanations that are discussed and found wanting
Sex ratio include cultural determinism. Causal links connecting the marriage market and violent crime include possible
Marriage Markets sociological, physiological, and developmental mechanisms that offer exciting prospects for future
Mating Effort researchers.
© 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Contents

1. Adaptation in modern societies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 421

2. Defining adaptation in a way that suits socially-learned behavior . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 421
2.1. Evolutionary Social Science: a causal evolutionary model for explaining societal differences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 422
3. Marriage markets, sex ratios, and social behavior . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 423
4. Violent crime and direct mating effort . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 423
5. The anthropology of mating aggression and violent crime . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 424
6. How to make sense of data linking marriage markets and violent crime . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 424
7. Alternative theoretical explanations for variation in violent crime . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 425
8. Filling in the causal mechanisms through which mating competition increases violence. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 425
9. Discussion and conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 426
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 427

Evolutionary theory rationalizes the great complexity of life for
all species and there is no reason why it cannot also illuminate the
causes of variation among human societies (Barber, 2008; Richerson
& Boyd, 2004, p. 94–96). All of the complexity of human societies
must have emerged from the same process of natural selection that
fashioned the social behavior of other species on planet Earth.
Admittedly, recent human societies, at least from the agricultural
revolution on, are qualitatively different from earlier societies due
to their complexity, level of technological development, modes of
information transmission, capacity to store food and concentrate
power and wealth, etc. The concept of adaptation is nevertheless
⁎ Tel.: + 1 205 956 0508.
E-mail address: Barnigel@gmail.com.
useful for analyzing variation in violent crime even in contemporary
societies.
This claim rests upon two theoretical innovations. The first is an
expanded definition of adaptation to include social learning, as well
as genetically-determined variation, so as to render the concept
applicable to modern societies. The second is the establishment of a
chain of causality that describes how natural selection may produce
modern societal variation. In particular, varying marriage markets
affect violent crime in systematic ways because those societies
having an excess of females (or a low sex ratio, defined as the
number of men per 100 women) elicit more direct mating effort
thereby increasing male–male violence and violent crimes. This
paper discusses the role of adaptive mechanisms in accounting for
society-wide differences in violent crime rates with an emphasis on
proximate mechanisms.

1359-1789/$ – see front matter © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.avb.2011.01.001
 N. Barber / Aggression and Violent Behavior 16 (2011) 420–427
1. Adaptation in modern societies
A gene-based evolutionary adaptation is a design-like match
between features of the organism and the way that it makes a living
(Reeve & Sherman, 1993; Williams, 1966). An adaptation is often
thought of as providing the solution to an adaptive problem. The long
neck of a giraffe solves the problem of reaching into the higher
branches of trees where these animals browse. Adaptations must
increase biological fitness (or the probability of surviving and
reproducing) so that individuals manifesting them are biologically
successful and transmit the alleles that underlie them into future
generations at the expense of rival alleles. After many generations of
such genetic selection, favorable alleles get fixed in the population.
According to the gene-centered view of adaptation shared by
many evolutionary psychologists an adaptation is found in virtually all
members of a species, at least at the appropriate age or developmental
stage and if gender appropriate (Buss, Haselton, Shackelford, Bleske, &
Wakefield, 1998). This criterion of universality is far too restrictive if
the concept of adaptation is to be applied to behavior, or to societal
differences in behavior, for behavior is not only contingent upon the
immediate context but is also affected by the developmental
environment. According to gene-centered adaptationism, the current
fitness impact of some characteristic is deemed irrelevant to its status
as an adaptation: what is required instead, is a demonstration that the
characteristic was selected for over a long enough period in the
evolutionary past to drive it to fixation in the species-typical genotype
(Buss et al., 1998; Symons, 1992).
These two criteria of adaptations having to be universal and
requiring deep roots in evolutionary history are too stringent to be
applied to behavior (as opposed to anatomy that may be studied in
the fossil record over millions of years). Indeed, insisting upon
universality and evolutionary antiquity makes the concept of
adaptation peripheral to the social and behavioral sciences. The
argument that selection removes genetic variability with respect to
behavior — that is pivotal to the universality argument — flies in the
face of much personality research. In general, personality variation
partly reflects genetic polymorphisms that are maintained due to the
trade-off between varied fitness costs and benefits associated with the
Big Five dimensions of personality, for example (see Nettle, 2006), or
individualism versus collectivism (Fincher, Thornhill, Murray, &
Schaller, 2008).
It is one thing to criticize the adaptationist program advanced by
evolutionary psychologists. How can adaptation be defined in a better
way that allows us to comprehend societal differences in violent
crime in adaptative terms? To begin with, we must include behavioral
phenotypes as well as morphological ones and must therefore include
a role of society-specific learning processes.
2. Defining adaptation in a way that suits
socially-learned behavior
In summary, the definition of adaptation taken from evolutionary
biology is more suited to phenomena that can be observed over tens
of millions of years in the fossil record. It is less relevant to behavioral
evolution that occurs too rapidly and leaves little or no fossil record
for comparative analysis. Defining behavioral adaptations as species
typical is far too restrictive to include socially learned adaptations that
vary among local populations. For, different local populations
encounter varied challenges to survival and reproduction and
behavioral solutions to such problems that are partly dependent on
social learning traditions should be considered adaptations (Richer-
son & Boyd, 2004) because they serve the same function as genetically
evolved solutions to the same problem. In either case, an adaptation is
defined as a fitness-enhancing phenotype (whether genetically-
based, learned, or both) that helps an organism to adjust to varied
habitats in ways that promote survival and/or reproductive success.
421
Adaptations have design-like features in the sense that the phenotype
is explicitly suited for such adjustment, just as a key is suited to turn a
particular lock.
In the past, evolutionary psychologists coped with the lack of a
fossil record of behavior in an ingenious, but unsatisfactory, way. They
assumed that humans are adapted to the environment of evolutionary
adaptedness (or the ecological conditions that prevailed during the
two-million-year history of Homo) rather than current conditions.
Further, they assumed that the brain comprised numerous special-
purpose information processing devices, or modules, each of which
was designed to solve some recurrent problem of the remote
evolutionary past, such as selecting a mate, detecting cheaters on
social contracts, or acquiring language (Cosmides & Tooby, 1987). The
structure of these modules was believed to be inherited via a genetic
program that was driven to fixation through persistent positive
selection so that all humans have essentially the same psychology
(with exceptions for gender differences and developmental changes).
These assumptions are each disputable (Barber, 2008; Laland &
Brown, 2002). Evolutionary psychology has nevertheless stimulated
much empirical research predicated on the assumption that if we
understood what problems our ancestors faced, and imagined
possible components of the relevant solutions (or reverse engineer-
ing), that we could conduct tests on modern populations to see
whether their minds work as would be predicted using such logic.
It seems preferable that a natural-science approach to our species
would focus on observable behavior rather than “the mind” that
presupposes subjective self-reports, not to mention a complex system
of intervening variables, such as modular information processing
mechanisms that are generally difficult to observe, or to reconcile
with known mechanism of neuroscience or gene expression (Barber,
2008). Moreover, this approach could not be applied to nonhuman
animals. By that criterion, it is inherently unsuitable as a natural-
science approach and thus falls into a human-uniqueness trap that has
bedeviled evolutionary analyses of human behavior over the past
century-and-a-half.
I argue that in addition to pan-human adaptations, we should also
consider that behavioral differences among local populations can be
adaptations to local conditions. This logic is quite general and draws
on the literature of animal behavior. Examples of socially-learned
adaptations include the song complexity of birds, rats specializing on
pine cones in some local communities, or shellfish in others, and the
Mauritius kestrel developing a novel habit of nesting on cliffs to elude
predators (Avital & Jablonka, 2000; Barber, 2008; Colias & Colias,
1984). The prevailing definition for an adaptation among evolutionary
psychologists excludes such phenomena, leaving us with an
impoverished account of animal behavior (much less that of humans)
in which learned solutions to adaptive problems that make the
difference between survival and extinction for individuals, or entire
communities, are ignored as irrelevant to adaptation. Consequently,
we are left to conclude that most modern human behavior is
adaptively neutral or irrelevant. If we are to avoid that conclusion —
one that has been all too popular among opponents of evolutionary
approaches to human behavior — then we must redefine adaptation in
a manner that is more relevant and useful for behavioral scientists
whose subject matter is behavior, including criminal behavior, and its
underlying evolutionary biological mechanisms.
Here are the main criteria for a more useful definition of behavioral
adaptations:
1. Behavioral adaptations crop up among local populations and do not
have to be species typical.
2. Behavioral adaptations need not be observable in the fossil record
over thousands of generations to be accepted as valid.
3. Current (or comparatively recent) fitness consequences are
relevant for defining behavioral adaptations (contrary to the
arguments of Buss et al., 1998 and Symons, 1992 among others).
422 N. Barber / Aggression and Violent Behavior 16 (2011) 420–427
At a more general level, it is simply wrong to imagine that human
adaptations have been fixed over the past two million years, if only
because our ancestry extends back over many different species
during that time period who varied in size, habitat, diet, cranial
capacity, tool complexity, encephalization, and so on. Phenotypes
that enhanced fitness in the evolutionary past may continue to do
so, of course, although that is not always true. The human capacity
for storing food energy — an adaptation in past environments —
causes obesity and metabolic illnesses and is quite maladaptive
today, for instance. By the same token, behaviors that enhance
fitness today, such as nonviolence, would not have had the same
consequence in the past when assaultive violence might have
brought immediate benefits rather than swift and long-lasting
incarceration. Such changes in the fitness consequences of
behavior do not invalidate an adaptationist approach to modern
behavior: they make it indispensable (when appropriately
modified).
4. Societal differences in behavior may be adaptive so that societal
variation in criminal violence is part of an adaptive response to
varied marriage markets as explained in more detail below. In
general, one finds that men emphasize direct mating effort in
societies, or communities, where women are sexually active
outside marriage, and this behavioral pattern bespeaks adaptive
variation in male sexual behavior.
A formal theoretical model that contemplates societal variation
from an adaptationist perspective is known as Evolutionary Social
Science (Barber, 2007, 2008, 2009b). This specifies a chain of
causation whereby changes in local conditions, such as varied
marriage markets affect how evolved behavioral predispositions
play out.
2.1. Evolutionary Social Science: a causal evolutionary model for
explaining societal differences
Evolutionary Social Science (not abbreviated to avoid confusion
with evolutionarily stable strategies) shares features with both human
behavioral ecology and evolutionary psychology. The similarities
and differences are outlined in Table 1, which is loosely based on
Winterhalder and Smith (2000). The table highlights many differ-
ences in these related approaches. The key points are that behavioral
ecology focuses on human adaptations to life in subsistence societies
whereas Evolutionary Social Science focuses on modern societies.
Evolutionary psychology focuses primarily on cross-societal univer-
sals that are interpreted in terms of pan-human adaptations, although
most evolutionary psychologists recognize that psychological devel-
opment proceeds differently in response to varied environments,
such as varied levels of psychological stress during childhood (Belsky,
Table 1
Evolutionary Social Science compared to closely related fields.
Evolutionary Social Science
Adaptations Short-term, phenotypic
Expected current Intermediate
adaptiveness
Explanatory focus Modern behavior
Methods Compare societies, compare socialization
Hypothesis generation Behavior fits differences in developmental, adult social context
Favored topics Individual differences, societal differences, reproductive strategies
Key constraints Economic, ecological, marriage market
Key assumptions Interactionism, methodological individualism, adaptive
development, counter cultural relativism
Steinberg, & Draper 1991; Del Giudice, 2009), an approach that is
often referred to as “life history theory”.
Modern human social behavior can be causally linked to ecological
pressures using four necessary key assumptions that form the core of
Evolutionary Social Science (Barber, 2007, 2008). These assumptions
are: (1) that modern societies owe their character to an interaction of
hunter–gatherer adaptations with the modern environment (inter-
actionism); (2) that some changes in societies are due to changes in
individuals (methodological individualism); (3) that historical changes
and cross-societal differences can be due to similar adaptational
mechanisms (counter cultural relativism); (4) and that different social
contexts modify individual development in adaptive ways (adaptive
development). These four assumptions must be made if evolutionary
explanations are to be applied to the problem of explaining societal
differences in violent crime (or anything else). A corollary is that if any
of these assumptions is wrong, evolutionary explanation for societal
differences may be impossible.
Each of the above mechanisms is relevant to variation in violent
crime. Interactionism means that human adaptations relevant to
direct mating effort (which increases violent crime, Minkov, 2009) are
influenced by novel economic factors, such as the relative indepen-
dence of some working women from economic support by their
sexual partners, particularly in the context of generous state
provisions for child care, such as those in modern social democracies.
If more individual women opt for sexual intercourse prior to marriage
this increases the pool of women available for extramarital sex which,
in turn affects the viability of direct mating effort by men as an
alternative to marriage (methodological individualism). Such phe-
nomena can account both for societal differences and for changes in
crime rates over time (counter cultural relativism, Barber, 2003a).
Abusive parenting has been identified as a cause of antisocial
behavior and crime (see below). Evolutionary Social Science reinter-
prets such phenomena through the prism of adaptive development.
Does parental behavior facilitate the kind of reproductive strategy
that is likely to succeed in a particular social context? For instance,
children maturing in an urban slum might learn to be tough,
suspicious, and street smart thereby protecting themselves from
being taken advantage of by others. Specific parenting practices, such
as corporal punishment, may promote this phenotype (Nightingale,
1993). This approach to adaptive development is within the
mainstream of evolutionary psychology (Del Giudice, 2009).
Given this theoretical backdrop, variation in violent crime over
generations, and among nation states, can be thought of as one
manifestation of ancient adaptations for mating competition as they
play out in varied modern environments. One aspect of differential
expression of mechanisms for mating competition is adaptive
development, the process through which the violent tendencies of
young people are affected by their familial and community surround-
ings. With this theoretical framework in place, it is time to review
Behavioral ecology Evolutionary psychology
Short-term, phenotypic Long-term, genetic
High Low
Behavioral strategies of foragers Evolved psychological
mechanisms
Ethnographic observation Surveys, experiments
Foraging optimality, evolutionarily Reverse engineering
stable strategies
Subsistence, reproductive strategies Mate choice, sex
differences
Ecological, material Cognitive, genetic
Ecological determinism Universals, cognitive
modules
 N. Barber / Aggression and Violent Behavior 16 (2011) 420–427
evidence that violent crime varies predictably with marriage market
conditions such that high levels of direct mating effort are correlated
with high rates of violent crime.
3. Marriage markets, sex ratios, and social behavior
The marriage market is most often measured using sex ratios,
although this approach can be criticized as being overly simplistic. In
general, though, the logic is that in societies having more women than
men, (i.e., a low sex ratio) it is more difficult for women to marry
resulting in higher levels of non marriage for women, and higher
levels of non marital reproduction (Guttentag & Secord, 1983). Any of
these variables might be substituted for the sex ratio as a measure of
the marriage market. When using sex ratios as a measure of marriage
market conditions, it is worth pointing out that there are many
relevant control variables. Income is one given that unemployment, or
having a minimum-wage job effectively disqualifies men from
marriage in many societies (Staples, 1985). Age is critical because
the sex ratio is relevant only for persons who are in an age range
where marriage is likely (e.g., 15–64 years). Some scholars prefer to
restrict their analysis to the peak ages of first marriage for males and
females and this makes sense in societies where most people marry
once only. Marital status is important as well because married people
are theoretically removed from the marriage market. Nevertheless,
there is some evidence that young married women play the field in
the sense that they are more likely to divorce and remarry if there is a
good supply of marriageable men (see Barber, 2003b).
There are many different ways of measuring the marriage market
and there are many different kinds of sex ratios that may be used for
this purpose. Sex ratios based on narrow age ranges (e.g. b5 years)
and that consider only single people are suitable for studying secular
changes in the marriage market within a particular society but the
numbers are highly unstable given that they vary not only with
changing birth rates (given that women prefer to marry men who are
a few years older than themselves) but also with changing ages of
marriage both within and between the sexes. For this reason, many
researchers prefer to use a broad sex ratio covering most of men's and
women's reproductive lives (or marriage careers in the case of
women) because this is more stable over time and therefore
preferable for comparative purposes. So what is the empirical
relationship between the marriage market and violent crime?
Analysis of INTERPOL crime data (murders, rapes, and assaults)
found that violent crime is a predictable feature of countries with a
relative scarcity of men (ages 15–64 years, Barber, 2000a) in
regressions controlling for level of economic development. This is a
counter-intuitive result given that most of the violent crimes in any
country are committed by men. O'Brien (1999) also reported that
during years when there were more males, American rape rates were
lower but Avakame (1999) concluded that a greater supply of males
in the U.S. augments female homicide victimization. Walsh (2003)
reviews several studies conducted within the U.S. finding higher
violent crime in locations with relatively fewer males. Barber (2009a)
confirmed and extend Barber's (2000a) INTERPOL finding by using
better-quality data sources (UN murders and WHO homicides) and
considering additional control variables as possible alternative
explanations. Lim, Bond, and Bond (2005) replicated the effect using
the WHO data for a smaller sample.
The effect of sex ratios on violent crimes is quite robust and fairly
substantial as assessed through different kinds of comparative study.
Given that men have much higher violent crime rates compared to
women, it is counterintuitive that societies having a greater
proportion of males should have lower crime rates. This apparent
contradiction can be resolved in terms of alternative mating strategies
of men in societies that vary in their sex ratios.
When there is an excess of females in the population, women are
more likely to be sexually active outside marriage. This phenomenon
423
may be illustrated by prevalence rates of HIV/AIDS that are much
higher in sub-Saharan Africa where adult sex ratios are comparatively
low compared to the Middle East where sex ratios are high, and HIV/
AIDS infection rates are low, indicating lower levels of extramarital
sexuality. Such regional differences in sexual behavior as a function of
the sex ratio are fairly easily explained.
Where there is a substantial excess of females in the population,
many of them have difficulty in marrying and are therefore more
likely to be sexually active outside marriage. The existence of a pool of
women who are sexually active outside marriage means that men
may emphasize mating effort rather than competing over spouses. In
such societies, direct mating competition between men increases,
which has the consequence of increasing male–male violence (the
possible mechanisms being sketched out below).
Conversely, when there is a scarcity of females, women are in
greater demand as marriage partners and are less likely to be sexually
active outside marriage for various reasons. One reason is that
premarital sexuality damages a young woman's sexual reputation so
that she is less desirable as a marriage partner on the logic that she
provides less paternity confidence that men look for in a potential
spouse (Barber, 2002). Another factor is that women in sexually
restrictive societies are chaperoned, or protected by their male
relatives from the possibility of contact with sexual partners. Because
few women are sexually active outside marriage, this invalidates a
masculine strategy of direct mating effort. Men are thus constrained
to compete over marriage partners rather than sex partners (Gutten-
tag & Secord, 1983). Such indirect (nonviolent) reproductive effort
usually takes the form of competition over economic resources that
women prefer in a potential husband (Barber, 2002). Empirical
evidence shows that the distinction between both types of reproduc-
tive competition is psychologically, and behaviorally, salient.
Research on American college students, for example, found that if
women perceive their campus to lack men who would make
committed husbands, they emphasize their own sexuality and engage
in brief relationships with various men, for instance (Cashdan, 1993).
Cross-national research also found that both men and women in
countries with a relative scarcity of men are more interested in casual
sex (as measured by the Sociosexual Orientation Inventory, Schmitt,
2005). Such direct mating effort is implicated in violent crimes.
4. Violent crime and direct mating effort
A great deal of evidence bolsters the conclusion that violent crime
is produced by direct mating competition (Barber, 2007, 2009a,b).
Such evidence includes analysis of contextual factors in assault and
homicides, characteristics of offenders and victims, cross-national
research, and time series analyses. Characteristics of the criminal are
revealing: criminal violence in the form of assaults and homicides is
overwhelmingly a masculine activity and it is more likely to be
perpetrated on male victims (Campbell, Muncer, & Bibel, 2001; Daly &
Wilson, 1988). Men are most violent during the ages when they are
actively dating, a phenomenon that could be partially mediated by
testosterone levels (Barber, 2002). Time series analyses of violent
crimes in the U.S., England, and Scotland, also found that crime
increases during years when women found it more difficult to marry
(and are thus likely to be sexually active outside marriage, Barber,
2003a).
One of the more intriguing cross-national patterns in violent crime
is the fact that murders, assaults, and rapes are significantly higher in
the Americas than they are in the rest of the world (Barber, 2006;
Neapolitan, 1994). This difference is statistically explainable in terms
of higher proportions of single parenthood in these countries. (As an
index of the number of women who are sexually active outside
marriage, single parenthood is a convenient measure of direct mating
effort.) Lim et al. (2005) also reported that the effects of the sex ratio
(and economic development) on WHO homicides were mediated by
424 N. Barber / Aggression and Violent Behavior 16 (2011) 420–427
individual-level preference of love over status in a prospective mate,
indicating that violent crime increases where a higher premium is
placed on love (or direct mating effort) than social status (suggesting
indirect competition via status enhancement).
Single parenthood is a convenient index of direct mating effort in a
country but it has some problems including co-residence of ostensibly
single parents. Although “single” mothers may well live with the
“single” father of their offspring, cohabiting relationships are briefer
than marriages (Smock, 2000). Given that paternal investment in
offspring is thereby reduced, men can engage in more direct mating
effort (Barber, 2002). The fact that more sexually active women are
without a permanent mate due to rapid dissolution of unions also
creates more opportunities for brief sexual relationships than would
be true if they were formally married. For this reason direct mating
effort is likely to be correlated with reduced paternal (and parental)
investment. This raises the question of whether mating effort, as such,
is the important factor in violent crime, or whether crime is a product
of reduced parental investment.
These factors can be teased apart in time-series analyses by
looking for an immediate effect of single parenthood on crime
(tapping direct mating effort) versus one that is delayed by a
generation (tapping parental investment during childhood of the
criminal). The immediate effect is far more important and when this is
statistically removed, the lagged effect has no predictive power
according to Barber's (2004a) analysis using data for 39 countries.
Such ecological correlations are provocative but they do not fill in the
causal mechanisms through which mating effort might increase
violent crime. Before attempting to fill in the causal links between
mating effort and violent behavior, it is helpful to think about these
phenomena in a broad anthropological perspective.
5. The anthropology of mating aggression and violent crime
In subsistence societies lacking frequent warfare, the primary
motive for homicide seems to be sexual competition among men
including the jealous aggression associated with lover's triangles
where men kill unfaithful spouses as well as sexual competitors (Daly
& Wilson, 1988). This generalization prevails around the world from
the !Kung of the Kalahari Desert in South Africa, to the Inuit of North
America, the Tiwi of North Australia, the Siriono of Bolivia, and the
Arapesh of New Guinea (Symons, 1979). Moreover, sexual jealousy is
the primary motive for violence against women in nation states
around the world (Barber, 2002; Daly & Wilson, 1988).
There has been little systematic cross-societal investigation of the
association between mating competition and violent crime. Never-
theless, several plausible indices of mating competition are positively
correlated with violent crimes in cross-national research. Violent
crime correlates positively, if weakly, with divorce rates in developed
countries, for instance (Neapolitan, 1999).
In societies with high rates of divorce, there are more sexually active
unmarried reproductive-age women, and hence a rationale for
increased direct mating effort by men. A similar logic applies to societies
with a scarcity of males having more violence given that such scarcity
promotes premarital sexuality (Barber, 2000a,b,c, 2001, 2002, 2007)
because it is more difficult for women to marry creating a pool of
sexually active single women. Conversely, a scarcity of women
promotes premarital (and extramarital) chastity. These ideas suggest
that violent crime should be linked to the marriage market in
predictable ways. If such patterns exist what is the best way of
interpreting them, bearing in mind that such evidence is correlational?
6. How to make sense of data linking marriage markets and
violent crime
Considerable evidence thus shows that violent crime rates are
higher in countries where males make up a lower proportion of the
population. These data are counterintuitive given that crime rates are
higher in males than females in all nations and thus call for
explanation and discussion. The results are quite general showing
up in several different data sets for different populations, various time
periods, and using different analytic approaches (cross-national,
ecological comparisons within countries, individual-level, cross-
sectional, time-series, and so on.
It is reasonable to suspect that such results might be due to the
effects of various confounding variables. Yet, marriage-market effects
on crime persist despite controlling most or all of relevant control
variables. This task is most easily accomplished in cross-national
comparisons because there are rather few reliable cross-national
predictors of violent crime (Barber, 2000a; Neapolitan, 1997). The
effect could not be attributed to economic development, income
inequality, urbanization, level of policing, or the presence of a major
international drug trafficking network (Barber, 2009a). (Warfare
could also be ruled out because none of the countries in this study was
actually at war and violent military deaths are not classified as
murders or homicides in any case.)
We may thus conclude that violent crime rates are indeed higher
in countries where there is a relative scarcity of males, despite the fact
that males are considerably more prone to criminal violence than
females. Although other possible third variables might explain this
effect, it is difficult to imagine what they might be, given that there is
no other known factors with a sufficiently large effect size in cross-
national research on violent crime to qualify as alternative explana-
tions (Neapolitan, 1997). Admittedly, most researchers have paid
insufficient attention to the role of single parenthood and the lack of
current data is a real problem here. When Barber (2009a) controlled
for teen parenthood as a proxy for the unavailable data on single
parenthood, he found that this had little effect on the conclusion that
countries with a greater proportion of adult men in the population
have lower crime rates. See Schmitt (2005) for analysis of other
possible third variables connecting sex ratios and sexual behavior,
that might also be relevant to violent crime. Moreover, this
counterintuitive effect of the sex ratio on violent crime is larger,
more consistent, and better established perhaps than any other factor
in comparative research (Walsh, 2003).
Much data thus confirm Barber's (2000a) finding of crime
decreasing as masculinity of the population declined. These data are
correlational, of course, and subject to various interpretations apart
from the causal conclusion that the level of violence is determined by
direct mating competition in countries experiencing a scarcity of men.
As to homicides, for instance, it is theoretically possible that the
direction of causality is reversed and that a high murder rate simply
serves to remove more males than females from the population. There
are two good reasons for doubting this interpretation. First, other
crimes, such as rapes and assaults, that do not subtract males from the
population have similar correlations with the sex ratio (Barber, 2000a,
2004). Second, homicides are too rare to have much of an impact on
the sex ratio. Based on cross-national data, homicide rates generally
average fewer than 8 per 100,000. Over the adult life of the individual,
this amounts to less than 0.5% and would not be expected to have a
detectable impact on sex ratios expressed as whole percentages
(Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, 2006). Lim et al. (2005) also suggest
that violence in low-sex-ratio societies is due to the greater resource
competition among women unable to find mates, which would be a
rival explanation to the mating aggression approach developed in this
paper. Yet, when one considers that women's rates of violent crime
are an order of magnitude lower than those of men (Daly & Wilson,
1988), this is an almost absurdly inadequate alternative explanation.
How, then, are we to explain why low-sex-ratio countries, and
societies in general, are so violent according to analysis of various
crime data (Barber, 2000a, 2009a,b)? A plausible interpretation is that
when men are in greater demand in the marriage market than
women, more females are sexually active outside marriage, either
 N. Barber / Aggression and Violent Behavior 16 (2011) 420–427
because they are unable to marry, or because they use sexual intimacy
as a technique for competing over the romantic attentions of desirable
men (Guttentag & Secord, 1983). This sets the scene for more
extensive direct mating competition by men — a process that is
inherently violent due to a great variety of behavioral, physiological,
and societal mechanisms. Conversely, in societies having a scarcity of
females, women are more sexually restrictive and are less likely to be
sexually active outside marriage as this harms their otherwise
excellent marriage prospects. Because so few women are sexually
active outside marriage, direct mating competition is not a viable
strategy for men given that their sexual options are determined by the
sexual proclivities of women. Although the marriage market is
currently the most plausible explanation for societal variation in
violent crime based on the empirical research, it is certainly not, at
this point, the preferred interpretation among criminologists and
social scientists.
7. Alternative theoretical explanations for variation in
violent crime
The evidence implicating direct mating competition among men in
violent crime is thus rich, if mostly indirect, but it is not the only
current interpretation of the evidence, or even the one most widely
used. Many social scientists and other scholars prefer to discuss the
association between violence and sexuality in terms of declining
moral values that would permit both extramarital sexuality and
impulsive violence to occur in the same societies. This approach is
inherently circular and cannot be taken seriously as a scientific
explanation, however, and the same is true of other cultural
determinist approaches that refer to a culture of violence (Barber,
2004, 2005, 2007, 2008).
Although expectations about sexual behavior, and about violent
behavior, do clearly vary from one society to another, such phenomena
can be explained in terms of objective differences in the marriage
market and its economic influences (Abrahamson, 1998; Barber, 2000b,
c, 2001, 2002; Guttentag & Secord, 1983). The same argument applies to
antisocial impulses more generally, including interpersonal violence
(Barber, 2007). Many scholars who are not interested in evolutionary
explanations of violent crime also prefer to discuss various psychological
factors (lack of social trust, frustration, etc.) that mediate the connection
between country differences in economics or sex ratios and violent
crime (reviewed in Lim et al., 2005). Ideally, such approaches could be
reconciled with the evolutionary one developed here but doing so is
beyond the scope of this paper.
Societal variation in violent crime is partly a manifestation of male
reproductive competition — based on evolved psychological predis-
positions — playing out in modern social contexts. Greater under-
standing of the means through which social contexts either reduce, or
increase, direct sexual competition is thus of central importance for
understanding societal variation in criminal violence. Such work holds
out the promise of providing a natural-science explanation for
variation among modern societies that would replace moralistic, or
cultural-determinist alternatives (Barber, 2007). It is also important
to grasp the anthropological and sociological contexts of violence as
these affect the form of marriage — even whether it persists — with
implications for mating effort and violence. How does increasing
mating effort on the part of men boost violent crime rates?
8. Filling in the causal mechanisms through which mating
competition increases violence
How can direct male mating competition increase violent crime?
At least three levels of mechanisms may be involved: sociological,
behavioral, and physiological. At a sociological level, patterns of
association play a clear role. Thus, (mainly) young men assemble
wherever sexually active women may be encountered. Venues such as
425
night clubs and bars, are characterized by exceptionally high levels of
male–male violence (Peterson, Krivo, & Harris, 2000). Apart from the
obvious fact that crimes of violence are bound to be more probable at
locations where violence-prone individuals meet, why are such
venues particularly likely to evoke crimes of violence? This question
gets at the underlying behavioral mechanisms.
At the behavioral level, violence frequently breaks out at night
clubs, bars, and other such dating venues over issues of “face,” or
dyadic social status among possible mating competitors. Such
incidents may be provoked by one person accidentally jostling
another in a crowded room, or getting into a dispute over who is
next to play on a pool table. When these disputes come to the
attention of police, due to property damage or injury, they are
classified as “trivial altercations,” because they appear to lack
adequate motivation. Yet, there is a loss of status by men who back
down in such confrontations. The view that such violence is really a
form of mating aggression rests on the claim that combatants in these
altercations are often known to each other, implying a plausible
scenario of repeated encounters in which status-related conflict
recurs. Loss of face impairs their reputation and status among peers
and thereby indirectly reducing their appeal as dating partners
(Barber, 2002; Daly & Wilson, 1988).
Such hot-headedness is particularly characteristic of young
adulthood and reflects physiological influences (the third category
of causes), particularly levels of testosterone and other androgens
(Archer, 2006). This is a complex relationship because testosterone
levels are temporarily increased by competitive situations, and even
by sexual relationships (Archer, 2006).
It may be over simplistic to attribute criminal violence to any
single hormone. However, in view of the comparative evidence for
other species, this caveat is generally overstated. In other words,
anyone who denies that androgens play an important role in violent
behavior, including violent crime runs the risk of ignoring a pattern of
evidence supportive of the contrary position. Thus, the time course of
testosterone production is linked in interesting ways to both mating
competition and crime. Young men experience peaks of criminal
incidence and testosterone production at around the same ages
(Archer, 2006; von der Pahlen, Sarkola, Seppa, & Eriksson, 2002).
Criminal violence is associated with testosterone levels in other data.
With marriage, men experience a simultaneous decline in criminal
offending and testosterone levels (Booth & Dabbs, 1993; Mazur &
Michalek, 1998) compared to single men of the same age. The
relationship between testosterone and violence might be causal,
although the true experiments necessary to draw this conclusion have
not been conducted and could not be conducted on humans for ethical
reasons. Divorce is something of a natural experiment in this respect,
however, because when previously married men begin dating again,
their testosterone rises against the normal tendency to decrease with
age and they are more likely to commit crimes of violence (Mazur &
Michalek, 1998). Both phenomena may reflect a tendency to begin
staying out late at night in bars and other dating venues as well as
increased alcohol consumption (Waite & Gallagher, 2000). In other
words, it may be that testosterone boosts violent crime but there are
many possible third variables in this relationship, several having to do
with resumption of dating behavior and frequenting high-crime
dating locations, such as bars. Increased alcohol consumption is yet
another possible third variable connecting masculine divorce with
increased risk of violent behavior.
Alcohol consumption disinhibits aggressive behavior. The disin-
hibiting effects of alcohol and other recreational drugs is widely
recognized as a prominent factor in the physiology of violent crime
(Giancola, 2002; Norris, Davis, George, Martell, & Heiman, 2002). By
reducing serotonin activity in the brain, alcohol contributes to
impulsive aggression. (Alcohol actually reduces testosterone levels.)
There is thus a rich network of factors associated with direct sexual
competition that mediate the connection between scarcity of males in
426 N. Barber / Aggression and Violent Behavior 16 (2011) 420–427
the population and violent crime. Investigation of these probable links
opens up many avenues for future research. In establishing such
linkages, it is important to emphasize that crimes of violence are quite
rare in our society: most dating men do not engage in violent
behavior, although this might have been more common in forager
communities (Symons, 1979). However rare crimes of violence are,
contemporary societies with more extramarital sexuality do have
more violence on account of direct reproductive competition and the
psychological adaptations underlying it. Such variation in sexual
behavior is a key factor in accounting for societal differences in violent
crime.
9. Discussion and conclusions
The impact of direct mating competition on violent crime
committed by males is substantial in terms of the variance explained.
This key empirical role has been largely ignored by criminologists and
other social scientists to date (but see Walsh, 2003). The reasons for
this relative neglect are probably complex but three reasons seem
particularly obvious. First, the study of crime is compartmentalized
separately from the study of sexuality in an academic world that
encourages, and rewards, specialization and discourages synthesis.
Second, criminology is a branch of sociology, a discipline that has been
particularly slow to adopt the sort of evolutionary analysis that is best
suited for integrating research on sexuality with research on violent
crime (Barber, 2008; Lopreato & Crippen, 1999). Third, sociologists
have been more interested in accounting for violent crime (and crime
more generally) in terms of economic factors, such as poverty, or
income inequality, rather than in terms of sexual behavior. Such
factors are related to crime rates in comparative analyses (Pridemore
& Trent, 2010) but that may be because poverty and inequality
undermine marriage as a reproductive strategy (Barber, 2006, 2008).
Although the empirical support for a connection between marriage
markets and violent crime is very good, skeptical readers might
question the practical importance of such findings. To begin with, if
academics who study violent crime are unwilling to be receptive to
the key explanatory role of mating aggression, then its clear relevance,
and predictive value may not matter greatly. Taking an optimistic
perspective, criminologists of the future may become more receptive
to evolutionary ideas.
There is an even more sobering reason that connecting marriage
markets with mating aggression and violent crime may prove to be of
limited value. That is that marriage itself is on the decline so that the
orderly relationship between marriage markets and crime may no
longer be discernible.
Marriage is declining in many developed countries by many
different measures such as declining marriage rates and increasing
divorce rates. A century ago, divorce rates in the U.S., and in Europe
were very low (typically well below 5% of marriages) whereas divorce
rates in these countries today are typically around 50% of marriage
rates (Martinson, 2006; OECD, 2010; Shorter, 1975). The proportion of
births outside wedlock has followed a similar trajectory. Another
revealing statistic is the proportion of young women who cohabit. In
some European countries this number had exceeded 50% of women
aged 20–25 years by the end of the 20th Century (Chesnais, 1996),
implying that sexual relations outside marriage is now the majority
practice there.
On the surface, these data suggest that marriage is on the verge of
disappearing. Yet, marriage rates are much higher in some developed
countries than others, e.g., the U.S. Another qualification is that formal
marriage can be mostly replaced by de facto marriage without much
apparent change in living arrangements, or in the quality of life of
children, as illustrated by secular change in Swedish marriage
(Popenoe, 1988). Although young Swedes are mostly uninterested
in formal marriage, children are very likely to spend their early years
under the same roof as their fathers and formal marriage may have
minimal practical consequences so far as reducing male–male mating
competition (and violent crime) is concerned. Moreover, the
association between single parenthood and child poverty found in
Britain, the U.S., and other countries is not seen in Sweden where
households with children are more affluent, on average, than
households without children, reflecting state subsidies for raising
children (Home sweet home, 1995). Consequently, there is little
economic motive for formal marriage and marriage rates in Sweden
are indeed low. What is more, Swedish children born to single
mothers are as healthy as children of married parents and no more
likely to be involved in serious crime, drug dependency, or unplanned
teenage pregnancy.
One of the key practical differences between formal marriage and
cohabitation is that common-law unions are significantly shorter. The
most common explanation for this difference is that cohabitation
arrangements are entered into without as much of an emotional
commitment, so that the union is more likely to break up (Smock,
2000). Another issue is that legal marriages have more inertia because
they are more difficult and expensive to dissolve, often with adverse
economic consequences for either, or both, parties, such as payment
of alimony, or a reduced standard of living following the divorce due
to maintaining two residences rather than one.
Ancestral marriage contracts came into being among foragers
because men who stayed with their spouse and helped her to raise
children were more reproductively successful than men who
attempted to father children with multiple mates without investing
substantially in any of them. Similarly, women who opted for
permanent marriages were more reproductively successful than
those who mated with several men without securing investment in
their offspring.
This basic bargaining arrangement between the sexes was
maintained following the Agricultural Revolution in which men
continued to play a key role in food production, particularly given that
they frequently owned land, provided needed labor, or maintained
control over technologies of food production, such as by fashioning
plows, raising draught animals, or organizing crop rotations (Sakala,
2000). It is, however disrupted by modern economic conditions. As
women became more economically independent, thanks to increased
participation in paid employment, and increasing wages relative to
men, there was an increase in the proportion of births to unmarried
women, as reflected in Barber's (2003c) cross-national analysis.
Women's economic independence is also bolstered by welfare states
having generous child support provisions and this is one reason that
more births are to single women in social democracies as opposed to
countries like the U.S., where social welfare programs relevant to
women of reproductive age are targeted more narrowly at low-
income individuals.
Although female economic independence might appear threaten-
ing to the continued existence of marriage (Popenoe, 1988), this is not
necessarily true. One reason is that marriage provides appreciable
household economies so that married couples may accumulate more
capital than single people having the same combined income (Waite
& Gallagher, 2000). Marriage can thus be considered a social mobility
strategy as well as a reproductive strategy. That helps explain why
single parenthood remains rare among middle class women in the U.S.
whereas it is much more common among low-income women
(Abrahamson, 1998) suggesting that middle class people are more
interested in social mobility. If marriage promotes social mobility, this
would also explain other puzzling phenomena, such as a tendency for
women who begin their families as single mothers to marry
subsequently, a pattern that is fairly common among African
Americans, for instance (Burton, 1990).
There is a certain irony in seeking to establish the connection
between marriage markets and violent crime at a time when marriage
is becoming much less frequent and could actually disappear. Even
if marriage is about to disappear (and this is highly uncertain)
 N. Barber / Aggression and Violent Behavior 16 (2011) 420–427
understanding the connection between marriage markets and violent
crime, as mediated by male–male mating aggression is just as
important. By studying the simpler historical case in which most
women married, we are in a better position to identify the key
independent variables underlying societal differences in interpersonal
aggression. We are then in a position to apply that knowledge to a
more complex post-marriage world (if that is what transpires). This
paper has sketched out the sociological, behavioral, and physiological
mechanisms through which male–male direct mating competition
increases crimes of violence. The focus on males is justified by their
huge overrepresentation in crimes of violence. A similar analysis
could be applied to females.
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