Today, a little Evo Psych Pop Quiz for you all!
5 of the following 6 statements are actual quotes from a 2007 article in the open access peer-reviewed journal Evolutionary Psychology. Can you spot the quote that isn’t from the article?
- “The section on intra-vaginal anti-cuckoldry tactics focuses on sperm competition, providing fascinating descriptions of the semen-displacement hypothesis (Gallup Jr. and Burch) and the psychobiology of semen (Burch and Gallup Jr.).”
- “[I]ntra-vaginal battles demand men to become aroused to situations that are actually unpleasant for them, for instance the suspicion of their partner’s infidelity.”
- “This section also includes discussions of the interesting notions that … women should not be motivated to have sex with their main partner right after an extra-pair copulation because of the possibility of sperm displacement (the penis appears to be shaped to do just that), [and] that a man may manipulate a woman’s mood via semen content (Rice, 1996, has experimentally shown something similar in fruit flies) … .”
- “One of the mating strategies examined as an early prevention method is violence against women within partnered relationships.”
- “Despite this scrutiny, a man can still gain from deliberately ejaculating in front of his partner from time to time. Choosing each occasion carefully so as to display a good ejaculation can be a powerful way to advertise his continuing good health.”
- “Affirmative feedback did not increase men’s likelihood to allocate resources to self-morphed images, but men were significantly less likely to allocate resources to self morphed images when told the morphed image did not resemble them … . “
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Answer: Number 5 is the ringer! But, lacking confidence in my own ability to come up with something as convincingly batty as the quotes from the real article, I cheated a little here, borrowing this quote from a real Evo Psych book — Sperm Wars, by Robin Baker, a popular title from a major publisher recommended on countless Pickup Artist and “Red Pill” reading lists. It’s a truly bizarre and often quite disturbing read. (If you have a bit of Google-fu you should be able to locate a pdf of it online with no trouble.)
And speaking of pdfs, if you want tp read the article in Evo Psych I got most of these quotes from, a book review by Kelly D. Suschinsky and Martin L. Lalumière titled The View From the Cuckold, you can find a pdf of it here. See, I really didn’t just make it up!
CassandraSays: But we can’t study how anger works without a theory of what it’s for. And that theory has to come from somewhere. The only alternative, as I said, is to never speculate about anger’s functions, which severely and enormously limits the hypotheses we’ll think to test. I can’t imagine you’re advocating that, so I’m not sure what alternate framework you’d use for allowing psychological phenomena to have functions.
dustydeste: But the thing is, if no one drew any causal inferences about oxytocin, then no one would think to study its potential effects on donations. That awesome paper that found that oxytocin actually kind of makes people more xenophobic? There’s no logical link there unless “oxytocin’s function is to increase pair bonds” is on the table.
I’m curious, what is it you guys are imagining when i talk about evolutionary psychology? If I say “evolutionary psychology” and “oxytocin” in a sentence, what do you think people are doing? Why is this so resisted? Because I guarantee all of those papers were written by people who assume that psychological phenomena have evolutionary bases. I… kind of can’t imagine that most people HERE don’t believe that psychological phenomena have evolutionary bases. Given that most professionals are careful about the appeal to nature, what’s the problem with evolution being part of the intellectual realm of psychology?
@tedthefed – I bet you’re right about the NeoAtheist/Evo-Psych intersection.
Personally, I’m pretty sure there is no such being as “god,” but I am an active member of my progressive-Jewish religious community. (Fun fact: you actually do NOT have to believe in “god” as traditionally defined to be a religiously-active Jew, and this isn’t some newfangled NewAgey thing – check out one of our greatest philosophers, Baruch Spinoza.)
That being said, I can’t bring myself to identify as an atheist; I prefer agnostic. And that’s at least in part because I can’t deal with the reflexive, and often unseemingly gleeful, NeoAtheist/Evo-Psych attitude: “Human life doesn’t “mean” anything, and if you think it does, you’re just a pathetic religious idiot! You can tell how brilliant and daring and NeoAtheist I am, because I say there’s no such thing as Meaning! Humans are just bigger, smarter ants! Nihilism IS TOO an ethos, beeyotches!”
Like the anger thing, which was stated as a fact rather than a theory. Nope, sorry, no matter how strongly you believe that theory to be true it’s not a thing you actually know for sure. It’s a hypothesis.
@ dustydeste
The untestable thing remains a sticking point for me.
@Viscaria
Yep, definitely not aimed at you. It’s just that after posting that, I realised that it may read as an accusation considering there’s an argument going on here, and knowing that you’re a psych grad (and I think Cassandra is as well, IIRC), and everyone else sounds like they know what they’re talking about, I wanted to make myself extra clear 🙂
@dustydeste
I actually took a course in Evo Psych when I was doing my undergrad, and I had a really good teacher who was always very forthcoming about the shortcomings of every study he brought up and basically straight up admitted that the field is basically just a bunch of hypotheses right now. I was only introduced to pop evopsych when I started reading feminist sites, so it was a complete shock for me to hear evo psych theories without caveats and disclaimers.
Hey, Ted? Have you heard the First Rule of Holes? That’s a hell of a theory.
I’m a psych drop-out, actually XD but I’m glad we’re all pretty much on the same page. Loving the Tick avatar.
@ ted
Are you under the impression that prior to the emergence of evo-psych psychology as a field just sat around twiddling its thumbs and waiting for its savior to come along? The whole tone of your comments is starting to sound almost religious.
Honestly, I think you’re using the term “evolutionary psychology” in a rather strange, idiosyncratic way. That’s the only way your comments make any sense. BTW, you know that several of the people you’re talking to are psychology grads, right?
CassandraSays: Oh, okay, sorry if you felt condescended to. I thought you said that oxytocin’s functionality was a conclusion, but I guess I was confused.
One way I might be being unclear is, when I say “Hugging increases oxytocin because it increases pair bonds and leads to motivation to give up resources,” then of course there’s a “might” in there, because everything has a “might” associated with it. It’s an assumption, and then you try to collect information in line with it.
At its most basic, the issue is this: To do psychological research, you need to assume “All humans are alike in certain ways.” And evolutionary theory provides a baseline for that assumption. We literally couldn’t do psych without SOME baseline, and given that the previous one was “God made us all as humans,” it seems a step up.
“First Rule of Hole”
No, never heard of, Does it involve mentulae?
@ Shadow
Now think how weird it feels to watch someone insist that the existence of psychology as a field hinges upon evopsych, and without it we can’t do psychology at all. I should send my old psychopathology professor an email and inform him that he must stop immediately.
tedthefed: You don’t have to infer causality in order to test things that a substance might effect. It’s unnecessary and problematic to attach untestable meanings to things. If you just look at what we already know oxytocin does, you can then go on to test its effects on related things, which is, in all probability, how those experiments you referenced got going. It’s sufficient to say “hugging increases oxytocin, which makes people feel closer to their loved ones, which increases the desire to work on their behalf;” there’s no need to assign causal meaning to it, especially as there’s no way to prove any of that causality.
It’s one thing to use considered causality as a tool in deciding research directions. It’s a completely different thing once you start claiming that because you considered a possible but unprovable causality in determining what you researched, that that causality must be scientific truth.
Again, I don’t mean to be condescending, but I’m very surprised that psych students haven’t come across lots and lots of papers where evolution wasn’t an assumed thing, and where the functionality of some phenomenon wasn’t explained as serving some evolutionary purpose.
And… I’m actually a psych PhD. I don’t mean to say that to imply I know better than anyone else here, but just to say that I don’t not know what I’m talking about.
And…no, I don’t think I’m being very idiosyncratic in my definition of evolutionary psychology. Assuming anger’s functionality is the same thing in-kind as assuming female submissiveness’s functionality; it’s just that the latter is A: awful, B: stupid, and C: a belief that causes huge, real social problems. But THOSE are the problems, not evolution being a part of psychology in the first place.
What I MAY come off as is being intentionally obtuse, and I apologize for that. I KNOW how people talk about evolutionary psych, and I knew ten years ago when I first threw my copy of The Blank Slate out a window when Pinker got to the part where he was saying people don’t REALLY like modern art. There is huge idiocy there, and I’m not being an idiot and denying that. It’s just, we should be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater because of moron manosphere dudes injecting their evil into stuff.
talacaris: you wasted time typing that word salad instead of Googling it?
dustydeste: “It’s one thing to use considered causality as a tool in deciding research directions. It’s a completely different thing once you start claiming that because you considered a possible but unprovable causality in determining what you researched, that that causality must be scientific truth.”
I agree with this. If I gave the impression that I don’t, or that I think such claims are worthwhile or good, then I totally miscommunicated my point.
There are lots of psychologists who think evo psych is junk science. Trying to insinuate that the idea that evo psych is necessary for psychology to get anything done at all is universally accepted is really sketchy, imo.
And with that I’m done with this conversation, because it’s starting to feel far too much like arguing with someone about their religious beliefs, and there’s never any point in that.
Okay, I think that’s the issue then. Clearly there’s been some miscommunication somewhere in here. Probably to do with the difference between evo-psych as done by real academics (though I’d still say it’s not really science so much as science-related and -relevant) and evo-psych as popularly understood and practiced. I think that you probably see more of the former, and that’s probably skewed the conversation, since many here see more of the latter, so it’s made the common framing a bit weird. If that makes sense.
“Googling ”
Does not work any longer. You know, Illuminati and so
BBut I will get my tinfoils…….aha, not what I thougt of, in fact, not related to sex at all.
I believe both that evolution has had an impact on psychology and that none or very few of the hypotheses generated by that idea are falsifiable at the moment. I don’t consider those positions to be in conflict.
I’m also not particularly qualified to be a part of this conversation, so… eh.
Exactly who I was thinking of, thenat! 😀
Also congrats on passing the Blockquote Monster Taste Test.
I wish Pratchett would write more about orcs. Nothing against the goblins, it’s just that the one book that dealt with orcs was really interesting.
Did Ted just say it’s OK to assume “females” are naturally submissive? Or did I read that wrong?
CassandraSays: Not expecting a reply, but clearly the issue is that we’re just talking about different things. When I say an acknowledgement of evolution is necessary for psychology (which, as an aside, I think is historically justified, given Wundt’s lab and methods), you seem to be interpreting it as “That crazy stuff that crazy people use to justify misogyny is necessary for psychology.” I don’t think anyone’s wrong to focus on that side of things, especially since it’s such a huge social problem that people think they CAN justify their own abhorent beliefs in such a way. And, as I said, I was pointedly ignoring that side while being well aware of it.
But, I just think it’s also important to not assume that any study that mentions the word “evolution” is attached to a worldview that justifies sposal abuse and imperialism.
Okay, back to hating 85% of evolutionary psych for me.
Because I definitely said that psychology should pretend that evolution never happened, and go with “God did it” instead (these being the only options).
BTW, just for the sake of people who’ve never had any contact with any of this academic stuff who’re reading along, it is true that some evolutionary psychologists have tried to advance the idea that their discipline is essential to psychology as a field. What isn’t true is that everyone else in the field agrees with them.
tedthefed:
That sounds arse about face to me. Surely you can study something to develop an idea of what it’s about, rather than go in with a theory – or, possibly, just assumptions parading as a theory – and try to make the evidence fit?
I think there’s a huge difference between saying psychologists need to know about evolution and biology, and saying evo-psych is the real deal. I know my psychologist wasn’t pulling gender-essentialism bullshit or biotruths when he told me about the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, the adrenal gland and how all that reacts to danger (or things one’s learned to perceive as danger) and start fucking one’s head around with anxiety and stress.
I did cheer, though, at your comments about Neo-atheists*, Dawkins et al and their asshattery. That “if it makes you happy it must be wrong, and you just made it up ‘cos you’re a weakling and coward” stuff does come across from a lot of otherwise not-assholish people.
*Are they people who don’t believe in Keanu Reeves?
Harking back to the body-fluids bit: I can understand going overboard about how wonderful menstrual blood is, partly if you’re all hung up on fertility and so on (hardly necessary with our current numbers, I’d have thought) but more in reaction to the centuries of societal abhorrence toward it and toward women in general. Not that I feel that way about it. Like CassandraSaid, it’s just body fluid, and (TMI) more inconvenient and occasionally painful than having the runs.
tl:dr for the whole thread:
People studying psychology need to understand evolution and biology. Nobody’s arguing with this.
That is not the same as evolutionary psychology, aka evopsych, a distinct area, which is all too prone to being gender-essentialist, bio-reductionist, everyone-was-a-21st-century-sperm-obsessed-dude-like-me bullshit.