Sexual Attraction and Inter-sexual Dominance among Virtual Agents

In many group-living primates, males are dominant over females, but despite this dominance, they allow females access to resources during the period when females are sexually attractive but only then and not otherwise. Conventionally, such male ‘courtesy’ is explained as a special strategy to gain mating access to females. In the present paper I propose a simpler hypothesis that is based on an agent-centered model, namely that male ‘courtesy’ to females is in fact a kind of ‘timidity’ that arises because sexual attraction automatically increases female dominance. The model consists in a homogeneous, virtual world with agents that group and perform dominance interactions. VirtualMales have a higher intensity of aggression and start with a greater capacity to win conflicts than VirtualFemales. I shall explain how the addition of attraction of VirtualMales by VirtualFemales leads to female dominance, and other phenomena that are relevant to the study of animal behaviour.