The Connection Between Economics and Promiscuity

When it comes to mating, humans are a rather flexible species. In attempting to make sense of this variation, a natural starting point for many researchers is to try and tackle what might be seen as the largest question: why are some people more inclined to promiscuity or monogamy than others? Though many answers can be given to that question, a vital step in building towards a plausible and useful explanation of the variance is to consider the matter of function (as it always is). That is, we want to be asking ourselves the question, “what adaptive problems might be solved by people adopting long- or short-term mating strategies?” By providing answers to this question we can, in turn, develop expectations for what kind of psychological mechanisms exist to help solve these problems, explanations for how they could solve them, and then go examine the data more effectively for evidence of their presence or absence.

It will help until the research process is automated, anyway

The current research I wanted to talk about today begins to answer the question of function by considering (among other things) the matter of resource acquisition. Specifically, women face greater obligate biological costs when it comes to pregnancy than men. Because of this, men tend to be the more eager sex when it comes to mating and are often willing to invest resources to gain favor with potential mates (i.e., men are willing to give up resources for sex). Now, if you’re a woman, receiving this investment is an adaptive benefit, as it can be helpful in ensuring the survival and well-being of both yourself and your offspring. The question then becomes, “how can women most efficiently extract these resources from men?” As far as women are concerned, the best answer – in an ideal world – is to extract the maximum amount of investment from the maximum amount of men.

However, men have their own interests too; while they might be willing to pay-to-play, as it were, the amount they’re willing to give up depends on what they’re getting in return. What men are looking for (metaphorically or literally speaking) is what women have: a guarantee of sharing genes with their offspring. In other words, men are looking for paternity certainty. Having sex with a woman a single time increases the odds of being the father of one of her children, but only by a small amount. As such, men should be expected to prefer extended sexual access over limited access. Paternity confidence can also be reduced if a woman is having sex with one or more other men at the same time. This leads us to expect that men adjust their willingness to invest in women upwards if that investment can help them obtain one or both of those valued outcomes.

This line of reasoning lead the researchers to develop the following hypothesis: as female economic dependence on male investment increases, so too should anti-promiscuity moralization. That is, men and women should both increase their moral condemnation of short-term sex when male investment is more valuable to women. For women, this expectation arises because promiscuity threatens paternity confidence, and so their engaging in mating with multiple males should make it more difficult for them to obtain substantial male investment. Moreover, other women engaging in short-term sex similarly makes it more difficult for even monogamous women to demand male investment, and so would be condemned for their behavior as well. Conversely, since men value paternity certainty, they too should condemn promiscuity to a greater degree when their investment is more valuable, as they are effectively in a better position to bargain for what they want.

In sum, the expectation in the present study was that as female economic dependence increases, men and women should become more opposed to promiscuous mating.

“Wanted: Looking for paternity certainty. Will pay in cash”

This was tested in two different ways: in the first study, 656 US residents answered questions about their perceptions of female economic dependence on male investment in their social network, as well as their attitudes about promiscuity and promiscuous people. The correlation between the measures ended up being r = .28, which is a good proof of concept, though not a tremendous relationship (which is perhaps to be expected, given that multiple factors likely impact attitudes towards promiscuity). When economic dependence was placed into a regression to predict this sexual moralization, controlling for age, sex, religiosity, and conservatism in the first step, it was found that female economic dependence accounted for approximately 2% of the remaining variance in the wrongness of promiscuity ratings. That’s not nothing, to be sure, but it’s not terribly substantial either.

In the second study, 4,626 participants from across the country answered these same basic questions, along with additional questions, like their (and their partner’s) personal income. Again, there was a small correlation (r = .23) between female economic dependence and wrongness of promiscuity judgments. Also again, when entered into a regression, as before, an additional 2% of the variance in these wrongness judgments was predicted by economic dependence measures. However, this effect became more substantial when the analysis was conducted at the level of the states, rather than at the level of individuals. At the state level, the correlation between female economic dependence and attitudes towards promiscuity now rose to r = .66, with the dependence measure predicting 9% of the variance of promiscuity judgments in the regression with the other control factors.

Worth noting is that, though a women’s personal income was modestly predictive of her attitudes towards promiscuity, it was not as good of a predictor as her perception of the dependence of women she knows. There are two ways to explain this, though they are not mutually exclusive: first, it’s possible that women are adjusting their attitudes so as to avoid condemnation of others. If lots of women rely on this kind of investment, then she could be punished for being promiscuous even if it was in her personal interests. As such, she adopts anti-promiscuity attitudes as a way of avoiding punishment preemptively. The second explanation is that, given our social nature, our allies are important to us, and adjusting our moral attitudes so as to gain and maintain social support is also a viable strategy. It’s something of the other side of the same social support coin, and so both explanations can work together.

The dual-purpose marriage/friendship ring

Finally, I wanted to discuss a theoretical contradiction I find myself struggling to reconcile. Specifically, in the beginning of the paper, the authors mention that females will sometimes engage in promiscuous behavior in the service of obtaining resources from multiple males. A common example of this kind of behavior is prostitution, where a woman will engage in short-term intercourse with men in explicit exchange for money, though the strategy need not be that explicit or extreme. Rather than obtaining lots of investment from a single male, then, a viable female strategy should be to obtain several smaller investments from multiple males. Following this line of reasoning, then, we might end up predicting that female economic dependence on males might increase promiscuity and, accordingly, lower moral condemnation of it, at least in some scenarios.

If that were the case, the pattern of evidence we might predict is that, when female economic dependence is high, we should see attitudes towards promiscuity become more bi-modal, with some women more strongly disapproving of it while others become more strongly approving. As such, looking at the mean impact of these economic factors might be something of a wash (as they kind of were on the individual level). Instead, one might be interested in looking at the deviations from the mean instead, and see if those areas in which female economic dependence is the greatest show a larger standard deviation from the average moralization value than those in areas of lower dependence. Perhaps there are some theoretical reasons that this is implausible, but none are laid out in the paper.

References: Price, M., Pound, N., & Scott, I. (2014). Female economic dependence and the morality of promiscuity. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 43, 1289-1301.

Why Non-Violent Protests Work

It’s a classic saying: The pen is mightier than the sword. While this saying communicates some valuable information, it needs to be qualified in a significant way to be true. Specifically, in a one-on-one fight, the metaphorical pens do not beat swords. Indeed, as another classic saying goes: Don’t bring a knife to a gun fight. If knives aren’t advisable against guns, then pens are probably even less advisable. This raises the question as to how – and why – pens can triumph over swords in conflicts. These questions are particularly relevant, given some recent happenings in California at Berkeley where a protest against a speaking engagement by Milo Yiannopoulos took a turn for the violent. While those who initiated the violence might not have been students of the school, and while many people who were protesting might not engage in such violence themselves when the opportunity arises, there does appear to be a sentiment among some people who dislike Milo (like those leaving comments over on the Huffington Post piece) that such violence is to be expected, is understandable, and sometimes even morally justified or praiseworthy. The Berkeley riot was not the only such incident lately, either.

The Nazis shooting guns is a very important detail here

So let’s discuss why such violent behavior is often counterproductive for the swords in achieving their goals. Non-violent political movements, like those associated with leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi, appear to yield results, at least according to the only bit of data on the matter I’ve come across (for the link-shy: nonviolent campaigns combined complete and partial success rate was about 73%, while the comparable violent rate was about 33%). I even came across a documentary recently I intend to watch about a black man who purportedly got over 200 members of the KKK to leave the organization without force or the threat of it; he simply talked to them. That these nonviolent methods work at all seems rather unusual, at least if you were to frame it in terms of any other nonhuman species. Imagine, for instance, that a chimpanzee doesn’t like how he is being treated by the resident dominant male (who is physically aggressive), and so attempts to dissuade that individual from his behavior by nonviolently confronting him. No matter how many times the dominant male struck him, the protesting chimp would remain steadfastly nonviolent until he won over the other chimps in his group, and they all turned against the dominant male (or until the dominant male saw the error of his ways). As this would likely not work out for our nonviolent chimp, hopefully nonviolent protests are sounding a little stranger to you now; yet they often seem to work better than violence, at least for humans. We want to know why.

The answer to that question involves turning our attention back to the foundation of our moral sense: why do we perceive a dimension of right and wrong in the world in the first place? The short answer to this question, I think, is that when a dispute arises, those involved in the dispute find themselves in a state of transient need for social support (since numbers can decide the outcome of the conflict). Third parties (those not initially involved in the dispute) can increase their value as a social asset to one of the disputants by filling that need and assisting them in the fight against the rival. This allows third parties to leverage the transient needs of the disputants to build future alliances or defend existing allies. However, not all behaviors generate the same degree of need: the theft of $10 generates less need than a physical assault. Accordingly, our moral psychology represents a cognitive mechanism for determining what degree of need tends to be generated by behaviors in the interests of guiding where one’s support can best be invested (you can find the longer answer here). That’s not to say our moral sense will be the only input for deciding what side we eventually take – factors like kinship and interaction history matter too – but it’s an important part of the decision.

The applications of this idea to nonviolent protest ought to be fairly apparent: when property is destroyed, people are attacked, and the ability of regular citizens to go about their lives is disrupted by violent protests, this generates a need for social support on the part of those targeted or affected by the violence. It also generates worries in those who feel they might be targeted by similar groups in the future. So, while the protesters might be rioting because they feel they have important needs that aren’t being met (seeking to achieve them via violence, or the threat of it), third parties might come to view the damage inflicted by the protest as being more important or harmful (as they generate a larger, or more legitimate need). The net result of that violence is now that third parties side against the protesters, rather than with them. By contrast, a nonviolent protest does not create as large a need on the part of those it targets; it doesn’t destroy property or harm people. If the protesters have needs they want to see met and they aren’t inflicting costs on others, this can yield more support for the protester’s side.

I’m sure the owner of that car really had this coming…

This brings us to our third classic saying of the post: While I disagree with what you have to say, I will defend to the death your right to say it. Though such a sentiment might be seldom expressed these days, it highlights another important point: even if third parties agree with the grievances of the protesters (or, in this case, disagree with the behavior of the people being protested), the protesters can make themselves seem like suitably poor social assets by inflicting inappropriately-large costs (as disagreeing with someone generates less harm than stifling their speech through violence). Violence can alienate existing social support (since they don’t want to have to defend you from future revenge, as people who pick fights tend to initiate and perpetuate conflicts, rather than end them) and make enemies of allies (as the opposition now offers a better target of social investment, given their relative need). The answer as to why pens can beat swords, then, is not that pens are actually mightier (i.e., capable of inflicting greater costs), but rather that pens tend to be better at recruiting other swords to do their fighting for them (or, in more mild cases, pens can remove the social support from the swords, making them less dangerous). The pen doesn’t actually beat the sword; it’s the two or more swords the pen has persuaded to fight for it – and not the opposing sword – that do.

Appreciating the power of social support helps bolster our understanding of other possible interactions between pens and swords. For instance, when groups are small, swords will likely tend to be more powerful than pens, as large numbers of third parties aren’t around to be persuaded. This is why our nonviolent chimp example didn’t work well: chimps don’t reliably join disputes as third parties on the basis of behavior the way humans do. Without that third-party support, non-violence will fail. The corollary point here is that pens might find themselves in a bit of a bind when it comes to confrontations with other pens. Put in plain terms: nonviolence is a useful rallying cry for drawing social support if the other side of the dispute is being violent. If both sides abstain from violence, however, nonviolence per se no longer persuades people. You can’t convince someone to join your side in a dispute by pointing out something your side shares with the other. This should result in the expectation that people will frequently over-represent the violence of the opposition, perhaps even fabricating it completely, in the interests of persuading others. 

Yet another point that can be drawn from this analysis is that even “bad” ideas or groups (whether labeled as such because of moral or factual reasons) can recruit swords to their side if they are targeted by violence. Returning to the cases we began with – the riot at UC Berkeley and the incident where Richard Spencer got punched – if you hope to exterminate people who hold disagreeable views, then violence might seem like the answer. However, as we have seen, violence against others, even disagreeable others, who are not themselves behaving violently can rally support from third parties, as they might begin to worry that threats to free speech (or other important issues) are more harmful than the opinions and words we find disagreeable (again, hitting someone creates more need than talking does). On the other hand, if you hope to persuade people to join your side (or at least not join the opposition), you will need to engage with arguments and reasoning. Importantly, you need to treat those you hope to persuade as people and engage with the ideas and values they actually hold. If the goal in these disputes really is to make allies, you need to convince others that you have their best interests at heart. Calling those who disagree “baskets of deplorables,” suggesting they’re too stupid to understand the world, or anything to that extent doesn’t tend to win their hearts and minds. If anything, it sends a signal to them that you do not value them, giving them all the more reason to not spend their time helping you achieve your goals.  

“Huh; I guess I really am a moron and you’re right. Well done,” said no one, ever.

As a final matter, we could also discuss the idea that violence is useful at snuffing out threats preemptively. In other words, better to stop someone before they can try and attack you, rather than after their knife is already in your back. There are several reasons preemptive defense is just as suspect, so let’s run through a few: first, there are different legal penalties for acts like murder and attempted murder, as attempted – but incomplete acts – generate less needs than completed ones. As such, they garner less social support. Second, absent very strong evidence that the people targeted for violence would have eventually become violent, the preemptive attacks will not look defensive; they will simply look aggressive, returning to the initial problems violent protests face. Relatedly, it is unlikely to ever make allies of enemies; if anything, it will make deeper enemies of existing ones and their allies. Remember: when you hurt someone, you indirectly inflict costs on their friends, families, and other relations as well. Finally, some people will likely develop reasonable concerns about the probability of being attacked for holding other opinions or engaging in behaviors people find unpleasant or dangerous. With speech already being equated to violence among certain groups, this concern doesn’t seem unfounded. 

In the interests of persuading others – actors and third parties alike – nonviolence is usually the better first step. However, nonviolence alone is not enough, especially if your opposition is nonviolent as well. Not being violent does not mean you’ve already won the dispute; just that you haven’t lost it. It is at that point you need to persuade others that your needs are legitimate, your demands reasonable, and your position in their interests as well, all while your opposition attempts to be persuasive themselves. It’s not an easy task, to be sure, and it’s one many of us are worse at then we’d like to think; it’s just the best way forward.

On The Need To Evolutionize Memory Research

This semester I happen to be teaching a course on human learning and memory. Part of the territory that comes with designing and teaching any class is educating yourself on the subject: brushing up on what you do know and learning about what you do not. For the purposes of this course, much of my preparations come from the latter portion. Memory isn’t my main specialty, so I’ve been spending a lot of time reading up on it. Wandering into a relatively new field is always an interesting experience, and on that front I consider myself fortunate: I have a theoretical guide to help me think about and understand the research I’m encountering – evolution. Rather than just viewing the field of memory as a disparate collection of facts and findings, evolutionary theory allows me to better synthesize and explain, in a satisfying way, all these novel (to me) findings and tie them to one another. It strikes me as unfortunate that, as with much of psychology, there appears to be a distinct lack of evolutionary theorizing on matters of learning and memory, at least as far as the materials I’ve come across would suggest. That’s not to say there has been none (indeed, I’ve written about some before), but rather that there certainly doesn’t seem to have been enough. It’s not the foundation of the field, as it should be. 

“How important could a solid foundation really be?”

To demonstrate what I’m talking about, I wanted to consider an effect I came across during my reading: the generation effect in memory. In this case, generation refers not to a particular age group (e.g., people in my generation), but rather to the creation of information, as in to generate. The finding itself – which appears to replicate well – is that, if you give people a memory task, they tend to be better at remembering information they generated themselves, relative to remembering information that was generated for them. To run through a simple example, imagine I was trying to get you to remember the word “bat.” On the one hand, I could just have the word pop up on a screen, tell you to read and remember it. On the other hand, I could give you a different word, say, “cat” and ask you to come up with a word that rhymes with “cat” that can complete the blanks in “B _ _.” Rather than my telling you the word “bat,” then, you would generate the word on your own (even if the task nudges you towards generating it rather strongly). As it turns out, you should have a slight memory advantage for the words you generated, relative to the words you were just given.

Now that’s a neat finding at all – likely one that people would read about and thoughtfully nod their head in agreement – but we want to explain it: why is memory better for words you generate? On that front, the textbook I was using was of no use, offering nothing beyond the name of the effect and a handful of examples. If you’re trying to understand the finding – much less explain it to a class full of students – you’ll be on your own. Textbooks are always incomplete, though, so I turned to some of the referenced source material to see how the researchers in the field were thinking about it. These papers seemed to predominately focus on how information was being processed, but not necessarily on why it was being processed that way. As such, I wanted to advance a little bit of speculation on how an evolutionary approach could help inform our understanding of the finding (I say could because this is not the only possible answer to the question one could derive from evolutionary theory; what I hope to focus on is the approach to answering the question, rather than the specific answer I will float. Too often people can talk about an evolutionary hypothesis that was wrong as a reflection of the field, neglecting that how an issue was thought through is a somewhat separate matter from the answer that eventually got produced).

To explain the generation effect I want to first take it out of an experimental setting and into a more naturalistic one. That is, rather than figuring out why people can remember arbitrary words they generated better than ones they just read, let’s think about why people might have a better memory for information they’ve created in general, relative to information they heard. The initial point to make on that front is that our memory systems will only retain a (very) limited amount of the information we encounter. The reason for this, I suspect, is that if we retained too much information, cognitively sorting through it for the most useful pieces of information would be less efficient, relative to a case where only the most useful information was retained in the first place. You don’t want a memory (which is metabolically costly to maintain) chock-full of pointless information, like what color shirt your friend wore when you hung out 3 years ago. As such, we ought to expect that we have a better memory for events or facts that carry adaptively-relevant consequences.

“Yearbooks; helping you remember pointless things your brain would otherwise forget”

Might information you generate carry different consequences than information you just hear about? I think there’s a solid case to be made that, at least socially, this can be true. In a quick example, consider the theory of evolution itself. This idea is generally considered to be one the better ones people (collectively) have had. Accordingly, it is perhaps unsurprising that most everyone knows the name of the man who generated this idea: Charles Darwin. Contrast Darwin with someone like me: I happen to know a lot about evolutionary theory and that does grant me some amount of social prestige within some circles. However, knowing a lot about evolutionary theory does not afford me anywhere near the amount of social acclaim that Darwin receives. There are reasons we should expect this state of affairs to hold as well, such as that generating an idea can signal more about one’s cognitive talents than simply memorizing it does. Whatever the reasons for this, however, if ideas you generate carry greater social benefits, our memory systems should attend to them more vigilantly; better to not forget that brilliant idea you had than the one someone else did.

Following this line of reasoning, we could also predict that there would be circumstances in which information you generated is recalled less-readily than if you had just read about it: specifically, in cases when the information would carry social costs for the person who generated it.

Imagine, for instance, that you’re a person who is trying to think up reasons to support your pet theory (call that theory A). Initially, your memory for that reasoning might be better if you think you’ve come up with an argument yourself than if you had read about someone else who put forth that same idea. However, it later turns out that a different theory (call that theory B) ends up saying your theory is wrong and, worse yet, theory B is also better supported and widely-accepted. At that point, you might actually observe that the person’s memory for the initial information supporting theory A is worse if they generated those reasons themselves, as that reflects more negatively on them than if they had just read about someone else being wrong (and memory would be worse, in this case, because you don’t want to advertise the fact that you were wrong to others, while you might care less about talking about why someone who wasn’t you was wrong).

In short, people might selectively forget potentially embarrassing information they generated but was wrong, relative to times they read about someone else being wrong. Indeed, this might be why it’s said truth passes through three stages: ridicule, opposition, and acceptance. This can be roughly translated to someone saying of a new idea, “That’s silly,” to, “That’s dangerous,” to, “That’s what I’ve said all along.” This is difficult to test, for sure, but it’s a possibility worth mulling over.

How you should feel reading over old things you forgot you wrote

With the general theory described, we can now try and apply that line of thinking back into the unnatural environment of memory research labs in universities. One study I came across (deWinstanley & Bjork, 1997) claims that the generation effect doesn’t always have an advantage over reading information. In their first experiment, the researchers had conditions where participants would either read cue-word pairs (like “juice” – “orange”, and, “sweet” – “pineapple”) or read a cue and then generate a word (e.g., “juice” – “or_n_ _”). The participants would later be tested on how many of the target words (the second one in the pair) they could recall. When participants were just told there would be a recall task later, but not the nature of that test, the generate group had a memory advantage. However, when both groups were told to focus on the relationship between the targets (such as them all being fruits), the read group’s ability to remember now matched that of the generate group.

In their second experiment, the researchers then changed the nature of the memory task: instead of asking participants to just freely recall the target words, they would be given the cue word and asked to recall the associated target (e.g., they see “juice” and need to remember “orange”). In this case, when participants were instructed to focus on the relationship between the cue and the target, it was the read participants with the memory advantage; not the generate group.

One might explain these findings within this framework I discussed as follows: in the first experiment, participants in the “read” condition were actually also in an implicit generate condition; they were being asked to generate a relationship between the targets to be remembered and, as such, their performance improved on the associated memory task. By contrast, in the second experiment, participants in the read condition were still in the implicit “generate” condition: being asked to generate connections between the cues and targets. However, those in the explicit generate condition were only generating the targets; not their cues. As such, it’s possible participants tended to selectively attend to the information they had created over the information they did not. Put simply, the generate participant’s ability to better recall the words they created was interfering with their ability to remember their associations with the words they did not create. Their memory systems were focusing on the former over the latter.

A more memorable meal than one you go out and buy

If one wanted to increase the performance of those in the explicit generate condition for experiment two, then, all a researcher might have to do would be to get their participants to generate both the cue and the target. In that instance, the participants should feel more personally responsible for the connections – it should reflect on them more personally – and, accordingly, remember them better. 

Now whether that answers I put forth get it all the way (or even partially) right is besides the point. It’s possible that the predictions I’ve made here are completely wrong. It’s just that what I have been noticing is that words like “adaptive” and “relevance” are all but absent from this book (and papers) on memory. As I hope this post (and my last one) illustrates, evolutionary theory can help guide our thinking to areas it might not otherwise reach, allowing us to more efficiently think up profitable avenues for understanding existing research and creating future projects. It doesn’t hurt that it helps students understand the material better, either.

References: deWinstanley, P. & Bjork, E. (1997). Processing instructions and the generation effect: a test of the multifactor transfer-appropriate processing theory. Memory, 5, 401-421.