(Don't get mad at me, women, because the emphasis here is on "play".) It seems to be commonly accepted that women "play dumb" when they're around men, and many women even get frustrated with themselves for not demonstrating how intelligent they really are. My thought had always been that a woman would pretend to be dumb in order to make a man she found attractive feel appreciated and smart. That's fine as far as it goes, but Nikolas Lloyd suggests that acting dumb and inviting men to talk is the human female form of the "lek".
Jackie, by asking this stupid question, is inviting the men to a lek. A lek is a term used by biologists to refer to a display by many males in one place, from which females might choose a male to mate with. It is a behaviour used by many species of bird, generally those where the male is gaudy, and the females drab. The men around the table now each get invited or lured to participate. The party’s host (or, more likely, hostess) might make sure that everyone gets to speak. The more able male speakers might taunt the less able into speaking, so as to offer a contrast with their abilities. Each man then offers his answer to her stupid question, and will seek to impress her, and show her that he know more than she does. She will not break the spell by admitting to any knowledge. She wants to hear what all the men have to say under equal conditions, before judging them. She and the other women around the table will all get to hear all the men, and so the best thing that they can do is shut up and listen.
And thus, the women get to discover which men are smart, which are arrogant, which are outgoing, which are polite, and so forth. These traits help the women determine whom they want to mate with.
It is interesting to consider whether this "lek instigation" by women -- likely subconsious -- has implications for how women interact with men in other settings, such as business meetings. Since most women "play dumb" regardless of their intentions at the time, it may be that they then later reclassify this mating instinct as "shyness" or "intimidation" without understanding what's really going on. An instinct that helps women identify good mates might hinder them in other contexts.
The mistake in that article is focusing so hard on social behavior between the sexes, when we really give much more attention to social ranking within each sex.
Intellectual conversation is usually just a male social-dominance game taken to a verbal plane. Men and most other male mammals have all sorts of game to decide who will lead and who will follow: We boast, we arm-wrestle, we box, we demonstrate our bravery, we collect possessions, and so on. Intellectual men argue and show off their knowledge to see who can prove himself to be the smartest person in the room.
This comes so naturally to men that they confuse success at verbal jousting with intelligence itself. Women don't have the instincts for male social-dominance games, so they are generally less motivated to waste time on them. Women can learn to play those games, of course, but it takes extra effort.
In my experience, most women would rather just skip on all the silly verbal posturing, and instead focus on 1) getting things done, or 2) how the people around them feel. Most of them don't care how smart you think they are, because your opinion of their intelligence doesn't matter to them. In a man-woman conversation, the woman usually doesn't understand that the man is inviting her to show off her intellectual prowess in order to take her proper place within the male social structure. She doesn't want a place in the male social structure. She not a man.
You can see this most clearly if you talk to men whose co-workers are overwhelmingly women. Nurses, for example. Social status among women seems to depend on how well a woman can establish emotional rapport with the women around her. So a man trying to find a place in a group of women will flex his intellectual muscles---not because he thinks that it will impress the women, but because that's how he instinctually finds a place in a social group. It doesn't work, of course, but he rarely understands why. Women speak a whole different social language, and most men in those situations find themselves very much shut out of group conversations.
I think Ben Bateman is accurate.
Lots of women play dumb because they have figured out that this is their best chance of enlarging the pool of dating partners.
Here's a harsh reality: about 2/3 of the population (both male and female) are in the middle of the bell curve. We tend to marry people of similar intelligence. Thus, if you are of average intelligence, you have an enormous number of possible partners. If you are out at one of the tails of the bell curve, your options are much more limited, because there are much fewer members of the opposite sex of similar intelligence.
A genius woman who plays dumb (which really means, "of average intelligence") has exchanged one potential mate pool of 2% of men for a pool many times as large. She may not be happy with a mate from this larger pool--but she won't be alone on Saturday night, either.
When I went to USC, there was a gal in my chemistry class who did her very best to play dumb blonde. She wasn't dumb. She accidentally exposed her intelligence to me one day after class--and it was apparent that she realized it, and quickly returned to giddy airhead state.
Clayton: What about women of average intelligence who pretend to be below-average? I think there's a lot of that as well.
Ben: Yes, there is a certain amount of difference in the way men and women interact, but I think it is also a matter of the interest (I'll get to that is a sec).
I don't put a terrible lot of stock in the evolutionary analysis of man-woman interactions. Oh, I certainly think that love and sex have a lot to do with it, but we may be going down the wrong path in looking for an evolutionary answer. After all, don't women continue to play dumb, even with their husbands, after they've settled down with a mate?
Women are practical creatures. I don't think they are interested in the sort of analytical topics that we associate with high intelligence. At least not to the degree that they fascinate intelligent men. (These are generalities of course.) Women certainly do NOT play dumb around men when the topic is a matter of social/emotional intelligence.
I think it is a (learned!) defense mechanism. Women aren't interested in analytics. If they play dumb, they communicate that they don't have a stake in their performance, giving them the freedom to do badly with only a little effort.
Men do this too, with matters that are important to women.
It may not be that much more complicated than a runner who doesn't race their hardest because they don't have their head in the game, and who doesn't want to deal with the expectations and the alienation of success. Wasn't there a Calvin and Hobbes strip where Calvin talks about lowing people's expectations to the point where they are already met?
What's great is that the women who do play dumb leave the geek pool to the few women who want to play there. I certainly had my pick among the geeks, and I found geeky guys more to my liking. It's actually not that difficult for above-average IQ women to find men of similar intelligence if they want to. I did it by participating in math competitions (which I did enjoy) and majoring in physics (a subject I found fascinating). Of course, it helps to be a genuine geek yourself, and many high IQ women just aren't into these pursuits.... which goes back to my first sentence.
I certainly had no interest in introducing more competition into the pool when I was on the prowl. Especially being of average attractiveness (at best), I didn't need intelligent, pretty women as competition. I managed to find a husband of much higher IQ than me, and our arguments tend to be over cleaning the house (and the nice distinctions between clean and neat) and exactly how innovative Chinese culture is/was. No need to play dumb.