The tend-and-befriend theoretical model was originally developed by Shelley E. Taylor and her research team at the University of California, Los Angeles and first described in a Psychological Review article published in the year 2000.
Studies conducted by Repetti (1989) show that mothers respond to highly stressful workdays by providing more nurturing behaviors towards their children.
Furthermore, physical contact between mothers and their offspring following a threatening event decreased HPA activity and sympathetic nervous system arousal.
Humans are born helpless and altricial, mature slowly, and depend on parental investment well into their young adult lives, and often even later.
Group living provides numerous benefits, including protection from predators and cooperation to achieve shared goals and access to resources.
[1][14] In spite of the large cultural diversity within this six-culture sample, none of the societies included demonstrated matrilineal tendencies, which have been found to negate and cancel out many supposedly "universal" sex differences (see "criticism" section below).
Additionally, the metrics used by the Whitings for evaluating sex differences in social support are somewhat questionable in their ability to predict friendship and relational quality and solidarity.
Many other surveys and tests, for instance, find that males actually demonstrate a greater degree of social support than women do in many non-western cultures, particularly from same-gender friendship networks.
[15][16][17] Human and animal studies (reviewed in Taylor et al., 2000) suggest that oxytocin is the neuroendocrine mechanism underlying the female "befriend" stress response.
One hypothesis is that men's responses to stress (which include aggression, social withdrawal, and substance abuse) place them at risk for adverse health-related consequences.
[25][26][27][28][29] Group living and affiliation with multiple unrelated others of the same sex (who do not share genetic interests) also presents the problem of competing for access to limited resources, such as social status, food, and mates.
In environments with a female-biased sex ratio, where males are a more limited resource, female-to-female competition for mates is intensified, sometimes even resorting to violence.
[34] In contrast, resource competition did not increase direct aggression in either men or women when they were asked to imagine themselves married and with a young child[citation needed].
[34] Therefore, women are believed by certain researchers to respond to threats by tending and befriending, and female aggression is often indirect and covert in nature to avoid retaliation and physical injury.
Like most evolutionary psychological theories related to sex differences in behavior, the "tend and befriend" model relies on a great deal of speculation, projection of present-day data into the distant past, untestable and unfalsifiable hypotheses, and reliance on a model of gender essentialism which has come under increasing critique from various social scientists in recent years.
One major issue from an anthropological standpoint is the considerable diversity of gendered norms and behaviors in traditional societies, and the difficulty for western researchers to interpret these adequately using quantitative and etic means.
For instance, anthropologists working within a psychoanalytic framework often set out on their project expecting to find cross-cultural confirmation of western gendered ideas such as castration anxiety or the Oedipus complex, only to run into considerable difficulty when non-western societies frequently deviate from these perceived "universal" norms.
[37][38] Sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists in general have come under fire for cherry-picking and misinterpreting cross-cultural data in order to align with preconceptions about the universality of "human nature", and then accusing cultural anthropologists of various cognitive biases and over-reliance on the alleged "standard social science model".
Some researchers have found apparently consistent differences across countries favoring women's greater sociability and agreeableness (the dimensions most likely to map onto the tend and befriend theory).
[41] However, there are considerable variations between countries, particularly on extraversion, which would seem to frustrate any attempt to find universal bidirectional patterns favoring women's greater tendencies towards cooperative or gregarious behaviors.
There is a rich body of data illustrating greater tendencies among women in various cultures toward cooperation, less overt competitiveness, more pro-social and nurturant responses, and preference for indirect and non-confrontational speech styles.
This is important since matrilineal and bilateral descent is consistently associated with elimination or even reversal of purported gender differences in competitiveness versus co-operation.
[43][44][45] Folklore illustrates another piece of evidence for the diversity of gendered behavioral norms; while the familiar construction of dominant and assertive males vs submissive and nurturing females is replicated frequently in cross-cultural folklore motifs, there are notable exceptions and instances of reversed motifs (dominant and assertive females, submissive and nurturing males) in monogamous or matrilineal cultures like the Kadiweu and the Palikur.
[48] The tend and befriend model also assumes a lower emotional and psychological quality to male same-sex friendships as compared to those between women, interpreting the former as largely "instrumental" and focused on giving and returning favors, building coalitions or acquiring resources while the latter function as superior means of social support.
This claim runs squarely counter to data finding that male friendships are equally if not more valuable to men's psychological well-being and societal adjustment than women's.
[51] In the past, before globalization and industrialization standardized the modern cultural traits of males disproportionately "projecting inward" by killing themselves or using maladaptive coping mechanisms (such as substance abuse), such homosocial intimacy may have been higher across much of the world.