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The notion of partner‐violence as a male‐perpetrated phenomenon is not a scientific position but an amelioration of cognitive‐dissonance within a political mindset. Against all the data, this ‘gender paradigm’ persists as a series of staged retreats as new research debunks each in turn. Supposed highly sex‐differential injury rates, male unilaterality of perpetration, female self‐defence, male ‘control’, and female especial fear are all discredited as reasons to focus solely on men's aggression. By contrast, scientific theorising regarding the root of the great bulk of partner‐violence is in terms of the biological phenomenon of mate‐guarding. However, the usual model of male proprietariness over female fertility itself is in part a ‘gender paradigm’ position. Recently revealed sex‐symmetries necessitate a major overhaul of this model. Drawing on new understanding of the basis of pair‐bonding, outlined here is a parsimonious account of mate‐guarding as being by both sexes; notably women, owing to sex‐dichotomous mate‐value trajectory. This framework heralds the complete abandonment of the ‘gender paradigm’ and thus the end of a highly inappropriate intrusion of extreme ideology into science.

This study aims to examine how loneliness, romantic relationship status (single/non-single) and romantic attachment factors (sociosexual orientation index (SOI), satisfaction with current relationship) interactively affect conspicuous consumption.

Five quasi-experimental studies were conducted with different measures of conspicuous consumption across a variety of samples (N = 1189).

Study 1 shows that loneliness increased singles’ but not non-singles’ conspicuous consumption. Study 2A further shows the mediating role of the mating motive amongst singles. Study 2B compared conspicuous and inconspicuous consumption and showed no interaction effect between loneliness and romantic relationship status in the domain of inconspicuous consumption. Studies 3 and 4 tested whether the effects of loneliness on non-singles’ conspicuous consumption were moderated by SOI and satisfaction with current relationship, respectively. Specifically, lonely non-singles with high SOI or low satisfaction with current relationship sought conspicuous consumption, but those with low SOI or high satisfaction with the current relationship avoided conspicuous consumption.

This study did not specifically consider different roots of loneliness (lack of romantic love, friendship or family attachment) between singles and non-singles, which future research should explore.

The findings have implications for both marketers and policymakers regarding marketing campaigns for conspicuous products, support programmes satisfying the specific social attachment needs of different lonely people, etc.

This study identifies a specific social attachment desire of the lonely, namely, romantic motive, by which loneliness influences singles’ and non-singles’ conspicuous consumption in different ways. The findings suggest the value of distinguishing types of loneliness.

Women’s conspicuous display of luxury brands is known to serve the purpose of sending signals to other women, but little is known about how men interpret those signals. The purpose of this paper is to elucidate how men interpret the signals sent by women displaying luxury brands.

An interpretivist approach and phenomenological methods were applied, involving interviews with selected men in Hong Kong.

The men interviewed suggested that if a woman’s overall image matches that of the brands she displays and the situation, luxurious brands can amplify the woman’s beauty and perceived class status. However, if these factors clash, men react negatively and tend to view the woman as engaging in impression management and pretending to have high social status unjustifiably.

The sample for this phenomenological study was limited to Hong Kong men only. Culture must, almost by definition, influence men’s views toward women and branded products, so similar exploratory research in other cultures seems justified.

The findings suggest that marketers should offer “brand education” to help make their female consumers aware of the images their products are trying to establish, and what are the appropriate usage situations. Such consumer education would also reduce the risk of negative image transfer from the brand user to the brands.

The current understanding of female luxury brand signals is limited to female-vs-female intra-sexual competition. By examining how men interpret female luxury brand signals, this research addresses an important research gap.

In this chapter, I use the term “biopolitics” to mean evolutionarily informed political science. Politics has been characterized as “Who gets what, when, and how” (Lasswell, 1936), but rather than about material possessions, politics is understood to be about power, more specifically about collective power, especially differential group power competition, hierarchy and stratification in power distribution, and the universal struggle to enhance power, and to maintain or challenge/destroy this status quo. Politics “should be found in any system of nature in which conflicts of interest exist among cooperating organic units” (Johnson, 1995, p. 279). My main focus will be competitive intergroup relations in monkeys and apes, or as I (van der Dennen, 1995) called it “intergroup agonistic behavior” (IAB). I also briefly treat interindividual and intercoalitionary agonistic behavior when relevant.

Brand prominence describes the conspicuousness of a brand on a product. The purpose of this research is to investigate the types of brand prominence variation.

Utilizing an exploratory approach, 20 in-depth interviews were conducted where respondents created five outfits for anticipated social scenarios. The prominence of brands on these outfits were photographed, catalogued and qualitatively analyzed for thematic variation. Then, the brand prominence data points were quantitatively content analyzed.

The results from the qualitative analysis is an organizing framework describing three major types of brand prominence variation: brand visibility, brand frequency and brand distribution. In addition, heat maps were generated to visually display the prominence of brands distributed on the individual’s body. Subsequent results from the quantitative content analysis revealed that brands on shoes and pants were most likely to display significant levels of prominence in relation to frequency and visibility dimensions. Significant differences across participant demographic groups were also found in terms of the brand visibility.

This new information on brand prominence variation provides business brand managers with insight on how to measure and monitor their own levels of brand prominence displays. They, in turn, can engage in more strategic placement and prominence of their brands in the future production of fashionable clothes, shoes and accessories.

The conspicuous consumption literature has long been interested in studying how consumers display their brands. The current study demonstrates how consumer researchers can measure brand prominence variation and therefore gain better insight on the consumer who engages in conspicuous consumption via brand prominence variation.

The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between self-consciousness and physical attractiveness from a psychological perspective, examining the relationship of physical attractiveness with the three dimensions of self-consciousness.

The research involved investigating the relationship between self-consciousness and physical attractiveness, focusing on how the three self-consciousness dimensions (i.e., private self-consciousness, public self-consciousness and social anxiety) affected physical attractiveness. Clustering techniques using self-organizing maps of data mining and decision trees were used in this study. The primal concept of clustering entails grouping unsorted and disorganized raw data and arranging data with similar properties into clusters. Classification primarily involves establishing classification models according to the category attributes of existing data. These models can be used to predict the classes of new data and determine interdata relationships and data characteristics.

Public self-consciousness was most strongly related to physical attractiveness, whereas the other two dimensions exhibited no obvious relationship to physical attractiveness. It may be concluded that people with higher physical attractiveness draw attention from others more easily and are more likely to be evaluated positively, and that they thus tend to be more confident in front of others and less likely to care about the opinions of others. Alternatively, perhaps people with lower public self-consciousness care less about how others view them and have the courage to express themselves, which signifies confidence and increases their physical attractiveness.

This research investigated the importance of self-consciousness that may apply to recruitment in practice. People with low public self-consciousness may have high confidence and efficiency. People have low social anxiety may not be nervous or anxious in public and easy to speak to strangers. This kind of employees are appropriate for the jobs involving team work and interaction such as public relations. Hence, companies can apply our findings to search appropriate employees except the first impression of appearance.

The results revealed that high physical attractiveness is related to low public self-consciousness, whereas low physical attractiveness is related to high public self-consciousness. Good-looking people tend to attract attention from others. The relationship between private self-consciousness and physical attractiveness is non-significant. The relationship between social anxiety and physical attractiveness is non-significant.