Macho guys are usually portrayed as go-it-alone heroes in the movies, but Hollywood may have gotten it wrong.
New study suggests that men with macho faces may actually be surprisingly cooperative, if needed by their home teams:
"Men with wider faces have typically been portrayed as 'bad to the bone,'" study researcher Michael Stirrat of the University of St. Andrews in the United Kingdom said in a statement. [...]
The wider a man's face, the less likely he was to cooperate with his group when told that he'd be compared with other men from his school. But when given an outside rival, these broad-faced macho guys got competitive. Suddenly, they became more likely than average to gamble their own money for the good of their group.
The findings reveal that masculine traits can come out in both pro-social and anti-social ways. In other words, masculine guys may be more aggressive in general, but their manly characteristics are downright warm-and-fuzzy in some circumstances, such as when they need to support the home team.
Link (Image: Macho Tissues from the NeatoShop)
They are still being aggressive and hostile it's just directed toward out-group members.
This is entirely consistent with what we already know about differences in in-group and out-group behavior of dominant and aggressive males.
Male chimps will smack subordinate in-group chimps around a bit, but they will violently tear the testicles off of an out-group chimp and beat him with his own nads until he's dead.
"warm and fuzzy" yea, right.