The moment she is upset with him and complains, she triggers our chivalrous programming. We are outraged, and we want to help her to get rid of the jerk . The implication is that our natural human concern for the welfare of females is not a haphazard social convention that could just as easily have been otherwise. Our concern for females goes much deeper. It resides in our innate natures, and surges up when females are mistreated or distressed.
Chivalrous sympathies guide gender socialization as well.
We expect men to be dominant, but we feel men ought to support and protect women rather than fight against them. So at least in that sense, the man who defers to his wife rather than fight against her is doing what he ought to do. In The Moral Animal , political scientist Robert Wright argues that evolution shapes not only our actions but our feelings and moral sympathies as well. Our sympathies are programmed not for any abstract notion of fairness, of course, but for the survival and propagation of our genes. We see here how genetic selection sensitizes us to men mistreating women but leave us oblivious to women mistreating men.