My 23-year-old nephew is a nice guy, a college grad with a good job who's a loving pet owner. The women in the family love his ironic mustache, his tattoos, and his way of making people laugh, but the men, including my husband, tend to see him in a negative light. I struggle to understand why they think so little of him. But maybe that's it: My nephew's not a big guy. He's maybe 5-foot-6, and while that's not terribly short, my family skews tall, with all the other men 6-foot-3 and over. From reading evolutionary theory in your books and columns, I'm wondering, might these men subconsciously dislike him because he's small? If so, is there any way to get them to see him in a better light?

--Concerned Aunt

Your nephew sounds like a good guy who'll eventually be some lucky woman's three-fourths and only.

You're on to something about height affecting our evaluation of other people. Evolutionary researchers Gert Stulp and Abraham "Bram" Buunk observe that, across cultures, "taller stature" is linked with higher social status, and historically, "The term 'big man' has been used to denote an individual of both high social status and physical stature."

In fact, the researchers explain, because physical dominance was the primary path to power for much of human evolutionary history, "it seems likely that 'big men' experienced increased social status" because of their "physical superiority in competition with others." In other words, though taller doesn't always equal stronger, in general, the bigger the bro, the bigger the beatdown he could dispense.

Today, physical dominance is still the currency of power in really scary neighborhoods (including scary cellblocks). However, a garden gnome-sized man can make up in stacks of thousand-dollar bills the leverage he'd have from physical stature. And recall that would-be duel from "Raiders of the Lost Ark" with some huge creep brandishing a giant scimitar at Harrison Ford -- who simply draws his gun and shoots the guy. Likewise, the local Goliath might be no match for a well-armed Mr. Stubby.

However, though we're living in modern times, the psychology currently driving our behavior is seriously antique, calibrated for the hunter-gatherer way back when. In our modern world, it often leads us to behave in unnecessary and even counterproductive ways. Our psychological response is typically subconscious, so, for example, we might sometimes think less of somebody less-than-towering without understanding why.

This could explain some of the findings Stulp and Buunk cited. Even in "contemporary, industrialized society," tall people rule, achieving "greater levels of upward social mobility." This is seen even when a taller person and a shorter one are siblings with a shared environment (researcher-speak for growing up in the same home). Additionally, from childhood on, "Height may also affect how people perceive themselves, and so influence behavior" (in turn influencing how other people perceive and treat them).

Though prior research finds perceptions of a person's dominance and high status are related to height, Stulp and Buunk's team explored the influence of height on people's behavior. For example, in a narrow pedestrian passageway, they observed that both taller men and taller women were more likely to storm forward unyieldingly, forcing shorter pedestrians to give way and let them pass. Likewise, on a crowded shopping street, when a shortie was coming from the opposite direction, people were less likely to step aside, which resulted in the shorties having more collisions.

After I had you do "homework," asking your male relatives whether they dislike your nephew, and if so, why, you came back on a positive note. They told you they don't dislike him; in fact, they say they like him. They just seem to talk trash about him over his attitudes about money. For example, your husband goes "on and on" about how the nephew's paying too big a monthly nut for his new truck.

Maybe this triggers fears in your husband that he'll be asked for money if the guy loses his job, and he's just venting. And going back to the evolutionary well, gossip is sometimes used as a form of signaling. Perhaps your husband and other men in the family OMG-ing about the big bucks for the truck are ultimately promoting themselves as fiscally wiser.

You do say the older dudes in the family don't have such a harsh attitude about other (taller) young nephews who are less responsible and together than the travel-sized one. So, maybe there is diminished respect for him because of his shorter stature. It's really impossible to do more than loosely speculate. All in all, you probably don't need to worry about your nephew, because he sounds happy and well-adjusted. Over time, I suspect the men in your family will come to realize that some stories just aren't complete without the little guys. (Consider: "Snow White and the Seven Los Angeles Lakers.")

For pages and pages of "science-help" from me, buy my latest book, "Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence." It lays out the PROCESS of transforming to live w/confidence.

I was dismayed at how off-base you were when I read your response to a woman wanting to give her female friend advice to stop her from dating and hooking up so much after her breakup. It's common knowledge that it's men who go off on women for being promiscuous and tell them to not dress sexy. It's one more form of patriarchal control. Why blame women for this?

--Angry Woman Living In The Real World

When men at construction sites catcall women, it generally isn't with remarks like, "If you had more self-respect, you'd wear a nice, classy long skirt."

There is a widely held belief that it's mainly men who try to curtail women's sexual expression -- particularly that of single women -- raging at them for engaging in hookup-athons or wearing skirts the size of an airmail stamp. There are men who do this, especially in repressive cultures, and even in our own.

But if you give this notion some thought, with an eye to our evolved psychology, it really doesn't make sense. Men and women evolved to have different mating strategies based on their physical differences, like how women can get pregnant from sex and left with a howling child to feed and care for. This probably worked out better -- meaning an ancestral woman was more likely to leave surviving descendants to pass on her genes -- if she didn't end up a single mom digging for grubs on the African savanna.

There's a good deal of evidence that female emotions evolved to push women to seek commitment and feel bad when it doesn't seem to be there, even when they hook up with a guy they know they want nothing more to do with. Though many men want (or eventually want) long-term relationships, a man can choose to dad up for a baby that results from sex...or choose to be all "'bye forever!" and still have a good shot at passing on his genes. (Thanks, single lady grub-digging on the savanna!)

This means that casual sex is a mating strategy that tends to be optimal for men in a way it isn't for women. Or, as evolutionary psychologist David Schmitt puts it, "Men tend to desire easy sexual access" to "large numbers of sex partners"; in other words, they tend to be up for casual sex with a slew of hot women (or a slew of women with a pulse).

Getting back to your notion that it's men who tamp down women's sexual expressiveness, sure, if a man's married to a woman, he might ask her to close up a few buttons on her blouse before they go to some pervy neighbor's party. But say the woman in the cleavage-a-boo blouse is not the man's wife. Even if the man is married and faithful, his mind -- his evolved psychology -- probably leads him to read her as a potential sex partner and consciously or subconsciously store her in memory as a "backup mate," a sort of sexual fold-up pocket umbrella (just in case!).

In other words, when a man isn't in a relationship with a particular woman, why would it possibly be in his self-interest to pressure her to dress a little more, um, Amish casual, and to keep her legs crossed until she's Mrs. Somebody?

Research supports this view. Social psychologists Roy Baumeister and Jean Twenge reviewed research on the "cultural" (meaning "societal") suppression of female sexuality, which they define as "a pattern of cultural influence by which girls and women are induced to avoid feeling sexual desire and to refrain from sexual behavior."

They report that "the view that men suppress female sexuality" (like, for example, by punishing women who make sex too available to men) "received hardly any support and is flatly contradicted by some findings. Instead, the evidence favors the view that women have worked to stifle each other's sexuality because sex is a limited resource that women use to negotiate with men, and scarcity gives women an advantage." (Women doing this are typically unaware of this underlying motive.)

Especially recently, people get outraged when scientific findings don't conform with the ideology they hold dear. This is unfortunate because only by finding out the sometimes counterintuitive, counterproductive, and surprising ways we actually think and behave can we choose to act more productively.

Personally, knowing how pernicious, sneaky, and underhanded female intrasexual competition (women competing with other women) can be makes me careful to be assertive in healthy ways and, in social situations, make sure other women feel included and not left out. And really, if you look logically at who benefits from getting hot women to de-hotify, well, lemme know when you find a strip club with dozens of men clamoring for the women there to cover up their enormous breasts and, for God's sake, put on a pair of pants.

For pages and pages of "science-help" from me, buy my latest book, "Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence." It lays out the PROCESS of transforming to live w/confidence.

My friend constantly talks to me about her baby on the way and asks me to help her pick out furniture and clothes for it. This is very painful for me because my husband doesn't want kids and I agreed not to have any. I didn't realize I'd have this deep longing for a child, but I love him and am not willing to leave him. I also have a hard time asking for things, even if a person is my friend. How do I tell her it would be better for me not to talk about this so much without making her feel bad?

--Never-Be Mom

It's hard when hanging out with your friend is one long "Look what the stork is bringing!" and all you can think is "My stork got run over by a bus en route to my house."

Understandably, you don't want your friend to feel bad. But you're protecting your friend's feelings at the expense of your own, feeling extra bad because you aren't telling her you need something from her: to stop bringing you in on crib picks and "which onesie is cuter?" because it shines a spotlight on the bare space in your life where a baby would go.

In other words, she's become a crappy friend to you -- through no fault of her own. Maybe she doesn't know you chose your husband over a baby, or maybe she thinks you've made your peace with that. By keeping mum about your feelings, you've effectively transformed her -- turned her into the pregnant version of some empathetically bankrupt Binge-Shopper Barbie dragging a friend with no head to all the hat sales.

Imagine if you were as attentive to emotional pain as you are to physical pain. If your friend backed her SUV onto your toes, you wouldn't just stand there all, "I have a hard time asking for things, even if a person is my friend." You'd scream; she'd move the thing; and then she'd whisk you off to the nearest urgent care for a lollypop and an X-ray.

In contrast, consider where submerging your emotions, opting for the just-suck-it-up approach, leads. As clinical psychologist Randy Paterson puts it: "If you cannot say no, you are not in charge of your own life." He explains that a "passive" style like yours is "designed to avoid conflict at all costs." (In fact, conflict we avoid doesn't go away; it just eats away at us on the inside.)

Paterson observes that passivity often emerges from a deep fear of being rejected and the mistaken sense that "the way to be accepted and appreciated by others is to give and give." It leads us to keep our opinions to ourselves, give in to unreasonable demands, and generally sell ourselves out in a desperate and typically counterproductive attempt to gain others' approval.

Your passive style might have been protective for you once, like if you were a little kid trying to avoid getting smacked around by violent alcoholic parents. But chances are you've continued using it out of habit, because it's become automatic, not because you closely evaluated it and decided that it still makes sense. And it still might -- that is, if you, as an adult, have fisty alcoholic giants as your legal guardians.

You can choose to shift to a healthier style: assertiveness, sticking up for yourself and your needs in an effort to rebalance your interactions with other people so they feel fairer. You do this by being direct and honest about how you'd like to be treated. State your needs calmly, using respectful language, and do it in a timely way -- as soon as possible -- instead of endlessly festering with resentment that someone hasn't read your mind and changed their behavior accordingly.

Assertiveness is ultimately the active form of self-respect (a person's sense that they have value and thus have the right to ask to be treated as if their needs matter). Keep that in mind when you first start asserting yourself, which is sure to feel seriously uncomfortable and maybe even terrifying. Do it despite that. Refuse to let your fears be the boss of you, turning your life into one big suck-it-up fest.

Be prepared for the other person to disagree with you, dislike what you say, or even get angry. All you can control is your own behavior -- through putting your needs out there in a calm, respectful, timely, and nontoxic way. Mick Jagger, wisely, noted that, "You can't always get what you want." However, you're more likely to have a crack at it if you don't just seethe with anger until your friend finally figures it out at her baby shower (upon unwrapping your generous gift of matching Mommy-and-baby Swarovski-encrusted muzzles).

For pages and pages of "science-help" from me, buy my latest book, "Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence." It lays out the PROCESS of transforming to live w/confidence.

I'm a woman who just turned 30, and so is my best friend, who just got out of a three-year relationship. She's now on the rebound hard-- hitting on her co-workers, going on multiple dates every week, hooking up with different guys all the time, etc. I can't decide whether to admire her confidence or be concerned that she needs constant attention and validation from men. Do you think this is healthy behavior? Should I tell her that she needs to stop acting out and work on healing from her relationship in healthy ways?

--Worried Friend

Nothing like women celebrating other women: "Yay, you, getting in regular workouts doing the walk of shame!"

I get that you mean to help. Uh, help your friend, that is. However, it appears we women evolved to help ourselves by "helping" other women, or as I like to call it, "benevolent meangirling." This plays out, for example, in telling a hot friend in a fabulous little dress, "I have to be honest, that makes you look a bit trampy," and engaging in other acts of humanitarian frankness to help keep her from giving men whiplash and jamming up her evenings with lots of dates.

These acts of female frenemyship are often subconsciously motivated, which is why we can tell ourselves we just want the best for our friends while in fact serving our own evolutionary best interests. Hidden treachery is actually a primary feature of "female intrasexual competition" (women competing with women).

Women are mistakenly seen as the sweeter, kinder sex. You hear people sigh, "If only we had women in charge," as if this would lead to world peace, universal basic income, and cats that paw-dial 911 when their owner dies instead of eating their face. But this view of women as the better half of humanity is psychologically naive. Women aren't less aggressive; they're just differently aggressive.

Aggression gets a bad name because it gives rise to uncomfortable emotions such as fear and, sometimes, to unexpected workplace activities, such as murder-suicide. However, aggression is actually a vital evolved motivation for getting our needs met so we can survive, mate, and leave surviving children to pass on our genes.

Research on sex differences in male and female aggression by psychologists Anne Campbell, Joyce Benenson, and others suggests that while male aggression is direct, manifesting in, say, yelled threats, a punch in the nose, or a barstool upside the head, female aggression tends to be indirect and thus hidden.

Though there are women who get physically violent with each other, Benenson explains that this happens rarely, and usually just in certain contexts (like impoverished neighborhoods). Generally, women fight other women with poisonous veiled aggression such as mean gossip, ostracism, shaming, and sneaky sabotage dressed up as concern for other women's welfare. Campbell contends that covert female aggression likely evolved out of women's need to avoid physical confrontation, which could kill them or damage their reproductive parts, leaving them unable to fulfill their role as an infant's primary caregiver.

Depressing as all this twisted sisterhood stuff surely seems, an inclination to behave a certain way isn't a mandate. So, if you'd prefer to be the sort of woman who acts in her friend's best interests, you can be. However, the reality is we often think we know what's best for somebody else, especially when we believe they're harming themselves. In fact, a person sometimes needs to go a bit wrong to get right again.

When (and if) what they're doing ultimately proves unsatisfying, they'll stop. Telling them to stop can actually be counterproductive, even if you feel sure you have their best interests at heart. Research by psychologist Jack Brehm finds that telling people what they should do seems to make them rebel and do exactly the opposite, like by continuing to do whatever they'd been doing, but louder and harder.

A more effective technique -- one that's proved successful in addiction treatment -- is "motivational interviewing." It starts with asking a person what they value deeply and ultimately want (romantically, in this case). After they reflect on that and answer, ask them how whatever they're currently doing, whatever behavior they're engaging in, aligns with their values and goals.

This technique might not get you immediate answers (or any answers), but you might inspire your friend to reflect on behavior she might be engaging in somewhat automatically. And how nice if you're doing this through some insight of your own -- for example, on sisterhood ideals like, "There's a special place in hell for women who do not create space for other women," and how this can play out in reality: "I want to get your shoes in the shot, doll. Just take two more steps back" (right into that open manhole).

For pages and pages of "science-help" from me, buy my latest book, "Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence." It lays out the PROCESS of transforming to live w/confidence.

My girlfriend got a dog six weeks ago -- a Chihuahua. I don't hate the dog, but I'm not wild about him. I've almost stepped on him twice in the kitchen, and my snuggle time on the couch with my girlfriend has now become me watching him sit in her lap while they cootchie-coo it out. She hasn't had the dog sleep in bed with us, but I know that's next. Is this the end of our relationship?

--Annoyed

It's pretty depressing when doing risky stuff in bed means sleeping without a flea collar.

Though the interspecies bed-sharing you fear has yet to become a reality, chances are it's next, especially if you stick with your current strategy: resenting that the dog's getting all the attention but saying nothing to try to change that.

As humiliating as it is to have your top-dog status usurped by an actual dog, coming to understand the evolved function of jealousy could help you shift your focus -- to see whether you can get your needs met or whether you need to blow this particular doghouse.

Jealousy often gets confused with envy, but evolutionary psychologist David Buss explains that they are "distinct emotions" that motivate "distinctly different" behaviors in line with the differing problems they were "designed" by evolution to solve. Buss' research finds jealousy is activated "when there is a threat to a valued social relationship." Envy, on the other hand, is triggered "when someone else has something that you desire or covet but currently lack."

So, while envy mainly sparks longing (for the things, partner, or relationship someone else has), jealousy mainly arouses fear (of losing one's own partner or friend to someone else). Accordingly, a woman envious of the promotion her co-worker got basically "plays offense": perhaps working harder and sucking up more to the boss in hopes of getting a promotion of her own. A woman experiencing jealousy over her hubby's coziness with his hot female co-worker "plays defense": possibly dressing sexier to compete with her rival in hopes of protecting her relationship against infidelity or "mate-poaching" (the other woman stealing her man).

Though jealousy is seen as maladaptive and toxic, it actually protects our interests, both by flagging threats to a "valued social relationship" -- romantic or platonic -- and by motivating us to fend them off. Research by evolutionary social psychologist Jaimie Arona Krems and her colleagues suggests jealousy is an "overlooked tool" for "friendship maintenance." The loss of a friendship if, say, our friend moves away makes us feel sad, but if we seem to be losing the friendship because our best friend is hanging out with some new person, we feel jealous. The threat of being replaced, not the mere loss of the friendship, triggers jealousy in us, motivating us to put effort into shoring up our friendship.

Researchers have yet to explore the dog-as-mate-poacher angle, but it likely triggers jealousy for the same reasons human mate-poaching does: to alert you to a threat to a valued relationship so you can take steps to get the affection and commitment nozzle turned back in your direction.

For your best chance at getting your girlfriend to scratch behind your ears (or whatever!) at the rate she used to, evoke her empathy while giving her the sense your unhappiness could send you out the door. For example, say, "It's great how happy Cujo's making you, but when we're on the couch, I feel embarrassingly left out." You two might then brainstorm how you each can get enough of what you want. (A possible solution might be to get a little furry "cup" bed so he can curl up by her shoulder on the corner of the couch.)

By making your feelings known, you'll likely give her the sense the dog-in-bed thing is something to ask you about, not just surprise you with when a paw goes up your nose at 3 a.m. By the way, I have a possible solution with something for both of you: Have the dog next to the bed, in his own little bed, when you stay over. Dogs have an extremely powerful sense of smell, and I discovered while potty training mine that she would cry if she had to sleep in her little area in the living room but was calm and content when I put her bed next to mine in a giant Tupperware container. (She is a tiny Chinese crested, not a Great Dane.)

Whatever you two decide, it'll come out of your using your jealousy productively: to see whether it's possible to redirect enough of her attention and affection your way and to set some dog boundaries going forward. If something furry comes between you and your woman, you'd like it to be a mink bikini and not a small, growling four-legged thing that hates you and chews up your $200 sneakers.

For pages and pages of "science-help" from me, buy my latest book, "Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence." It lays out the PROCESS of transforming to live w/confidence.