Rebecka Kathleen Hahnel-Peeters

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University of Texas at Austin | UT · Department of Psychology

Research on men's sexual exploitation of women has documented that men's psychology tracks cues associated with the ease of women's exploitability. In the current studies, we examined a different class of cues hypothesized to aid men's use of sexually exploitative strategies: environmental cues to the likelihood of discovery. We defined likelihood...

Femicide refers to the general and intentional killing of a woman (Taylor & Jasinski, 2011). Evolutionary psychology and sexual conflict theory provide a unique framework through which to understand femicide (Buss, 2017; Parker, 1979). Sexual conflict theory hypothesizes that evolved psychological mechanisms selected across evolutionary time produc...

Sexual fantasies are private experiences often unconstrained by social norms (Ellis & Symons, 1990). In this entry, we discuss the differences between erotic and aversive rape fantasies, different perspectives on the function and origin of rape fantasies, and how sexual fantasies surrounding non-consensual sexual relationships may invoke sexual gui...

Sexual orientation refers to a pattern of emotional, romantic, or sexual attractions to men, women, or both (American Psychological Association, 2008). Sexual fluidity is a situation-dependent flexibility in manifestations of sexual responsiveness (Diamond, 2008). Women are more fluid across sexual orientations compared to men. In this entry, we di...

Rape myth acceptance (RMA) is the acceptance of false beliefs, stereotypes, and statements about rape victims, perpetrators, and the act itself. RMA positively predicts shame felt by victims and negatively predicts reports of sexual victimization. Knowledge about sexual violence changes over time; accordingly, psychometric scales measuring RMA shou...

Previous research argues that female choice may not be as powerful an influence on the evolution of human mating preferences as once expected given the importance of parental choice in marital practices across cultures. Furthermore, much data supporting this argument assumes that endorsed cultural norms reported in the ethnographic record accuratel...

Presentation of research replicating and expanding upon unpublished data from Buss and Schmitt (1998) investigating how accurate/inaccurate each sex is at predicting the sexual desires of the opposite sex and the average member of their own sex. Specifically, participants were asked questions derived from the seminal sexual strategies theory (Buss...

The reproductive self-interest model of morality (RSIMM) is a framework for understanding moral judgments associated with sexual behavior. This model posits that individual differences in sexual strategies, mediated by one’s religiosity and political orientation, casually influence people’s moral judgments toward social hot-button issues. Previous...

The bodyguard hypothesis posits that women cultivate and use bodyguards to provide protection against sexual violence. Bodyguards are defined as individuals in social relationships with the target who provide protection by deterring would-be sexual assaulters, physically intervening during an attempted assault, or seeking revenge against a perpetra...

The reproductive self-interest model of morality (RSIMM) is a framework for understanding moral judgments associated with sexual behavior. This model posits that individual differences in sexual strategies, mediated by one's religiosity and political orientation, casually influence people's moral judgments toward social hot-button issues. Previous...

Benenson et al. (2022) amass impressive evidence of robust sex differences as support for expanding “staying alive” theory. We argue for a broader and more domain-specific conceptualization focusing on life history tradeoffs between survival and mating success. Using three examples – women's disgust, fear of rape, and cultivation of bodyguards – we...

Rape myth acceptance (RMA) is the acceptance of false beliefs, stereotypes, and statements about rape, victims, and perpetrators (Burt, 1980). Rape myths become outdated as we learn more about sexual violence. Therefore, psychometric scales should be updated periodically to reflect the more nuanced phenomenon of rape myth acceptance. Several items...

Friends bolster health and happiness, with friend preferences directing us toward friends who can facilitate this. Intuition and research alike suggest people prefer friends to be kind and trustworthy and disfavor viciousness and indifference (and befriend the similar, familiar, nearby). Taking a target-specific approach, we predict and find people...

Landscapes varied throughout human history, some offering more fitness benefits than others. Therefore, natural selection has likely designed in us landscape preferences that motivated us to seek some environments over others (Orians, 1980). These evolved landscape preferences may influence several aspects of modern-day society, including how we ma...

In a review of evolutionary analysis of human behavior, Alden Smith (2000) argues that evolutionary anthropology and evolutionary psychology should not be considered competing disciplines. If evolutionary anthropology and psychology were to become more collaborative, it would aid our understanding of human nature – regardless of the different assum...

The vertical-horizontal illusion is the overestimation of a vertical line compared to a horizontal line of the same length. Jackson and Cormack (2007) proposed that the vertical-horizontal illusion might be a byproduct of the mechanisms that generate the environmental vertical illusion, which is the tendency to overestimate vertical distances (i.e....

We respond to Gallup’s (2020) opinion piece by indicating that psychologists have yet to agree on an operationalized definition of “intelligence.” We offer our understanding of the literature that a decline of human intelligence is mixed; additionally, if a decline in human intelligence was supported, evolutionary scholars are not in a position to...