In Which a Newspaper Article Makes Me Angry

I know, it happens all the time, to everyone. 

I'm still going to write about it, though.

The article that bothered me was this one in today's Kansas City Star, about the controversial anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon joining the University of Missouri's anthropology department as Distinguished Research Professor and Chancellor's Chair for Excellence in Anthropology.

Napoleon Chagnon, if you didn't know, is famous (or infamous) for his research on a group of Amazonian indigenous people called Yanomami. He called them "the fierce people" (which he says is a translation of what they call themselves) and said that their way of life was especially violent, characterized by constant warfare and abduction of women from other villages. 

A Yanomami shaman and spokesman, Davi Kopenawa, says that Chagnon's depictions of his people are false, and that he has harmed the Yanomami by making everyone think of them this way [PDF]:

For us, we Yanomami who live in the forest, the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon is not our friend. He does not say good things, he doesn't transmit good words. He talks about the Yanomami but his words are only hostile. He is angry and says, 'The Yanomami are bad, the Yanomami fire arrows at one another because of women. The Yanomami beat one another.' He has always thought that. 

Young American men and women think, 'Napoleon knows a lot and transmits true words --- the Yanomami are very bad.' I am not happy about this.

But that wasn't the thing that bothered me about this article; the article actually does address the arguments that Chagnon's research was shoddy, that he mischaracterized the Yanomami, making them out to be far more vicious than they are, and that his activities in the Yanomami villages may have harmed the people he set out to study*.

No, what bothered me was the reductive way they framed the story, as another battle in the ongoing war between partisans of Nature and Nurture.

You often see that in articles about evolutionary psychology, especially when the person or idea being discussed is the subject of controversy.

Here are a couple of examples from the article:

Chagnon ... has been a lightning rod at the center of an academic tempest over evolutionary anthropology. In Darwin's world (and Chagnon's), where the fastest, fiercest, smartest, and perhaps cruelest, survive to pass on their genes, what does that mean to human nature today? 

Those arguing against this sociobiology fiercely contend our behavior and culture are rooted in our environment --- or, at least, one cannot credibly discern the effects of a "mean gene" from a war-ax-wielding ancestor in the family tree. 

... 

[Quoting MU Anthropology Department Chairman R. Lee Lyman] "... The Darwinian perspective might give us unique insight. Chagnon was one of the founders of that approach. Unfortunately, it became a political issue as opposed to a scholastic issue. It was heresy."

(That's a rhetorical trick that particularly annoys me: if someone has a problem with your research or your ideas, don't engage the substance of their critique, just dismiss it as politics. You see this in discussions of gender differences, too. A feminist points out that gender might be more complicated, and more malleable, than the hard-wired "pink brain, blue brain" model popular today, and people roll their eyes at her for letting her politics get in the way of Serious Science**. That maneuver also makes the person whose ideas are being discussed into a heroic figure who is being unfairly silenced, rather than an ordinary researcher whose methods, data, and interpretations of said data are being criticized by other researchers.)

More:

The article [that Chagnon published in Science in 1988 (PDF)], summed up as "killers have more kids" by some, rattled or outraged many in his discipline. Suggesting that brutality might be embroidered into our genes by evolution seemed a slippery slope toward racism or a step backward toward eugenics that saw the forced sterilization of thousands. 

"This is no longer thought to be true. There are, of course, a few holdouts," explained Bill Irons, Northwestern University professor emeritus and a Chagnon ally. "Many anthropologists and many on the political left as well preferred to believe that human behavior was shaped completely by culture."

The article makes it sound like there are only two choices for what to believe about human nature and evolution: that human nature is innate, heritable, unchanging and inherently violent, selfish and sexist, or that there is no such thing as human nature, and that people will be whatever the culture around them shapes them to be.

This leaves out a growing body of research within anthropology, primatology, evolutionary  biology and related fields that deals with other factors besides male-on-male conflict that have shaped human evolution.

Examples of people doing this kind of research include: 

1) Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, who has studied mating behavior, female reproductive strategies and social organization in langur monkeys, and has developed a theory that kinship networks and shared child-rearing ("alloparenting" or "allomothering," she calls it) were necessary for early humans' survival.

Here is a snippet from an interview she did with Scientific American blogger Eric Michael Johnson, in which she briefly addresses the notion that killers and rapists have more kids, and why she thinks that's not true:

[A]mong hunter-gatherers, the way to breed successfully is to have alloparental help and provisioning help from others. Anybody who goes around killing off his wife's relatives and stealing women is going to have a lower chance of rearing offspring. These warring bands of brothers didn't emerge until fairly recently, after people started to become more sedentary. 

Part two of that interview is here.

2) Frans de  Waal, who studies cooperation, communication, empathy, conflict resolution, reciprocal altruism (i.e., trading favors) and sharing in chimpanzees, bonobos and capuchin monkeys.

3) Robert Sapolsky, a neurobiologist whose research has mostly dealt with the physiological effects of stress, but who has also studied social hierarchies and aggression in two troops of savanna baboons in Kenya, where he saw the level of violence in one of those troops drop off dramatically when the biggest, meanest dominant males were all killed in an outbreak of tuberculosis. The troop has kept up this more peaceful way of life even now, over 20 years since the dominant-male die-off, when probably every single (current) member of the troop was born after it happened, and every adult male has come from another troop. 

4) Robert Trivers, an evolutionary biologist who has studied reciprocal altruism, sexual selection, and parental investment in offspring. He wrote an article in 1971 called The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism (PDF), in which he argued that animals who repay other animals' helpful acts were more likely to keep getting help throughout their lives, and thus were more likely to survive longer, have more offspring survive to adulthood, etc.

That's not an exhaustive list, just the names that I, a non-anthropologist who has never taken an anthropology class, know.

*The name they gave him, Shaki, which the article's author translates as "annoying bee," does not suggest that they thought very highly of him, or found him very pleasant company.

**See Simon Baron-Cohen's review of Cordelia Fine's book Delusions of Gender, in which he uses words and phrases like "polemic," "barely veiled agenda," "blurring science and politics," and "extreme social determinism" to describe Fine and her book, when she's really more like a gender agnostic than a proselytizer.

Another "Extreme Female Brain" Sighting

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Simon Baron-Cohen's E-S theory of autism, sex differences and whatever else he's applied it to lately states that people have one of three basic cognitive styles: Type E, the empathizer, who understands people and relationships; Type S, the systemizer, who understands abstract ; and Type B, who can do both. Prof. Baron-Cohen has identified autism as exemplifying the Type S cognitive style taken to extremes, but hasn't written much about its opposite, the extreme Type E, or Extreme Female Brain. He allows that it must exist, but he doesn't think it would be as disabling in modern society as an Extreme Male Brain --- autism --- is. Other people (Crespi and Badcock) have suggested paranoid psychosis as the condition typical of the Extreme Female Brain, as it involves being morbidly obsessed with other people. In the paper I discuss here, a pair of evolutionary psychologists make the case that the psychopathology characteristic of the Extreme Female Brain is disordered eating.

The paper I discuss in this blog post describes a series of four different "experiments" in which groups of college students, of varying size (as large as n = 160, as small as n = 37), are given multiple psychometric exams. They are tested for the following things: disordered eating, sensitivity to other people's judgments, Empathizing Quotient (EQ), Systemizing Quotient (SQ), performance on various tasks considered representative of either empathizing or systemizing (e.g. guessing what emotion people in photographs are feeling, or mentally rotating three-dimensional objects), and schizotypal personality disorder. Some of the data are compatible with the idea of a high-empathizing, low-systemizing Extreme Female Brain that is particularly susceptible to disordered eating, and some are not.
________________________________________________

Thought to exist, but seldom glimpsed in the wild

Today on the fascinating psychology blog BPS Research Digest, I saw that some other researchers think they've found a candidate for an Extreme Female Brain, which according to Simon Baron-Cohen's E-S theory ought to exist, probably in about the same numbers as the Extreme Male Brain (which he identifies as autism) does, but which hasn't been described in the psychological literature.

The new article, by evolutionary psychologist Gordon G. Gallup, Jr. and assistant professor of psychology Jennifer Bremser --- both affiliated with the State University of New York --- and published in the journal Evolutionary Psychology, tries to make the case that eating disorders stem from the heightened sensitivity to others' judgments that is characteristic of the Extreme Female Brain.

What they did was to give a group of undergraduate psychology students at SUNY a battery of tests: the Eating Attitudes Test (EAT), which looks for disordered attitudes about eating (sample questions: "I feel extremely guilty after eating"; "I feel that food controls my life"); the Fear of Negative Evaluation Scale, which measures how anxious you are about what other people think of you (sample questions: "I often worry that I will say or do the wrong thing"; "I feel very upset when I commit some social error"; "When I am talking to someone, I worry about what they may be thinking about me"); Simon Baron-Cohen's Empathizing and Systemizing Quotients (which I have critiqued here and here); the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire (PDF), which tests for nine traits associated with schizotypal personality disorder: ideas of reference (which means thinking that other people, or the media, are talking specifically to or about you when they aren't really), excessive social anxiety, odd beliefs or magical thinking, unusual perceptual experiences, odd or eccentric behavior, a lack of close interpersonal relationships, odd speech, constricted affect (i.e., not being very good at showing one's feelings), and general suspiciousness; and several tests that measure skills that would be associated with either an empathizing or systemizing cognitive style: the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test, the Intuitive Physics Test and the Redrawn Vandenburg and Kuse Mental Rotations Test (Version A). Then they looked for relationships between all of these different test scores, and between any given score and the test taker's sex.

Their hypothesis --- that an empathizing cognitive style is more characteristic of women than of men, and tends in its extreme form towards disordered eating and social anxiety --- would predict the following: women scoring higher, on average, on the EQ and Mind in the Eyes tests, and lower on the SQ, Intuitive Physics, and Mental Rotation tests; women scoring higher than men on the measures of disordered eating and fear of negative evaluation, and high scores on those measures being correlated with high scores on the EQ and Mind in the Eyes tests for both sexes. 

They found significant differences between the sexes on the measures of disordered eating and fear of negative evaluation (both were higher for women), and also on the EQ, but not on the SQ. Women were also likelier to display something called "empathizing bias", which they defined numerically as each study participant's z-score on the EQ minus their z-score on the SQ. (Z-scores are a measure of how far an individual's score on a given statistical measure is above or below the average score. A negative number means the person, or sub-group, scored below average, while a positive number means they scored above average). Thus, the empathizing bias score is supposed to represent how much better a person does at empathizing than systemizing (or not, if it's zero or a negative number).

There was also a disparity between how participants scored on the EQ and SQ versus how they did on the more "objective" measures of systemizing or empathizing skill, the Intuitive Physics, Reading the Mind in the Eyes and mental rotation tests. The sexes differed strongly on their (self-reported) EQ scores, but performed almost identically on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. Obviously guessing what emotion a black-and-white photograph of a stranger's eyes is meant to convey is very different from accurately gauging the emotional states of one's relatives and friends, so that still leaves open the possibility that women perform better at this task when it involves real people who are known to them, but it's just as likely that women tend to overrate, and men to underrate, their interpersonal sensitivity on self-reported measures, and that real differences between the sexes on this ability are minimal. 

The opposite pattern occurred between the SQ and one of the "objective" measures of systemizing ability: men and women scored equally on the SQ, but men outperformed women on the Intuitive Physics test. (I can't find any results on the mental-rotation test broken down by sex).

There was also a very inconsistent pattern of correlations between disordered eating, fear of negative evaluation and the various systemizing and empathizing variables. High scores on the disordered-eating measure correlated with high scores on the fear-of-negative-evaluation (FNE) measure, and also with high scores on the EQ. There was no relationship between SQ scores and either disordered eating or fear of negative evaluation, and EQ and SQ scores were positively correlated with each other. Most strangely, SQ scores were correlated positively with empathizing bias: the number that reflects the imbalance between one's empathizing and systemizing abilities!

Also, within each sex the overall pattern of disordered eating patterns correlating with greater empathic ability (whether self-reported or "objectively" measured) seems to fall apart. 

Two graphs, Figure 1 and Figure 2, show bars for average male and female performance on both the EQ and the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test, at low and high ends of the disordered-eating spectrum. According to these graphs, women score about the same on these tests regardless of whether they show disordered eating patterns or not, and for men the results are all over the place. On one test (the Mind in the Eyes), men who score low on the Eating Attitudes Test do equally well with all women, while men who score higher do more poorly on average, but their range of results is very, very broad. The error bar is wider than the bar on the graph is tall. 

On the EQ, the men show more or less the pattern the researchers expected: men at the high end of the disordered-eating spectrum scored higher than men at the low end on average, but for the former group especially there was a lot of within-group variation.

They also found correlations between disordered eating, fear of negative evaluation and several of the traits that make up schizotypal personality disorder: disordered eating correlates positively with ideas of reference (i.e., thinking everything refers to you, specifically), magical thinking and suspicion. Fear of negative evaluation correlates positively with ideas of reference, suspicion, social anxiety and constricted affect. (This latter makes sense --- if you are afraid people are judging you, of course you are going to try and minimize the extent to which those people are able to tell what you're thinking or feeling! It's called a "poker face".)

They also wanted to see if any of these psychological problems --- disordered eating, fear of negative evaluation, schizotypal personality disorder or any of its component traits --- interfered with one's ability to rotate three-dimensional objects in one's head. (Their reasoning for doing this wasn't just for giggles --- let's take a bunch of emotionally stressed people and ask them to do something both pointless and difficult! Hilarious! --- it can be hard to shake the idea that a lot of psychological experiments are done with precisely that objective --- but because they wanted to see if people who were unusually and morbidly concerned with what other people thought of them, and were thus "hyper-mentalizers" who would be reckoned extreme empathizers in Simon Baron-Cohen's typology would also show the expected impairment in systemizing tasks. 

Annoyingly, they did not compare people's scores on the mental-rotation task with their scores on other direct measures of systemizing or empathizing ability: they assumed, given earlier findings, that high scorers on the measures of disordered eating and fear of negative evaluation are also high empathizers. As I have said above, the data are less than clear in their support of this assumption. 

They found that people (they do not break it down by sex, probably because at this stage in the study they were dealing with a lot fewer participants) who scored high on their measure of disordered eating tended to do worse at mental rotations, consistent with their prediction. However, they also found a small (too small to be significant) positive correlation between mental-rotation scores and fear of negative evaluation. Of those two things, I'd consider the FNE score to be the more pure indicator of a "hypermentalizing" excess of concern for what other people think; there's a lot that's still unknown about the psychology of eating disorders, to the point that calling disordered eating a behavior born out of a fear of negative evaluation by others would be speculative.

The correlations they found between the various schizotypal personality traits and mental rotation ability surprised me, too. You'd think, if greater skill at mental rotation of three-dimensional objects indicated a logical, "systemizing" type of mind, that there would be a strong negative correlation between mental-rotation scores and those schizotypal traits that bespeak irrationality, like magical thinking or ideas of reference. (Especially magical thinking). But no, there's no correlation between either of those things and how well one does at mental-rotation tasks. The only components of schizotypal personality disorder that showed any significant relationship to mental rotation were social anxiety and constricted affect, both of which were negatively correlated. 

A negative correlation between skill at mental rotation and one's score on the social anxiety subscale of the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire does fit with the researchers' idea of "hyper-mentalizing" at the expense of systemizing. But the lack of such a correlation with fear of negative evaluation does not fit, and instead makes one wonder if what's going on is, instead, anxious people's anxiety interfering with their ability to perform the rotations. 

In their Discussion section, the researchers do not comment on most of these discrepancies, but the one they do address --- worse performance on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test* by people with more severely disordered eating --- they attribute to those people's having greater, not less, emotional sensitivity**. Why, they're so sensitive they see things that aren't even there, so they do poorly on certain tests of emotional sensitivity and interpersonal acuity like the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test.

I'm being silly, but that really is their explanation:

Comparable to the heightened sensitivity to sensory stimuli (auditory, visual and tactile) common among people with autism, individuals with the EFB [Extreme Female Brain] may be hypersensitive to social stimuli. Disordered eating may ameliorate the experience of negative evaluation anxiety that results from heightened sensitivity to social stimulation. 

Consistent with this idea, emotional processing deficits have been linked with eating disorders including the inability to recognize, label and describe emotions in detail and to link feelings with bodily correlates (Bourke, Taylor, Parker and Bagby, 1992 [link]; Eizaguirre, de Cabezon, de Alda, Olariaga and Juaniz, 2004 [PDF]; Garner, Olmsted and Polivy, 1983 [link]) Also, compared to healthy controls, women with anorexia had difficulty recognizing emotions from facial expressions and vocal tones (Jansch, Harmer and Cooper, 2009 [link]; Kucharska-Pietura, Masiak and Treasure, 2003 [link]).

Jones, Harmer, Cowen and Cooper (2008) [link] investigated emotional face processing in female undergraduates with high and low levels of disordered eating. Participants completed the Eating Attitudes Test-26 and the Facial Expression Recognition Task, a computer task in which participants view faces depicting 7 different expressions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise, and neutral) at different intensities. The participants with higher levels of disordered eating were less accurate in identifying happy and neutral faces. Among participants with high levels of disordered eating, there was a tendency to classify more happy faces as neutral, and more neutral faces as either angry or sad. In addition, there was evidence that reaction times to recognize disgust were longer, while reaction times to recognize fear were faster than participants with low levels of disordered eating. When disordered eating reaches clinical levels, the effects of hyper-mentalizing may manifest as mental state misattributions. This may be because they are using their own experience to model the experience of others, and their bias to classify emotions with a negative bias may influence their attributions. For instance, when shown pictures of women who are said to have overeaten, females with high levels of disordered eating ascribed more negative emotional states to these women than control participants do. Thus, women with higher levels of disordered eating appeared to use their own experience of overeating to describe how the other women would feel (Beebe, Holmbeck, Schober, Lane, Rosa, 1996 [link]).

It is also possible that the physiological and cognitive effects of starvation produce deficits in performance. In a study looking at performance on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test, individuals with anorexia performed worse compared to healthy controls (Russell, Schmidt, Doherty, Young and Tchanturia, 2009 [link]. 

An alternative explanation is that low scores on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes task does not represent a deficit of theory of mind ability, but rather an excess that reflects hypermentalizing. Abu-Akel (2003) [PDF] suggests that theory of mind dysfunctions range from the complete absence of the ability to represent other people's mental states (as shown in severe autism) to having the representational understanding of mental states, but a deficit in the ability to apply this understanding (as in Asperger's syndrome) to the abnormal or excessive attribution of mental states (as in schizotypy). It may be that this third class of dysfunction is misconstrued as a deficit, rather than an excess. Consistent with this interpretation, the RME is one of the most widely used instruments to investigate theory of mind performance in adults; however, scores on the RME depend only on accuracy. The test does not identify the nature of the errors that impede performance. For example, there can be errors of absence (failing to detect a mental state when it is present) and errors of excess (wrongly inferring a mental state in its absence). We suspect the second class of errors (errors of excess) account for most of the lower scores on this test among individuals with anorexia.

(They also seem to be arguing that people cursed with an excessive degree of awareness of other people's judgment of them might be self-medicating by starving themselves: if they are women, they will produce much less estrogen, which the authors believe "may also produce changes in empathizing and theory of mind performance." So that's a novel proposal --- people with eating disorders starve themselves to dull their razor-keen interpersonal sensitivity, in the interests of making their lives bearable. Obviously there's no evidence for this, and I've never seen anyone who has an eating disorder describe it like that, but at least it does people with eating disorders the courtesy of treating them as rational beings, which not all of the accepted explanations do.)

I do not doubt at all that people who have this kind of hypersensitvity exist --- I know a few! What I doubt is that 1) these people are all the same, and all have this skill for the same reason; 2) these people are any likelier to develop eating disorders than the general population; and 3) these people are necessarily bad at "systemizing," which seems to include such things as logical reasoning, pattern recognition, organization and spatial cognition. Indeed, the data from this same study suggest that people who are good at one half of the empathizing/systemizing duality seem to be good at the other half, too.

You can also count me as agnostic, still, on the question of whether women are, overall, better empathizers and men better systemizers. I don't rule it out, as at least some cognitive differences between the sexes do seem to exist, and show up consistently in studies, but as yet I don't see strong empirical support for it. 

Also, they dance around this in their Discussion section, but never directly address it: disordered eating is quite common in autistic girls and women, and even non-autistic people with eating disorders, particularly anorexia, perform similarly to autistic people on tests of mentalizing ability (the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test again), mirror self-recognition, emotion recognition, body awareness, executive function and central coherence (the Embedded Figures Test).

If autism is supposed to be the Extreme Male Brain, and the Extreme Female Brain is supposed to be its opposite, doesn't that complicate things a lot? 

Bremser JA, and Gallup GG Jr (2012). From one extreme to the other: Negative evaluation anxiety and disordered eating as candidates for the extreme female brain. Evolutionary psychology : an international journal of evolutionary approaches to psychology and behavior, 10 (3), 457-86 PMID: 22947672

*In the present study, it was only the male participants who showed this pattern, but the researchers cite lots of other studies of people with eating disorders, particularly anorexia nervosa, who show the same impairment. Some of the other researchers hypothesized that insufficient nutrition made those patients less able to perform complex cognitive operations of any sort, which sounds convincing to me.

**I am having UNBELIEVABLE trouble spelling "sensitivity" today. I always seem to leave out one of the "I's".  

These Are Not the Eternal Verities of Biology - Part II

I wrote this post almost a year ago, but it's always been my plan to add to it. And now Echidne (who is, among other things, a tireless debunker of gender-essentialist pop evolutionary psychology) has inspired me to come back to this topic.

She describes a recent study in Evolution and Human Behavior (full text here) by Jaime C. Confer, Carin Perilloux and David Buss that tried to characterize how men and women choose short-term or long-term sexual partners.

Briefly, what the study did was sit 192 straight male and 183 straight female (the six --- only six?! --- would-be participants who said they were gay were screened out) college students down and show them a (clothed) picture of a member of the opposite sex, whom they were supposed to evaluate as a potential sex partner. (Half of them were told to consider the person as a short-term partner; the other half were told to think long-term). The picture was initially covered up, with one box covering the face* and another covering the body; study participants were given a choice which box to remove.

When evaluating the pictured person as a potential long-term sexual partner, the sexes behaved almost identically: sixty-eight of the men (75%) and sixty of the women (73%) chose to look at the person's face. The sexes also showed a similar change in strategy between long- and short-term conditions: both looked at the face more when they were asked to evaluate a potential long-term partner, and both looked at the body more when asked to evaluate a potential short-term partner. For the men, though, the change in strategy was much more dramatic: they went from three-quarters of them choosing the face in one set of circumstances to half and half in the other (roughly speaking); for the women, it was a much smaller decline, from (a little less than) three-quarters to two-thirds. The men's change, but not the women's, was considered statistically significant.

That's not the narrative Confer, Perilloux and Buss use to describe their findings, though: rather predictably, they see a marked sexual dimorphism in mate-choosing strategies, reflecting deeply ingrained male preferences for fertile mates (i.e., younger women with neotenous, "hyperfeminine" facial features as long-term partners, but also obviously sexually mature, fertile women with low waist-to-hip ratios as short-term partners) and an equally ingrained lack of female preferences for youth or bodily beauty in her partners.

The study, its findings, and the way its authors chose to present those findings are not what I really want to look at in this entry, though. (Echidne has already covered those angles really well). No, what I want to look at is the imaginary scenario the study's authors set up for its participants: what they were asked to do, essentially, is evaluate a third (absent) person's suitability as a sexual partner based on one quick look.

It came up in the comments at Echidne's blog, and I agreed wholeheartedly, that this scenario resembles today's anonymous, superficial meat-market dating scene a lot more than it does the likely pattern of courting and mating behaviors that early humans would've shown. Early humans, like other primates and modern-day humans still living a hunting-and-gathering lifestyle, lived in small, close-knit bands, where you would probably have known the people you ended up having sex with for quite a long time before you had sex with them. Accordingly, things like waist-hip ratio, facial symmetry and whatnot would've been less important than, say, each partner's social and family ties (i.e., does she have sisters, aunts or a mother who would help out with childcare? Do these aforementioned relatives *like* the prospective mate? What about his relatives? How does he get along with the other men in the tribe? Is he a social asset or liability?) or lack thereof.

This is another of the weird things I've noticed about much of evolutionary psychology --- it seems to be less a historical science (like paleontology or archaeology) and more an extended thought-experiment in What Human Nature Would Be Like If It Weren't for All This Pesky Civilization Crap. The ev-psych model for heterosexual relationships seems to assume that the man and the woman are both relatively isolated: the woman depends solely on the man for support, for herself and her children; the man, while he is not correspondingly dependent on the woman, and is thought to be impregnating --- or trying to impregnate --- other women whenever the opportunity arises, his relations to other men resemble the Hobbesian state of "war of all against all." (Similarly, other women are invisible unless and until the man in the thought-experiment has sex with them).

This highly individualized, atomistic way of thinking about people is actually very new in the history of ideas, and notably it does not compute to modern-day people who actually live in extended-family communities.

*This experimental setup apparently poses a temptation for commentators to make "butterface" jokes. I am trying to resist this.

Patternicity, Agenticity and Autism

From what I've written on this blog so far on the subject of evolutionary psychology, you might infer that I think it's all just conventional wisdom dressed up in pseudoscientific technobabble and appeals to an evolutionary past cribbed from bad genre fiction.

While there is a lot of what passes for evolutionary psychology "research" that fits this description, I also think there are some worthwhile ideas coming out of this field, too.

The things that most intrigue me in evolutionary psychology are the explorations of the constraints that might have shaped human cognition, perception and decision-making, and how these constraints might work to encourage certain biases in human cognition, making our minds imperfect tools for grasping objective reality while at the same time doing extremely well at solving problems relevant to survival.

Anthropomorphism --- the tendency to see events, natural phenomena, animals, objects, and other nonhuman things in humanlike terms, i.e. attributing consciousness, feelings, intentions and personalities to things that may or may not have them --- is one of these biases.

Here's anthropology professor Stewart Elliott Guthrie's explanation of anthropomorphism from his chapter in the 2001 book Religion in Mind: Cognitive Perspectives on Religious Belief, Ritual, and Experience:

Theories of religion as anthropomorphism so far have failed largely because they fail to consider anthropomorphism in general. This is crucial because anthropomorphism is general, spanning all cultures and all domains (Thomson 1955 [1932]; Mitchell, Thomson and Miles 1997). It occurs spontaneously and regularly in the unconsidered experience of daily life, for instance when we hear a branch tapping at a window as someone attracting our attention, see a full garbage sack in an alley as a lurking figure, or look at a car from behind and see its headrests as the heads of occupants.

Anthropomorphism also occurs in the deliberate productions of the arts and sciences. In the sciences, it is anathema, yet as Nietzsche (1966, 316) writes, even scientists wrestle "for an understanding of the world as a humanlike thing." Indeed, they do so commonly (Liebert 1909; Kennedy 1992; Mitchell, Thompson and Miles 1997). Striking examples include Darwin's view of Nature as a stockbreeder (Young 1985); Lovelock's (1987) view of the Earth as Gaia, a living organism; and the "anthropic principle" of some physicists -- the idea that because a large number of physical properties of the universe must be just as they are for humans to exist, the existence of those properties, and of humans, can be no accident (Earman 1987).
...
[Art] combines human and non-human categories not spontaneously but self-consciously. But such art is only the tip of a cognitive iceberg, seen in the wake of conscious experience. It is a tiny fraction of an obscure whole, held up to the light of retrospect. Artists, like all of us, must encounter anthropomorphism before using it. This encounter is involuntary. It consists not in mixing cognitive categories, but in applying a template from one category to an ambiguity we later decide belongs to a different category. First we see an ambiguous shape in an alley as a person; then we think, "Oh! That's only a garbage can." It is only when we make this after-the-fact distinction that we speak of anthropomorphism. What powers religion, and what requires explanation, is this spontaneous tendency, not only in art but in all of life.

Scanning for signs of life, including signs of communication, begins early and appears intuitive and generalized. Carey and Spelke (1994, 176) note that infants "respond to objects that lack any clearly animate features (e.g., mobiles) as animate and social beings, if the behavior of those objects approximates the behavior of a responsive social agent." In a manner that parallels the Buddhist notion of karma, older children blame "illness on the victim himself or herself, rather than allow that it happened randomly, an explanation known as 'immanent justice'" (Gelman, Coley and Gottfried 1994, 345). Such interpretations apparently correspond to preconceptions that are early and powerful.

Animism is closely related to anthropomorphism and is equally widespread. Animism was first investigated experimentally by Piaget (1929), who found it universal among young children. Piaget's finding has been broadly replicated and, as Barrett notes in this volume, the dominant psychology of religion regarding concept development is still Piagetian. "A long tradition of work on animism shows that children extend psychological explanations to ... rivers, clouds and so forth" (Harris 1994, 308).

Other studies (Sheehan, Papalia-Finlay, and Hooper 1980-1981) find animism not only among children, but also among people of all ages. In addition to humans, nonhuman animals also seem to display animism. Birds peck at twigs resembling caterpillars (Hinton 1973), coyotes pounce on sticks resembling grasshoppers (Bekoff 1989), caribou avoid rockpiles resembling Inuit (American Museum of Natural History display), and chimpanzees direct threats against thunderstorms (Goodall 1992, 1994).

(I was especially intrigued by the last paragraph, about animals showing a bias towards treating ambiguous stimuli as if they were alive. That's interesting, and does add support to the idea that this is adaptive).

Several theorists have proposed evolutionary explanations for this phenomenon, most of them hinging on the relative risks and benefits of Type I (false positive) vs. Type II (false negative) errors. This reasoning is invoked to bolster claims that all sorts of quasi-related cognitive and perceptual phenomena (like patternicity, and its consciousness-seeking cousin, agenticity) might once have conferred evolutionary advantages on their possessors.

This review article (full text here) brings a long list of disparate-seeming phenomena --- among them "auditory looming," a perceptual illusion in which you hear sounds as coming from much closer to you than they actually are; superstititions; prejudices; phobias; anthropomorphism/animism; and believing that you are more in control of your fate than you really are --- together under the same vast explanatory umbrella: Error Management Theory.

Here's a description of error management theory written by the two of the idea's originators, David Buss and Martie Haselton, in this 2000 article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (full text here)*:

When judgments are made under uncertainty, two general types of errors are possible --- false positives (Type I errors) and false negatives (Type II errors). A decision maker cannot simultaneously minimize both errors because decreasing the likelihood of one error necessarily increases the likelihood of the other (Green & Swets, 1966).

The costs of these two types of errors are rarely symmetrical. In scientific hypothesis testing, Type I errors are usually considered more costly than Type II errors. Scientists, therefore, typically bias their decision-making systems (e.g., inferential statistics) toward making Type II errors. Errors are also asymmetrical in warning devices like fire alarms, which are biased in the opposite direction. Missed detections (Type II errors) are more costly; therefore, the bias is toward making false alarms (Type I errors). Whenever the costs of errors are asymmetrical, humanly engineered systems should be built to be biased toward making less costly errors (Green & Swets, 1966). This bias might increase overall error rates, but it decreases overall cost.

According to error management theory (EMT; Haselton, Buss, & DeKay, 1998), decision-making adaptations have evolved through natural or sexual selection to commit predictable errors. Whenever there exists a recurrent cost asymmetry between two types of errors over the period of time in which selection fashions adaptations, they should be biased toward committing errors that are less costly. Because it is exceedingly unlikely that the two types of errors are ever identical in the recurrent costs associated with them, EMT predicts that human psychology will contain decision rules biased toward committing one type of error over another (also see Cosmides & Tooby, 1996; Nesse & Williams, 1998; Schlager, 1995; Searcy & Brenowitz, 1988; Tomarken, Mineka & Cook, 1989).

The logic of EMT extends to benefit asymmetries as well as cost asymmetries. Consider two types of correct inferences, hits and correct rejections. If the benefits associated with these two different correct inferences differ recurrently over evolutionary time, other things being equal, then selection will favor the reasoning strategy that is biased toward the more beneficial inference, even if it results in more errors overall. In cases where the costs of two different errors are the same, but the benefits are asymmetrical, the benefit asymmetry will be the driving selective force. In cases where the benefits of correct inferences are the same but the costs of errors are asymmetrical, the cost asymmetry will be the driving selective force. The key point of EMT is that selection will favor biased decision rules that produce more beneficial or less costly outcomes (relative to alternative decision rules), even if those biased rules produce more frequent errors.

And this (to go back to that review article I mentioned earlier) is how that general pattern plays out with respect to anthopomorphism in particular:

Guthrie (2001) [in the book chapter I quote an excerpt from above] used error management logic to explain one of the key features of religion --- animism. He proposed that in ambiguous circumstances to falsely assume that an intentional agent (e.g., another human) has caused some event is less costly than to miss this fact. Given that agents often have interests that compete with those of the perceiver, it is important to have a low threshold for inferring their presence. For example, if one encountered a collection of twigs arranged in an improbably neat array, Guthrie proposed that it would be better to entertain the thought that a human or other intentional agent was responsible for the arrangement --- and to increase one's vigilance to the possibility of the agent's presence --- than to casually ignore it. Guthrie (2001) and Atran and Norenzayan (in press) proposed that belief in gods may be a by-product of this adaptive bias. The proposed animacy bias is consistent with classic laboratory experiments conducted by Heider and Simmel (1944; see also Bloom & Veres, 1999). When participants view moving images of circles and squares, they find it difficult not to infer intentional states --- chasing, wanting and escaping. The tendency to infer intentional states in these stimulus arrays emerges early (age 4), and there is preliminary evidence of cross-cultural universality of the bias (in Germans and Amazonian Indians; Barrett, Todd, Miller, & Blythe, 2005), although its magnitude of expression may certainly be variable. Common features of religion across cultures (Atran & Norenzayan, 2004)are also consistent with a universal animacy bias.

So, according to this theory, our brains are biased in certain ways, not because these shortcuts were likeliest to conform to reality (they're not, and probably never were), but because the errors they tended to lead to were the least costly (and/or most beneficial) in terms of reproductive success. We err on the side of seeing patterns --- inferring direct relationships between co-occurring phenomena, for example --- because ancestral humans did not have the luxury of adopting a lifestyle of radical experimentation. We err on the side of seeing agents --- assuming that things happen because someone wanted them to happen, and took steps to ensure that they did --- because missing signs that another being (maybe a human, who might be friend or foe, or maybe a large and dangerous animal) is in the area is a much deadlier mistake to make than thinking someone is there when you're really alone.

(It's worth pointing out that this hypothesis, like many others in the field of evolutionary psychology, isn't directly falsifiable**. It can't be tested. How could it be, when the conditions it makes predictions about only existed millions of years ago?)

It's particularly interesting for me to read about the apparent universality of these biases --- agenticity, anthropomorphism, animism --- because I don't think I share them. Or, if I do, I think I have a much weaker tendency to use them.

When I think about how I understood things as a child, what sticks out to me is how impersonal, how inhuman, my world was. For most of my childhood, I made the exact opposite assumption from the one described above --- I wouldn't even necessarily think about other people in the room with me, whom I could see and hear, as intentional agents; instead, I perceived them as a cluster of different, separately-experienced phenomena that all emanated from the same source: color, movement, lots of different sounds. I perceived, but did not often draw inferences from what I perceived. Much of the time, I didn't even sort my perceptions based on where they came from. I still devote a lot more of my brainpower at any given moment to raw perception, since I cannot filter sensory input or selectively direct my attention, than I do to interpreting what I perceive. Often I will notice something, but only react to it some moments later, because it has taken me that long to transmute the raw sensory data into information.

When I would think to draw conclusions from what I saw, my conclusions tended to run in the opposite direction from what you'd expect given the human biases towards patternicity and agenticity. The world I perceived was a random, self-sufficient system. It wasn't built; it grew. (When I was little, I thought houses and roads were some kind of large plant that grew out of the ground; if you had told me people made them I would've been thunderstruck).

*This article applies EMT in a way I'm not entirely sure is valid; they make some pretty boilerplate ev-psych assumptions about optimal reproductive strategies for men and for women (and, presumably, all male and female mammals) without any regard for social organization. They seem to assume, like Enlightenment philosophers, that everyone is an island, and that the only possible deviation from this atomistic state is a monogamous marriage life partnership (however peppered with infidelities on the man's part) and nuclear family. I do not think this notion matches up very well with what we know about how modern-day hunter-gatherers, as well as our closest evolutionary kin, the great apes, live.

**Sometimes, even when a proposition isn't directly testable, it might have implications that are testable. I think this idea --- that people's minds are set up to see the world in terms of the actions of intentional agents, rather than in terms of random chance, because there is an evolutionary advantage to this bias --- is amenable to cross-species testing. If agenticity is such a useful cognitive shortcut, it would make sense for at least some other animals to have also developed it!

Psychology Today? More Like Psychology Fifty Years Ago!

(Image created by Anne Taintor)

Pop evolutionary psychology, for all its vaunted iconoclasm, starts sounding awfully familiar when applied to what appears to be its spokespeople's favorite subject, innate gender differences and their implications for how men and women ought to be living their lives.

Here's an example, from another post on Satoshi Kanazawa's Psychology Today blog, this one titled "How to Be Happy":

One of the things that evolution has done is to make men and women very different. In some ways (though not in others), males of one species are often more similar to males of other species than to females of their own species, and vice versa. In some ways, in many ways, men are more similar to male chimpanzees or gorillas than to women. One of the ways that men and women are different is in what makes them happy.

Forget what feminists, hippies and liberals have told you in the last half century. They are all lies based on political ideology and on conviction, not on science. Contrary to what they may have told you, it is very unlikely that money, promotions, the corner office, social status and political power will make women happy. Similarly, it is very unlikely that quitting their jobs, dropping out of the rat race, and becoming stay-at-home dads to spend all their time with their children will make men happy.

(I'm not even going to address the staggering wrongness of the claim that male humans are more like males of other species than they are like female humans. Just take it from me that it is wrong, so extraordinarily, mind-bogglingly bizarre that I can only muster up one word in coherent response to it: No.)

So, men want to go out, make money and rule the world, while women want to stay at home and have babies. Those two nonoverlapping spheres are where men and women respectively excel, and the only place they can truly feel fulfilled.

Where have we heard that before?

It was quite familiar to Naomi Weisstein, who wrote these words (from her essay "Kinder, Kuche, Kirche as Scientific Law: Psychology Constructs the Female") in 1968:

It is an implicit assumption that the area of psychology which concerns itself with personality has the onerous but necessary task of describing the limits of human possibility. Thus when we are about to consider the liberation of women, we naturally look to psychology to tell us what that liberation would mean: what would give women the freedom to fulfill their own intrinsic natures. Psychologists have set about describing the true natures of women with a certainty and a sense of their own infallibility rarely found in the secular world. Bruno Bettelheim, of the University of Chicago, tells us (1965) that "we must start with the realization that, as much as women want to be good scientists or engineers, they want first and foremost to be womanly companions of men and to be mothers." Erik Erikson of Harvard University (1964), upon noting that young women often ask whether they can "have an identity before they know whom they will marry, and for whom they will make a home," explains somewhat elegiacally that "much of a young woman's identity is already defined in her kind of attractiveness and in the selectivity of her search for the man (or men) by whom she wishes to be sought ..." Mature womanly fulfillment, for Erikson, rests on the fact that a woman's "somatic design harbors an 'inner space' destined to bear the offspring of chosen men, and with it, a biological, psychological and ethical commitment to take care of human infancy." Some psychiatrists even see the acceptance of woman's role by women as a solution to societal problems. "Woman is nurturance ..." writes Joseph Rheingold (1964), a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, "anatomy decrees the life of a woman. ... [W]hen women grow up without dread of their biological functions and without subversion by feminist doctrine, and therefore enter upon motherhood with a sense of fulfillment and altruistic sentiment, we shall attain the goal of a good life and a secure world in which to live it." (p. 714)

These views from men who are assumed to be experts reflect, in a surprisingly transparent way, the cultural consensus. They not only assert that a woman is defined by her ability to attract men, and thus, a home; for this will allow her to set about her life's task of "joyful altruism and nurturance."

Though the reasoning behind it has shifted with the times, this notion of opposite sexes --- the active, aggressive male and the passive, nurturing female --- has remained more or less constant* in Western culture throughout history.

Equally constant, for as long as there has been a vocal feminist contingent protesting this consignment of women perpetually to kitchen and nursery, has been the experts' response to the feminists. For whatever reason --- whether it was physiological, as in the Victorian belief that brain and uterus competed with one another for a limited blood supply, and thus a woman could not make heavy use of one without causing the other to atrophy; or psychosexual, as in the Freudian belief that a healthy, mature woman's sexuality necessarily revolves around intercourse, and that childbirth represents her ultimate achievement and the only way to resolve lingering issues of "penis envy"; or romantic, as in the more recent backlash idea that a woman must marry young, prioritizing finding a husband and having children above education and work, or else she'll run out her biological clock and find herself unable to marry or have children later on --- deviation from woman's ordained role could only lead to disappointment, bitterness and literal and/or metaphorical sterility.

Indeed, an educated man from any of these eras --- Victorian, mid-twentieth century, 1980s backlash era --- would have been able to write an article very like Kanazawa's, urging women that neglecting their rightful, natural role in life would leave them lonely, bitter and unfulfilled.

If we go back far enough, everything new becomes old again, and we find evolutionary and physiological reasons being proposed for the inherent rightness of women's traditional role.

Psychologist Stephanie Shields describes some of these in a 1975 article in American Psychologist, titled "Functionalism, Darwinism and the Psychology of Women: A Study in Social Myth":

The first systematic treatment of individual differences in intelligence appeared in 1575. Juan Huarte [link] attributed sex differences in intelligence to the different humoral qualities that characterized each sex, a notion that had been popular in Western thought since ancient Greece. ...The humoral theory of sex differences was widely accepted through the 17th century, but with the advent of more sophisticated notions of anatomy and physiology, it was replaced by other, more specific, theories of female mental defect: the lesser size and hypothesized simpleness of the female brain, affectability as a source of inferiority, and complementarity of abilities in male and female. It was the developing evolutionary theory that provided an overall explanation for why these sex differences existed and why they were necessary for the survival of the race.

...

Because variation from the norm was already accepted [in the 1870s] as the mechanism of evolutionary progress (survival and transmission of adaptive variations) and because it seemed that the male was the more variable sex, it was soon universally concluded that the male is the progressive element in the species. Variation for its own sake took on a positive value because greatness, whether of an individual or a society, could not be achieved without variation. Once deviation from the norm became legitimized in evolutionary theory, the hypothesis of greater male variability became a convenient explanation for a number of observed sex differences; among them the greater frequency with which men achieved "eminence." By the 1890s it was popularly believed that greater male variability was a principle that held true, not only for physical traits but for mental abilities as well:

That men should have greater cerebral variability and therefore more originality, while women have greater stability and therefore more "common sense," are facts both consistent with the general theory of sex and verifiable in common experience. (Geddes & Thomson, 1890, p. 271)

...

In the United States the variability hypothesis naturally found expression in the new testing movement, its proponents borrowing heavily from the theory of [Havelock] Ellis and the statistical technique of [Karl] Pearson. The favor that was typically afforded the hypothesis did not stem from intellectual commitment to the scientific validity of the proposal as much as it did from personal commitment to the social desirability of its acceptance. The variability hypothesis was most often thought of in terms of its several corollaries: (a) genius (seldom, and then poorly, defined) is a particularly male trait; (b) men of genius naturally gravitate to positions of power and prestige (i.e., achieve eminence) by virtue of their talent; (c) an equally high ability level should not be expected of females: and (d) the education of women should, therefore, be consonant with their special talents and special place in society as wives and mothers.

Shields has also written more recently (2007) about how nineteenth-century psychologists differentiated the sexes within the realm of emotion:

Female reproductive physiology was at the heart of most explanations of the development of women's distinctive cognitive and emotional character (Vertinsky, 1988). ... The account generally followed this line: The human female's nervous system was limited (or prevented from its full development) either because of earlier achievement of full maturity [than the male] and/or because of the biological demands of development and maturation of the female reproductive system. At maturity, women's brain and nervous system were limited in their capacity to support the higher mental processes, specifically objective rationality and true creativity. The lower mental processes (emotion and certain perceptual skills) thus appeared to be or were comparatively stronger. Then, at menarche, the female's mental future was sealed: Blood that might have promoted further brain development was diverted to the uterus and sustaining fertility. The result of this abbreviated course of development and the demands of female reproductive physiology were limited intellectual capacity in comparison to men and a triad of interlocking traits: sensitivity, perceptual acumen, and, more important, emotionality.

...

In its feminine form, emotion was portrayed as a somewhat unstable sensitivity of feelings toward oneself and others. Masculine emotion, in constrast, was described as a passionate force evident in the drive to achieve, to create, and to dominate. Male/masculine reason was believed to be powered by a distinctively masculine emotion. Although passion could overwhelm reasoned behavior, well-controlled masculine passion is energy focused on "the battle of life." Passion was not simply equated with sexual drive, but as all strong feeling that powered creative thinking, social action, and physical prowess. Manly emotion was distinguished by its capacity to be put in the service of reason (Shields, 2002) and with a broader political definition of heterosexual manhood that emphasized Christian values of autonomy and self-regulation (Alderson, 1998). ... Women's emotion, feminine emotion, was portrayed as lacking the power and energy ascribed to masculine emotion, identified with an inferior and ineffectual emotionality. Women's emotion was more likely to be described as sentimentality, which was itself rendered as a degraded, pale version of normal emotional impulse that, in any event, women were not well equipped to regulate.

Men's emotions are strong, vigorous drives, leading them to do things, while women's, for all their greater refinement, are merely felt. Men are active, restlessly spurred onward, ever onward, by these heroic passions, while women's more diffuse emotionality renders them acutely sensitive to others' needs and emotions without ever feeling anything strongly enough to have emotional needs, or desires, or ambitions, of their own. As Shields points out, this ideal complementarity meshes nicely with the ideal of the nuclear family that was being popularized at the time:

The definition of women's ideal emotion evolved contemporaneously with the identification of women as the center of the household. This domestic image of woman featured emotional temperance and equanimity as its defining themes. Emotionally, the successful household manager was portrayed as expressing calm mother-love and unruffled housewifeliness. ...

The identification of the domestic sphere as one in which woman is the emotion expert (by virtue of natural qualities of attention to detail and emotional influences on judgment) undergirds a domestic structure of benevolent paternalism. As putative "emotion experts," the burden was on women to define healthy emotional home life. Nevertheless, women's tendency for "mere emotionality" calls into question the soundness of their judgment. The legitimacy of women's authority on emotional matters in the home was undermined by beliefs regarding the inherent weakness of feminine emotional nature. The intervention of someone with greater skills in self-regulation would be needed in matters of any importance.

She goes on to describe, and quote, the philosopher, sociologist and early popularizer of Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory Herbert Spencer's (whom we might consider an ancestral Evolutionary Psychologist) ideas about the nature and evolutionary origins of sex differences in human emotion and intelligence. Those ideas, not surprisingly, place male aggression, particularly competition among males, in the driver's seat of evolutionary progress, shaping women's behavior along with men's:

[Spencer, in the 1902 edition of his book The Study of Sociology:] In barbarous times a woman who could from a movement, tone of voice, or expression of face, instantly detect in her savage husband the passion that was rising, would be likely to escape dangers run into by a woman less skilled in interpreting the natural language of feeling. Hence, from the perpetual exercise of this power, and the survival of those having most of it, we may infer its establishment as a feminine faculty.

(This one-sidedness --- female behavior changing in response to male behavior or preferences --- is still entrenched in evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary explanations of female appearance, or, more precisely, female pursuit of feminine appearance, that invoke deep-seated genetic imperatives in the male to choose a young, healthy and fertile mate, abound, in defiance of the usual pattern of sexual selection in which females are the choosy partners).

Given how little was known during his lifetime about human evolutionary history (indeed, we're still very much in the dark about a lot of it), Spencer can be forgiven for making up tales of a Hobbesian state of nature in which the human psyche as he knew it was forged. Today, though, we have more actual evidence to work with than he did, but still the stories that are told about human nature are unchanged.

Sources:

Shields, S. A. (2007) "Passionate Men, Emotional Women: Psychology Constructs Gender Difference in the Late 19th Century." History of Psychology Vol. 10, No.2, pp. 92-110.

Shields, S. A. (1975) "Functionalism, Darwinism and the Psychology of Women: A Study in Social Myth." American Psychologist Vol. 30, Iss. 7, pp. 739-754.

Weisstein, Naomi (1968). "Kinder, Küche, Kirche as Scientific Law: Psychology Constructs the Female." Boston: New England Free Press.

*An interesting exception to this pattern is the cultural back-and-forth over which sex has the more powerful libido. Though it is now believed that men are the insatiable ones, and women the natural prudes, at some other points in history --- the Middle Ages being the first such era that comes to my mind --- this thinking has been reversed, with women being seen as the lustful, animalistic sex and men the higher, more cerebral and spiritual sex.

These Are Not the Eternal Verities of Biology - Part I

I don't read Psychology Today, as a rule --- it strikes me as very much psych-lite, and there are lots of much better neuroscience, psychology and social-science blogs around the Internet --- but Echidne does, and has lately been bemoaning the fact that so few people are criticizing their science reporting, especially on matters of gender differences, where the reigning theoretical framework seems to be a particularly rigid, virulently anti-feminist strain of evolutionary psychology.

The primary exponent of this doctrine on that site is Satoshi Kanazawa, a Reader in Management at the London School of Economics and Polical Science who holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Arizona.

This educational background, you might guess, does not lend Dr. Kanazawa much credibility as an authority on human evolutionary history, genetics, sexual selection, or early hominid reproductive strategies and social behavior.

I'll come back to that in a later post; what I'd like to focus on now is Kanazawa's treatment of a subject that does lend itself to sociological explanation: effects of culture on observed sex differences in wealth, prestige, happiness and mating behavior.

Oddly, when presented with a topic that so clearly invites a sociologist's patient untangling of all its component threads of cultural, historical and economic factors, Kanazawa seems to forget all about sociology.

Instead, in a post titled, incredibly, "Why Modern Feminism Is Illogical, Unnecessary and Evil," he clings stubbornly to "biologically meaningful measures of welfare" --- i.e., longevity and number of descendants --- to argue that, since women live longer than men, and more women than men have at least one child at some time in their lives, women are clearly thriving at men's expense!

The fact that men and women are fundamentally different and want different things makes it difficult to compare their welfare directly, to assess which sex is better off; for example, the fact that women make less money than men cannot by itself be evidence that women are worse off than men, any more than the fact that men own fewer pairs of shoes than women cannot be evidence that men are worse off than women. However, in the only two biologically meaningful measures of welfare -- longevity and reproductive success -- women are and have always been slightly better off than men. In every human society, women live longer than men, and more women attain some measure of reproductive success; many more men end their lives as total reproductive losers, having left no genetic offspring.

As Echidne points out, women's current near-universal advantage in life expectancy is a fairly recent development.

The 1999 Working Paper of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research has this to say about how sex differences in life expectancy have shifted around through the centuries:

Today, women have a mortality advantage at almost all ages in developed countries. But this has not always been the case. Paleo-demographers are now establishing evidence that there may have been no life expectancy difference between males and females prior to the development of agriculture. Following the development of agriculture, females may have then suffered higher mortality than males. It has not yet been established whether this female disadvantage was brought about by a heavy work burden, high fertility, the microbiological environment or other factors (Boldster and Paine, 1995). The oldest records on mortality are from England and Wales, and from Sweden. The data reconstructed for England and Wales show that from the early 17th to the 20th century male and female mortality differed only little. In general males had a slight advantage in the 17th and 18th centuries, but females enjoyed lower mortality during some periods.

The authors trace the emergence of a consistent gap between the average male and female life expectancies to the reduction or elimination of two major causes of early death in women: death in childbirth and death from illness or parasitic infestation during youth. While germs don't discriminate by sex, girls were likelier than boys to die of such illnesses as tuberculosis, scarlet fever, smallpox, measles, and the like because girls were more likely to be malnourished, and thus less able to fight off an infection.

Both countries [i.e., France and Denmark] exhibit a female disadvantage [in mortality rates] in early life between the ages of 5 and 15. This disadvantage, which was found in most European populations, was present from 1800 until it disappeared in the 1920s and 1930s. Data on causes of death show that infectious and parasitic diseases account for very high female mortality at these ages, tuberculosis being the main killer. The frailty of young girls from 5 to 15 with regard to tuberculosis has been attributed to hereditary factors, as well as living, working and housing conditions. This excess mortality for girls was the result of the sexual discrimination that characterised Western societies in the 19th century. Various factors played a role here, such as nutrition, housing and hygiene, access to education and medical assistance, and working conditions (Tabutin and Willems 1996).

This article goes into a lot of detail about the tuberculosis epidemic in late-nineteenth-century Ireland, which the article's authors think displayed typically sex-skewed patterns of mortality:

Tuberculosis was a serious problem in Ireland during the surveyed period. The tuberculosis epidemic was rising in the 1880's and 1890's and culminated in 1904. ... The high mortality rates were falling very slowly in the following decades and in the 1940's they were still higher than in many European countries. The reduction of overall mortality rates to European levels coincides with the reduction of tuberculosis mortality.

Mostly youth and young adults were infected by tuberculosis (Jones, 2001). During puberty mostly females died of TB, in older age groups the death rates of TB were more equal between genders. It was more probable for poor people to have TB and urbanisation brought a higher TB rate, men being more affected.
...
The true reasons for the high mortality from tuberculosis and the particular susceptibility of women may have been the same as for excess female mortality [in general]: poverty, urbanisation and malnutrition. In 1871 50% of the female workers in the linen factories of Belfast were aged between 15 and 25 years and hard work and unhealthy environment led to higher mortality rates. Many of them worked at home; the bad housing conditions in urban areas made it easy for the bacillus to spread to women and their daughters who were staying with their mothers while men and their sons worked in the fields. The women who were weakened from the bad living conditions and malnutrition contracted tuberculosis that their body otherwise may have resisted.

Though most, if not all, poor people living in Ireland at that time suffered malnutrition, women and girls got the worst of it, as they continue to do in poorer parts of the world today:

Traditionally, women in Ireland had almost no rights. Girls and women had to have their meals after men and sons had eaten ... . School education was denied to more girls than boys, as women were regarded as not capable [of making] use of the acquired knowledge.

Why am I bringing all this stuff up?

I'm trying to show that, contrary to what Dr. Kanazawa seems to think, sexism really does hurt women in tangible, "biologically meaningful" ways. It kills them, in infancy (girl babies, especially in societies where women have few or no employment prospects and a woman's family is expected to supply a dowry when she marries, are at a greater risk than boy babies are of being murdered by their parents), in childhood (again, when there's not enough food to go around, it's the women and girls who do without, which makes the girls frailer and less able to recover from ordinary childhood illnesses) and during reproductive years (when women don't have the option to terminate a risky pregnancy, or to choose when or if they bear children, they are likelier to die, or be seriously injured, during childbirth).

Furthermore, there's evidence that some of the kinds of cultural changes feminists generally favor --- particularly, changes that would reduce women's economic dependence on men, like making education and employment more accessible to women --- actually enhance infant girls' survival prospects.

Here's an explanation of how that works, taken from V. B. Tulasidhar's 1993 article in Health Transition Review, on "Maternal education, female labour force participation and child mortality: evidence from the Indian census":

Mother's education affects child survival in two main ways: through better child-care practices and higher standards of hygiene at home, and more rational and greater use of preventive and curative medical services (Mosley and Chen 1984; Cleland and van Ginneken 1988). ... It is also argued that education gives greater independence to the mother which will help her [m]ake child-health-promoting decisions without any hindrance (Caldwell 1986). ... Educated mothers are also found to have superior knowledge of diseases and they seek timely treatment more often (see Cleland and van Ginneken 1988). However, some studies deny superior health-care knowledge on the part of educated mothers, particularly among those with lower levels of education (Caldwell, Reddy and Caldwell 1983; Lindenbaum, Chakraborty and Elias 1985). To sum up, the available evidence indicates a strong and independent association between mother's education and child health, but the exact mechanisms through which it operates are not yet clear.

...

The relationship between female labour force participation and child mortality is even more complex. On the one hand, labour force participation can have an adverse impact on child health as the child will not get full attention from its mother and may even forgo the benefits of breastfeeding. This will probably happen in those families where because of poverty the mother must participate in the labour market soon after delivery. On the other hand, the mother's work force participation will enhance the family income which will in turn have a positive impact on child nutrition and health. Thus, the eventual outcome of female labour force participation on child mortality depends on the relative influence of these two routes of causation.

...

Besides female education, three important factors are identified to explain excess female mortality (Bardhan 1988; Basu 1989; Das Gupta 1990). They are, first, cultural preference for male children; secondly, low social status of women; and thirdly, low female labour requirements in areas where rice is not grown. Among these three, the last hypothesis, propounded by Bardhan (1988), is intuitively the most appealing. The underlying factor in the hypothesis is the low economic value of women and hence female children in areas where the labour force participation rates of women are low. It appears that the other two factors (low social status and cultural preference) stem partly from the low economic value of women.

A much more recent (2007) paper by World Bank development economist Shwetlena Sabarwal, written while she was a graduate student in economics at the University of Minnesota, sheds some more light on the relationship between mothers' education levels and daughters' chances of surviving childhood.

Sabarwal tries to account separately for the two things she sees education doing for women, which is informing them and empowering them, and measure the effect of each on child mortality and excess female mortality.

In this analysis, it is proposed that mother's education can affect child health outcomes in three ways: a) autonomy effects of education, b) information effects of education and c) other direct effects of education. Once the autonomy and information effects are isolated from the other direct education effects, some interesting results emerge. First, we see that mother's education influences child health primarily through direct education and information effects and mother's autonomy does not have much predictive power in this relationship. In the excessive female child mortality regression however, women's autonomy has a negative and significant influence. The fact that the female autonomy variable is not significant in the child mortality regression in India runs counter to theoretical literature that emphasizes the education-autonomy link as a major pathway through which maternal schooling influences child mortality. Instead, it is the information effects that stand out as being highly significant, indicating that effective information dissemination is a crucial channel for reducing child mortality.

These results also show that mother's education affects child mortality on the one hand and excessive female child mortality on the other hand in very different ways. Women's autonomy is an important pathway through which mother's education can improve relative survival probabilities of girls. This has important policy implications in that instead of simply relying on female education[,] attempts should be made to enhance female autonomy in a broader sense.

This is a really long, dense post, that in its specifics seems to leap randomly all over time, space, and culture, but throughout it I've been trying to demonstrate, both clearly and thoroughly, that feminism really does help women. My thesis here has been the opposite of Kanazawa's: rather than leave women unhappy, stressed-out and childless, feminism has improved women's health and well-being, and their children's --- especially daughters' --- chances for survival.