Category Archives: EvoPsych

Understanding Understanding

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“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance; it is the illusion of knowledge.” – Steven Hawking

Many researchers in the field of psychology don’t appear to understand that restating a finding is not the same as explaining that finding. For instance, if you found that men are more likely to gamble than women, a typical form of “explanation” of this finding would be to say that men have more of a “risk bias” than women, resulting in them gambling more. Clearly this explanation doesn’t add anything that stating the finding didn’t; all it manages to do is add a label to the finding. Now some psychologists might understand this shortcoming and take the next step: they might say something along the lines of men perceive gambling to be more fun or more likely to payoff than women do. While that might well be true, it still falls short of an complete explanation. Instead, it would merely push the explanation stage back a step to a question about why men might perceive gambling differently than women do. If the researchers understand this further shortcoming and take the next step, they’ll reference some cause of that feeling. If we’re lucky, that cause will be non-circular and amount to more than the phrase “culture did it”.

The smart money is on betting against that outcome, though…

A good explanation needs to focus on some outcome of a behavior; some plausible function of that outcome that can account for the emotion or feeling itself. This is notably easier in some cases than others: hunger motivates people to seek out and consume food avoiding starvation; fear motivates people to escape from or avoid threatening situations, avoiding danger; guilt motivates people to make amends and repair relationships towards wronged parties, avoiding condemnation and punishment while reaping the benefits of social interaction. Recently, I found myself posing that functional question about a feeling that is not often discussed: understanding. Teasing out the function of understanding is by no means a straightforward task. Before undertaking the task, however, I need to make a key distinction concerning precisely what I mean by “understanding”. After all, if wikipedia has a hard time defining the term, I can’t just assume that we’ll all be the on the same page despite using the same word.

The distinction I would like to draw is between understanding per se and the feeling of understanding. The examples given on wikipedia reflect understanding per se: the ability to draw connections among mental representations. Understanding per se, then, represents the application of knowledge. If a rat has learned to press a bar for food, for instance, we would say that the rat understands something about the connection between bar pressing and receiving food, in that the former seems to cause the latter. The degree of understanding per se can vary in terms of accuracy and completeness. To continue on with the rat example, a rat can understand that pressing the bar generally leads to it receiving food without understanding the mechanisms through which the process works. Similarly, a person might understand that taking an allergy pill will result in their allergy symptoms being reduced, but their understanding of how that process works might be substantially less detailed or accurate than the understanding of the researchers responsible for developing the pill.

Understanding per se is to be distinguished from the feeling of understanding. While understanding per se refers to the actual connections among your mental representations, the feeling of understanding refers to your mental representations about the state of those other mental representations. The feeling of understanding, then, is a bit of a metacognitive sensation; your thinking about your thinking. Much like understanding per se, the feeling of understanding comes in varying degrees: one can feel as if they don’t understand something at all through feeling as if they understand it completely, and anything in between. With this distinction made, we can begin to start considering some profitable questions: what is the connection between understanding per se and the feeling of understanding? What behaviors are encouraged by the feeling of understanding? What functional outcome(s) are those behaviors aimed at achieving? Given these functional outcomes, what predictions can we draw about how people experiencing various degrees of feeling as if they understand something will react to certain contexts?

Maybe even what Will Smith meant when he wrote “Parents Just Don’t Understand“

To begin to answer these questions, let’s return to the initial quote. The enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, but rather the illusion of knowledge; the feeling of understanding. While a bit on the dramatic and poetic sides of things, the quote brings to light an important idea: there is not necessarily a perfect correlation between understanding per se and the feeling of understanding. Sure, understanding per se might tend to trigger feelings of understanding, but we ought to be concerned with matters of degree. It is clear that increased feelings of understanding do not require a tight connection to degrees of understanding per se. In much the same way, one’s judgment of how attractive they are need not perfectly correlate with how attractive they actually are. This is a partial, if relatively underspecified, answer to our first question. Thankfully, it is all my account of understanding requires: a less than perfect correlation between understanding per se and feelings of understanding.

This brings us to the second question: what behaviors are motivated by the feeling of understanding. If you’re a particularly astute reader, you’ll have noticed that the term “understanding” appeared several times in the first paragraph. In each instance, it referred to researchers feeling that their understanding per se was incomplete. What did this feeling motivate researchers to do? Continue to attempt and build their understanding per se. In the cases where researchers lack the feeling that their understanding per se was incomplete, they seem to do one thing: stop. That is to say that reaching a feeling of understanding appears to act as a stopping rule for learning. That people stop investing in learning when they feel they understand is likely what Hawkins was hinting at in his quote. The feeling of understanding is the enemy of knowledge because it motivates you to stop acquiring the stuff. It might even motivate you to begin to share that information with others, opting to speak on a topic, rather than defer to who you perceive to be an expert, but I won’t deal with that point here.

Given that people often do not ever seem to reach complete understanding per se, why should we ever expect people to stop trying to improve? Part of that reason is that there’s a tradeoff between investing time in one aspect of your life versus investing it in any other. Time spent learning more about one skill is not time not spent doing other potentially-useful things. Further still, were you to plot a learning curve, charting how much new knowledge is gained per-unit of time invested in learning, you’d likely see diminishing returns over time. Let’s say you were trying to learn how to play a song on some musical instrument. The first hour you spend practicing will result in you gaining more information than, say, the thirtieth hour. At some point in your practicing, you’ll reach a point where the value-added by each additional hour simply isn’t worth the investment anymore. It is at this point, when some cognitive balance shifts away from investing time on learning one task to doing other things, that we should predict people to reach a strong feeling of understanding. Just as hunger wanes with each additional bite of food, feelings of understanding should grow with each additional piece of information.

Also like hunger, some people tend a touch more towards the gluttonous side.

This brings us to the final question: what can we predict about people’s behavior on the basis of their feelings of understanding? Aside from the above mentioned disinclination to learn about some specific topic further, we might also predict that repeated exposure to information we feel we already understand would be downright aversive (again, in much the same way that eating food after you feel full is painful). We might, for instance, expect people to react with boredom and diverted attention in classes that cover material too slowly. We might also expect people to react with anger when someone tries to explain something to them that they feel they already understand. In fact, there is a word for what people consider that latter act: condescending. Not only does condescension waste an individual’s time with redundant information, it could also serve as an implicit or explicit challenge to their social status via a challenge to their understanding per se (i.e. “You think you understand this topic, but you really don’t. Let me say it explain it to you again…nice…and…slowly…). While this list is quite modest, I feel it represents a good starting point for understanding understanding. Of course, since I feel that way, there’s a good chance I’ll probably stop looking for other starting points, so I may never know.

Why Hang Them Separately When We Can Hang Them Together?

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For those of you lucky enough to not have encountered it, there is a concept known as privilege that floats around in predominately feminist-leaning groups. The basic idea of the concept of privilege is that some groups of people have unearned social status or economic benefits provided to them strictly on the basis of their group membership. White people are supposed to be privileged over non-whites; men are supposed to be privileged over women; heterosexuals are supposed to be privileged over homosexuals. An official method for determining which groups are privileged over others appears to largely be absent, so the exercise tends to lean towards the infamous, “I know it when I see it” method of classification. That said, the unofficial method seems to be some combination of the Ecological and Apex fallacies. One curious facet of the idea of privilege is that it’s commonly used as a springboard for various types of moral condemnation. For instance, there are many who assert that sexism = power + prejudice, with power being equated with privilege. Accordingly, if you’re not privileged (i.e. not a male), you can’t be sexist. You can be discriminatory on the basis on sex if you’re a woman, but that is apparently something entirely different and worthy of a distinction (presumably because some people feel one ought to be more punishable than the other).

This sex-based discrimination was so accepted the first time they made a sequel.

Last Easter I discussed the curious case of morally punishing baseball batters for the misdeeds of baseball pitchers on the same team. Some similar underlying psychology seems to be at play in the case of privilege: people seem to perceive the moral culpability or welfare of all group members as being connected. In the case of privilege, if the top of the social hierarchy is predominantly male, males at the bottom of the hierarchy can be viewed as being similarly benefited, even if those men are obviously disadvantaged. In another case, white people might be viewed as being collectively complicit in harms done to non-whites, even if any contemporary white person clearly had no hand in the act, either directly or indirectly. For a final example, harms done to some specific women might be viewed as harms done to all women, with the suffering being co-opted by women who were never victimized by the act in question. Any plausible theory of morality that seeks to explain why people morally condemn others ought to be able to convincingly explain this idea of collective moral responsibility. Today I would like to examine what I consider to be the two major models for understanding moral judgments and see how they fare against a curious case of collective punishment: third-party punishment of genetic relatives of the perpetrator.

I’ll take those two matters in reverse order. A paper by Uhlmann et al (2012) sought to examine whether moral blameworthiness can spill over from the perpetrator to the blood relatives of the perpetrator, even if the perpetrator and their relative never knew one another. The first of the three studies in the paper looked at the misdeeds of someone’s grandfather in past generations. The 106 subjects read a story about Sal, whose grandfather owned a factory during the great depression and was exploitative of the workers. However, Sal received no direct benefit from this act (in that there was no inheritance left to him). Further, Sal’s grandfather was described as being either a biological relative or a non-biological one (only being related by marriage). Sal ended up winning the lottery and wanted to donate some of his winnings to a charity: either the descendants of some of the exploited workers (the purpose of which was to help them go to college) or a hungry children’s fund. Subjects were more likely to recommend that Sal donate money to the college fund of the exploited workers when his grandfather was a blood relative (M = 4.15) compared to when his grandfather was not (M = 5.28, where the scale was 1 to 9, with 1 representing donating to the college fund and a 9 representing donating to the hungry children). Obligations to try and right past wrongs appeared to transfer across generations to some extent.

The second study involved a case of a robbery/murder. A group of 191 subjects read a story about a man who killed a store clerk during a robbery. A video camera had managed to get a clear view of the perpetrator, but this was the only evidence to go on. Two possible perpetrators had been arrested for the crime on account of them looking identical to person in the video. Neither of these perpetrators knew the other, but in one case they were described as twins, whereas in the other they were described as not being related despite their similar appearance. The subjects were asked whether the two should be held in captivity while the police looked for more evidence or whether they should be let go until the matter was resolved (on a scale of 1 to 7, with 1 representing held in custody and 7 representing being let go until more evidence came in). The results showed that subjects were more willing to hold both in custody when they were twins (M = 3.03) relative to when they were not (M = 4.21). On top of transferring obligations, then, people also seemed somewhat willing to inflict costs on innocent relatives of a perpetrator.

Better kill them all, just to be on the safe-side

Of course, it’s not enough to just point out that moral judgments seem to have the capacity to be collective; one also needs to explain why this is the case. Collective punishment would seem to require that moral judgments make use of an actor’s identity, rather than an actor’s actions. Such an outcome appears to run directly counter to what is known as the dynamic coordination model (DeScioli & Kurzban, 2013). In the dynamic coordination model, third-party moral condemners choose sides in a moral debate on the basis of an individual’s actions as a means to avoid discoordination with other condemners (simply put, you want to be on the side that most other people are, so people opt to use an individual’s actions to judge which side to take. In much the same way, drivers want to avoid hitting other cars, so they decide when to stop and go on the basis of a traffic light). In the case of collective punishment, however, there is no potentially condemnable action on the part of the person being punished. The dynamic coordination model would have to require the mere act of being associated in any way with a perpetrator to be morally condemnable as well for this kind of punishment to make sense. While there might be laws against certain acts – like killing and stealing – being related to someone who committed a crime is typically not against the law (at least not the best of my knowledge. I’ll check with my legal team and get back to you about that).

While the dynamic coordination model would seem to have a good deal of trouble accounting for collective moral judgments, an alliance model would not. As Ulhmann et al (2012) note, the threat of punishment for one’s social allies can serve as a powerful deterrent. This is a point I brought up previously when considering why reputations matter: if I were to harm anyone who associated with person X, regardless of whether the person I was harming actually did anything wrong themselves, any associations with person X naturally have become costlier. If people are disinclined to associate with person X, then person X is all the worse off for it and the punishment successfully reached its ultimate target. If social ties are cut, person X will find it increasing difficult to engage in many behaviors that might ultimately be detrimental to others. This raises a concern to be dealt with, though: in the Ulhmann et al (2012) stories, the kin of the perpetrator were not described as being social allies (just as white males are not all allies, despite them being lumped together in the same group by the privilege term). If they weren’t allies, how can an alliance model account for the collective punishment?

My answer to this concern would be as follows: existing social alliances might only be one proximate cue that moral systems use. The primary targets of collective punishment would seem to be those with whom the perpetrator is perceived to share welfare with, and not all welfare connections are going to be worth targeting, given the costs involved in punishment. My welfare is, all else being equal, more dependent on kin than non-kin. Accordingly, collective punishment directed at kin is likely to be even costlier for that perpetrator, making kin punishment particularly appealing for any moral condemners. This would leave us with the following prediction: the degree to which collective punishment is enacted ought to be mediated by the perception of the degree of shared welfare between the perpetrator and the person being punished. Kin should be punished more than non-kin; close allies should be punished more than distant ones; allies that offer substantial benefits to the perpetrator ought to be punished more than allies who offer more meager benefits. Further, this punishment presents the social allies of a perpetrator with new adaptive problems to solve, specifically: how do they trade-off distancing themselves enough from the perpetrator so as to avoid being condemned with the loss of benefits that such distancing can bring?

Crude, yet effective.

This brings me to one final question: are moral judgments ever impartial? My sense is that no, moral judgments are in fact never impartial. This point requires some clarification. The first point of clarification is that moral judgments can have the appearance of impartiality without actually being generated by mechanisms designed to bring that state of affairs about. In fact, we ought not expect any cognitive mechanisms to be designed to generate impartiality because impartiality per se – much like feeling good – doesn’t do anything useful. One useful outcome that being impartial might bring would be, as DeScioli & Kurzban (2013) suggest, being better able to coordinate with other third-party condemners. Of course, if the target behavior is being on the winning side of a dispute, then we ought to expect mechanisms designed to take sides contingent on which side already has a majority of the support. Those mechanisms, though, should rightly be considered partial, in that they are judging the identity of who is on whose side, rather than neutrally on the basis of who did what to whom. This should be expected, in that the latter is only important insomuch as it predicts the former; being impartial is only useful insomuch as it leads to one being partial.

Oh; I would also like to add that providing you with this analysis of collective punishment was my privilege.

References: DeScioli, P., & Kurzban, R. (2013). A solution to the mysteries of morality. Psychological Bulletin, 139 (2), 477-496 DOI: 10.1037/a0029065

Uhlmann, E., Zhu, L., Pizarro, D., & Bloom, P. (2012). Blood is thicker: Moral spillover effects based on kinship Cognition, 124 (2), 239-243 DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2012.04.010

An Implausible Function For Depression

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Recently, I was involved in a discussion about experimenter-induced expectation biases in performance, also known as demand characteristics. The basic premise of the idea runs along the following lines: some subjects in your experiment are interested in pleasing the experimenter or, more generally, trying to do “well” on the task (others might be trying to undermine your task – the “screw you” effect – but we’ll ignore them for now). Accordingly, if the researchers conducting an experiment are too explicit about the task, or drop hints as to what the purpose is or what results they are expecting, even hints that might seem subtle, they might actually create the effect they are looking for, rather than just observe it. However, the interesting portion of the discussion I was having is that some people seemed to think you could get something for nothing from demand characteristics. That is to say some people seem to think that, for instance, if the experimenter thinks a subject will do well on a math problem, that subject will actually get better at doing math.

Hypothesis 1: Subjects will now be significantly more bullet-proof than they previously were.

This raises the obvious question: if certain demand characteristics can influence subjects to perform better or worse at some tasks, how would such an effect be achieved? (I might add that it’s a valuable first step to ensure that the effect exists in the first place which, in the case of stereotype threat with regard to math abilities, it might well not) It’s not as if these expectations are teaching subjects any new skills, so whatever information is being made use of (or not being made use of, in some cases) by the subject must have already been potentially accessible. No matter how much they might try, I highly doubt that researchers are able to simply expect subjects into suddenly knowing calculus or lifting twice as much weight as they normally can. The question of interest, then, would seem to become: given that subjects could perform better at some important task, why would they ever perform worse at it? Whatever specific answer one gives for that question, it will inevitably include the mention of trade-offs, where being better at some task (say, lifting weights) carries costs in other domains (such as risks of injury or the expenditure of energy that could be used for other tasks). Subjects might perform better on math problems after exercise, for instance, not because the exercise makes them better at math, but because there are fewer cognitive systems currently distracting the math one.

This brings us to depression. In attempting to explain why so many people get depressed, there are plenty of people who have suggested that there is a specific function to depression: people who are depressed are thought to be more accurate in some of their perceptions, relative to those who are not depressed. Perhaps, as Neel Burton and, curiously, Steven Pinker suggest, depressed individuals might do better at assessing the value of social relationships with others, or at figuring out when to stop persisting at a task that’s unlikely to yield benefits.  The official title for this hypothesis is depressive realism. I do appreciate such thinking insomuch as researchers appear to be trying to explain some psychological phenomenon functionally. Depressed people are more accurate in certain judgments, being more accurate in said judgments leads to some better social outcomes, so there are some adaptive benefits to being depressed. Neat. Unfortunately, such a line of thinking misses the aforementioned critical mention of trade-offs: specifically, if depressed people are supposed to perform better at such tasks, if people have the ability to better assess social relationships and their control over them, why would people ever be worse at those tasks?

If people hold unrealistically positive cognitive biases about their performance, and these biases cause people to, on the whole, do worse than they would without them, then the widespread existence of those positive biases need to be explained. The biases can’t simply exist because they make us feel good. Not only would such an explanation be uninformative (in that it doesn’t explain why we’d feel bad without them), but it would also be useless, as “feeling good” doesn’t do anything evolutionary useful. Notwithstanding those issues, however, the depressive realism hypothesis doesn’t even seem to be able to explain the nature of depression very well; not on the face of it anyway. Why should increasing one’s perceptual accuracy in certain domains go hand-in-hand with low energy levels or loss of appetite? Why should women be more likely to be depressed than men? Why should increases in perceptual accuracy similarly increase an individual’s risk of suicidal behavior? None of those symptoms seem like the hallmark of good, adaptive design when considered in the context of overcoming other, unexplained, and apparently maladaptive positive biases.

“We’ve manged to fix that noise the car made when it started by making it unable to start”

So, while the depressive realism hypothesis manages to think about functions, it would appear to fail to consider other relevant matters. As a result, it ends up positing a seemingly-implausible function for depression; it tries to get something (better accuracy) for nothing, all without explaining why other people don’t get that something as well. This might mean that depressive realism identifies an outcome of being depressed instead of explaining depression, but even that much is questionable. This returns to the initial point I made, in that one wants to be sure that the effect in question even exists in the first place. A meta-analysis of 75 studies of depressive realism conducted by Moore & Fresco (2012) did not yield a great deal of support for the effect being all that significant or theoretically interesting. While they found evidence of some depressive realism, the effect size of that realism was typically around or less than a tenth of a standard deviation in favor of the depressed individuals; an effect size that the authors repeatedly mentioned was “below [the] convention for a small effect” in psychology. In many cases, the effect sizes were so close to zero that they might of as well have been zero for all practical purposes; in other cases it was the non-depressed individuals who performed better. It would seem that depressed people aren’t terribly more realistic; certainly not relative to the costs that being depressed brings. More worryingly for the depressive realism hypothesis, the effect size appeared to be substantially larger in studies using poor methods of assessing depression, relative to studies using better methods. Yikes.

So, just to summarize, what we’re left with is an effect that might not exist and a hypothesis purporting to explain that possible effect which makes little conceptual sense. To continue to pile on, since we’re already here, the depressive realism hypothesis seems to generate few, if any, additional testable predictions. Though there might well be plenty of novel predictions that flow from the suggestion that depressed people are more realistic than non-depressed individuals, there aren’t any that immediately come to my mind. Now I know this might all seem pretty bad, but let’s not forget that we’re still in the field of psychology, making this outcome sort of par for the course in many respects, unfortunate as that might seem.

The curious part of the depressive realism hypothesis, to me, anyway, is why it appears to have generated as much interest as it did. The meta-analysis found over 120 research papers on the topic, which is (a) probably not exhaustive and (b) not representative of any failures to publish research on the topic, so there has clearly been a great deal of research done on the idea. Perhaps it has something to do with the idea that there’s a bright side to depression; some distinct benefit that ought to make people more sympathetic towards those suffering from depression. I have no data that speaks to that idea one way or the other though, so I remain confused as to why the realism hypothesis has drawn so much attention. It wouldn’t be the first piece of pop psychology to confuse me in such a manner.

And if it confuses you too, feel free to stop by this site for more updates.

As a final note, I’m sure there are some people out there who might be thinking that though the depressive realism idea is, admittedly, lacking in many regards, it’s currently the best explanation for depression on offer. While such conceptual flaws are, in my mind, reason enough to discard the idea even in the event there isn’t an alternative on offer, there is, in fact, a much better alternative theory. It’s called the bargaining model of depression, and the paper is available for free here. Despite not being an expert on depression myself, the bargaining model seems to make substantially more conceptual sense while simultaneously being able to account for the existing facts about depression. Arguably, it doesn’t paint the strategy of depression in the most flattering light, but it’s at least more realistic.

References: Moore, M., & Fresco, D. (2012). Depressive realism: A meta-analytic review Clinical Psychology Review, 32 (6), 496-509 DOI: 10.1016/j.cpr.2012.05.004

Mothers And Others (With Benefits)

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Understanding the existence and persistence of homosexuality in the face of its apparently reproductive fitness costs has left many evolutionary researchers scratching their heads. Though research into homosexuality has not been left wanting for hypotheses, every known hypothesis to date but one has had several major problems when it comes to accounting for the available data (and making conceptual sense). Some of them lack a developmental story; some fail to account for the twin studies; others posit benefits that just don’t seem to be there. What most of the aforementioned research shares in common, however, is its focus: male homosexuality. Female homosexuality has inspired considerably less hypothesizing, perhaps owing to the assumption, valid or not, that female sexual preferences played less of a role in determining fitness outcomes, relative to men’s. More precisely, physical arousal is required for men in order for their to engage in intercourse, whereas it is not necessarily required for women.

Not that lack of female arousal has ever been an issue for this fine specimen.

A new paper out in Evolutionary Psychology by Kuhle & Radtke (2013) takes a functional stab at attempting to explain some female homosexual behavior. Not the homosexual orientations, mind you; just some of the same-sex behavior. On this point, I would like to note that homosexual behavior isn’t what poses an evolutionary mystery anymore than other, likely nonadaptive behaviors, such as masturbation. The mystery is why an individual would be actively averse to intercourse with members of the opposite sex; their only path to reproduction. Nevertheless, the suggestion that Kuhle & Radtke (2013) put forth is that some female homosexual sexual behavior evolved in order to recruit female alloparent support. An alloparent is an individual who provided support for an infant but is not one of that infant’s parents. A grandmother helping to raise a grandchild, then, would represent a case of alloparenting. On the subject of grandmothers, some have suggested that the reason human females reach menopause so early in their lifespan – relative to other species who go on with the potential to reproduce until right around the point they die – is that grandmother alloparenting, specifically maternal grandmother, was a more valuable resource at the point, relative to direct reproduction. On the whole, alloparenting seems pretty important, so getting a hold of good resources for the task would be adaptive.

The suggestion that women might use same-sex sexual behavior to recruit female alloparental support is good, conceptually, on at least three fronts: first, it pays some mind to what is at least a potential function for a behavior. Most psychological research fails to think about function at all, much less plausible functions, and is all the worse because of it. The second positive part of this hypothesis is that it has some developmental story to go with it, making predictions about what specific events are likely to trigger the proposed adaptation and, to some extent, anyway, why they might. Finally, it is consistent with – or at least not outright falsified by – the existing data, which is more than you can say for almost all the current theories purporting to explain male homosexuality. On these conceptual grounds, I would praise the lesbian-sex-for-alloparenting model. On other grounds, both conceptual and empirical, however, I have very serious reservations.

The first of these reservations comes in form of the source of alloparental investment. While, admittedly, I have no hard data to bear on this point (as my search for information didn’t turn up any results), I would wager it’s a good guess that a substantial share of the world’s alloparental resources come from the mother’s kin: grandparents, cousins, aunts, uncles, siblings, or even other older children. As mentioned previously, some have hypothesized that grandmothers stop reproducing, at least in part, for that end. When alloparenting is coming from the female’s relatives, it’s unlikely that much, if any, sexual behavior, same-sex or otherwise, is involved or required. Genetic relatedness is likely providing a good deal of the motivation for the altruism in these cases, so sex would be fairly unnecessary. That thought brings me neatly to my next point, and it’s one raised briefly by the authors themselves: why would the lesbian sex even be necessary in the first place?

“I’ll help mother your child so hard…”

It’s unclear to me what the same-sex behavior adds to the alloparenting equation here. This concern comes in a number of forms. The first is that it seems adaptations designed for reciprocal altruism would work here just fine: you watch my kids and I’ll watch yours. There are plenty of such relationships between same-sex individuals, regardless of whether they involve childcare or not, and those relationships seem to get on just fine without sex being involved. Sure, sexual encounters might deepen that commitment in some cases, but that’s a fact that needs explaining; not the explanation itself. How we explain it will likely have a bearing on further theoretical analysis. Sex between men and women might deepen that commitment on account of it possibly resulting in conception and all the shared responsibilities that brings. Homosexual intercourse, however, does not carry that conception risk. This means that any deepening of the social connections homosexual intercourse might bring would most likely be a byproduct of the heterosexual counterpart. In much the same way, masturbation probably feels good because the stimulation sexual intercourse provides can be successfully mimicked by one’s hand (or whatever other device the more creative among us make use of). Alternatively, it could be possible that the deepening of an emotional bond between two women as the result of a sexual encounter was directly selected for because of it’s role in recruiting alloparent support, but I don’t find the notion particularly likely.

A quick example should make it clear why: for a woman who currently does not have dependent children, the same-sex encounters don’t seem to offer her any real benefit. Despite this, there are many women who continue to engage in frequent to semi-frequent same-sex sexual behaviors and form deep relationships with other women (who are themselves frequently childless as well). If the deepening of the bond between two women was directly selected for in the case of homosexual sexual behavior due to the benefits that alloparents can bring, such facts would seem to be indicative of very poor design. That is to say we should predict that women without children would be relatively uninterested in homosexual intercourse, and the experience would not deepen their social commitment to their partner. So sure, homosexual intercourse might deepen emotional bonds between the people engaging in it, which might in turn effect how the pair behave towards one another in a number of ways. That effect, however, is likely a byproduct of mechanisms designed for heterosexual intercourse; not something that was directly selected for itself. Kuhle & Radtke (2013) do say that they’re only attempting to explain some homosexual behavior, so perhaps they might grant that some increases in emotional closeness are the byproduct of mechanisms designed for heterosexual intercourse while other increases in closeness are due to selection for alloparental concerns. While possible, such a line of reasoning can set up a scenario where the hits for the theory can be counted as supportive and the misses (such as childless women engaging in same-sex sexual behaviors) dismissed as being the product of some other factor.

On top of that concern, the entire analysis rests on the assumption that women who have engaged in sexual behavior with the mother in question ought to be more likely to provide substantially better alloparental care than women who did not. This seems to be an absolutely vital prediction of the model. Curiously, that prediction is not represented in any of the 14 predictions listed in the paper. The paper also offers no empirical data bearing on this point, so whether homosexual behavior actually causes an increase in alloparental investment is in doubt. Even if we assume this point was confirmed however, it raises another pressing question: if same-sex intercourse raises the probability or quality of alloparental investment, why would we expect, as the authors predict, that women should only adopt this homosexual behavior as a secondary strategy? More precisely, I don’t see any particularly large fitness costs to women when it comes to engaging in same-sex sexual behavior but, under this model, there would be substantial benefits. If the costs to same-sex behavior are low and the benefits high, we should see it all the time, not just when a woman is having trouble finding male investment.

“It’s been real, but men are here now so…we can still be friends?”

On the topic of male investment, the model would also seem to predict that women should be relatively inclined to abandon their female partners for male ones (as, in this theory, women’s sexual interest in other women is triggered by lack of male interest). This is anecdotal, of course, but a fairly-frequent complaint I’ve heard from lesbians or bisexual women currently involved in a relationship with a woman is that men won’t leave them alone. They don’t seem to be wanting for male romantic attention. Now maybe these women are, more or less, universally assessing these men as being unlikely or unable to invest on some level, but I have my doubts as to whether this is the case.

Finally, given these sizable hypothesized benefits and negligible costs, we ought to expect to see women competing with other women frequently in the realm of attracting same-sex sexual interest. Same-sex sexual behavior should be expected to not only be cross-cultural universals, but fairly common as well, in much the same way that same-sex friendship is (as they’re hypothesized to serve much the same function, really). Why same-sex sexual interest would be relatively confined to a minority of the population is entirely unclear to me in terms of what is outlined in the paper. This model also doesn’t deal why any women, let alone the vast majority of them, would appear to feel averse to homosexual intercourse. Such aversions would only cause a woman to lose out the hypothesized alloparental benefits which, if the model is true, ought to have been substantial. Women who were not averse would have had more consistent alloparental support historically, leading to whatever genes made such attractions more likely to spread at the expense of women who eschewed it. Again, such aversions would appear to be evidence of remarkably poor design; if the lesbian-alloparents-with-benefits idea is true, that is…

References: Kuhle BX, & Radtke S (2013). Born both ways: The alloparenting hypothesis for sexual fluidity in women. Evolutionary psychology : an international journal of evolutionary approaches to psychology and behavior, 11 (2), 304-23 PMID: 23563096

Reactions To Reactions About Steubenville

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Around the middle of last month, CNN came under some social-media fire. The source of this fire came from the perception among some people that CNN had covered the Steubenville rape case inappropriately.  More precisely, the outrage focused on the notion that CNN had not demonized the two convicted male teens enough; if anything, many people seemed to feel that CNN had humanized the pair. Here’s one of the major quotes that people took issue with:

 ”It was incredibly emotional—incredibly difficult even for an outsider like me to watch what happened as these two young men that had such promising futures, star football players, very good students, literally watched as they believe their life fell apart.”

The issue, it would seem, is that many people felt that it ought not have been hard emotionally for the reporter to witness the event; if anything, she should have been angry that the teens were not sentenced more harshly. Other debates raged on in the comments sections of various articles about whether being placed on the list of registered sex offenders for the rest of their life was too harsh of a punishment for the two teens on the one hand, with those advocating the castration or death of the teens on the other extreme. I think these reactions, along with the case itself, happen to highlight some of the adaptive problems that bystanders face surrounding the moral judgments they make.

And now, since there are two degrees of separation between the tragic event and my use of it, it’s acceptable.

The first of these problems highlighted by the story is that third-party condemners (those who are not directly involved) need to pick a side in a moral dispute, and being on the wrong side of that dispute can be costly. Accordingly, third party condemners face the problem of figuring out how to coordinate their condemnation with other third parties (DeScioli & Kurzban, 2013). The problem runs deeper than choosing a side, though. As people’s reactions to the CNN story show us, even being on the “right” side of the dispute can be costly, provided one isn’t on the “right” side in the “right” way. Just to be clear, the first “right” in the previous sentence refers to being on the side with more social support; the second “right” refers to the agreement within a given side as to what the appropriate response of its members ought to be. The CNN coverage described the crime as “very serious” and the teen who was raped as “the victim”, suggesting that the reporters were certainly not of the opinion that rape is good or the boys were the real victims. The outrage was that the reporters for CNN did not appear to be appropriately outraged at the boys or offended enough on the part of the victim. CNN’s crime was not treating the teens as viciously as others would have liked.

It would seem that not condemning a behavior thoroughly enough can be interpreted by some as actually condoning that same behavior. Indeed, it was likely when the reporter for CNN said that it was emotionally difficult for her to witness the scene that she sparked the subsequent outcry against the network. This leaves us with a somewhat standard question: why should this be the case? Imagine for a moment that we’re not talking about rape anymore, but about theft. You and I both agree that stealing is wrong and deserves to be punished. However, while you think that stealing a car deserves a sentence of five years in jail and a permanent brand that says “car thief”, I think that stealing a car deserves a sentence of a year in prison and no brand. It would seem silly to conclude that, from these differences in opinion on the extent of deserved punishment, that only one of us is actually against stealing while the other is a morally condemnable “stealing-apologist”. Yet this is precisely what we see happening. Why?

A potential answer comes in more than one part. The first part of this answer is to note that, in cases of moral condemnation, the activity of certain parts of the brain associated with empathy seem to be inhibited. A neuroscience paper by Singer et al (2006) examined the responses of 16 men and 16 women in an fMRI to viewing confederates receiving painful shocks. Before the viewing took place, however, the confederates had either behaved fairly or unfairly towards the subject in a trust game. The results of the analysis found that men, but not women, showed a reduction in activation of presumably empathy-related regions of the brain when viewing the confederates receiving the painful shocks; in the case of the fair player receiving the shocks, subject’s brains showed more signs of empathy-related activation. Similarly, men, but not women, showed increases in brain regions associated with reward when the unfair player received the shocks. Post fMRI measures confirmed that men were more interested in seeking revenge against unfair players

Sure; the research could have been done without the expensive fMRI, but then we wouldn’t get pictures.

There are a few shortcomings of the Singer et al (2006) study to bear in mind as it relates to the current questions: the sample size wasn’t terribly impressive, but sample sizes in neuroscience studies seldom seem to be. The second piece to bear in mind is that these brain scans do not necessarily add much (or any) value beyond what the far cheaper survey did. At best, the brain scans were icing on the explanatory cake. Further, this study only examined cases of direct revenge, or second-party involvement; not the reactions of bystanders to the fair or unfair behavior. Nevertheless, the results hint at something interesting: the amount of empathy that people (at least men) feel towards the suffering of a perpetrator (i.e. how much they care about the consequences of the punishment to the perpetrator) might be indicative of how morally wrong they view the behavior as being, at least to some extent. One requires certain assumptions to make that leap, but it doesn’t seem too unreasonable.

The picture is not nearly that simple, however. It is at this point that the discoordination problem that DeScioli & Kurzban (2013) raised again rears its head. It is unlikely to be adaptive for condemners to completely – or partially – inhibit their empathic responses towards the perpetrator in all moral cases. While the inhibition might be adaptive in terms of avoiding the condemnation of other condemners (i.e. not being labeled a rape apologist and subsequently socially shunned), it also carries costs, chief among which is that the perpetrator often has social supporters as well. If a condemner has completely inhibited such empathic systems, they’re likely to seek greater punishments of the perpetrators which, by extension, are also punishments leveled against the perpetrator’s social allies. To put the matter more plainly, if my friend goes to jail, I’m out a friend and worse off for it. This can lead to retaliation on the part of the perpetrator’s allies: case in point, it was not long after the verdict was handed down that the rape victim received two threats from other girls who seemed to be socially aligned with one or more of the perpetrators.

This puts third parties in an unpleasant situation: no matter who they side with, they’re likely to face some condemnation, either for condemning one party too much or not condemning that party enough. Similarly, if the third party happens to be socially connected with either the perpetrator or the victim, any harms that befall that party are, by proxy, harms that befall the third parties themselves. Thus, inhibiting an empathy reaction towards a perpetrator might entail the related need to inhibit empathy towards the perpetrator’s social allies, at least to some degree. Such a need could potentially expand the costs associated with the conflicts surrounding moral condemnation and punishment, as the number of people to be punished has grown beyond the initial disputants. The fact that the coordination problem is actually a series of many different problems makes the matter of third-party coordination all the trickier to solve. In fact, it would seem that in many cases, perhaps even most cases, it is not at all clear that people actually do manage to consistently solve the coordination problem.

The whole mess makes dueling seem like a more reasonable alternative.

The previous analysis puts the matter as to why ostensible third parties become involved in moral disputes into a new light. Getting involved in these disputes is clearly a potentially costly endeavor, so why would an uninvolved party bother getting involved in the first place? What are the benefits to joining in the disputes of others that offset these very real costs? Part of that answer would seem to be that these third parties, as previously mentioned, are indirectly personally affected by their outcomes: my friend being condemned or harmed is bad for me to the extent that the condemnation or harm prevents them from delivering me benefits they previous did or potentially might.  Further still, if a friend of a friend has been affected in some way it is still potentially detrimental to me. The extent of that detriment would, of course, decrease as social distance between the parties increased; my best friend’s friend is more valuable to me than my acquaintance’s friend. A final possibility is that my not siding with one side could be taken as implicit support for the opposing side, making me the target of moral condemnation by assoication. The result of that perception of implicit support being that it can be similarly costly to me to not become involved. In other words, saying that one doesn’t care at all about the perpetrators or the victim in the Steubenville case is unlikely to earn you many friends, but it will likely still earn you plenty of condemnation.

References: DeScioli P, & Kurzban R (2013). A solution to the mysteries of morality. Psychological bulletin, 139 (2), 477-96 PMID: 22747563

Singer, T., Seymour, B., O’Doherty, J., Stephan, K., Dolan, R., & Frith, C. (2006). Empathic neural responses are modulated by the perceived fairness of others Nature, 439 (7075), 466-469 DOI: 10.1038/nature04271

Belief In “Belief In A Just World” Theory

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I have a new theory that goes something like this: social psychologists have a need to believe in their own hypotheses – a belief in the truth of their hypotheses (or BTH for short). When evidence turns up that is “threatening” the truth of these beliefs, psychologists try to defend their hypotheses and restore their belief in their veracity. This can be achieved either through psychologists reinterpreting contradictory evidence into confirmatory evidence, or through the psychologists modifying their hypotheses but insisting that the new hypothesis was the one they really believed in the whole time. While some evolutionary theorists might try to explain these perceptual shifts in terms of some adaptive function (such as, say, maintaining social status amongst one’s peers, trying to obtain grant money, or make oneself an attractive job candidate, rather than just trying to “be correct”), they have done little in terms of considering whether BTH plays a role in the often-silly ways that social psychologists tend to behave.

Pictured: The co-authors on my new BTH paper.

Now I know some of you out there might have some qualms with my BTH theory. Some of you might point out, for instance, that BTH theory merely describes a pattern of results and then tries to explain those results in a circular fashion: specifically, the fact the psychologists seem to hold to incorrect beliefs is “explained” by my positing that psychologists have a desire to hold to incorrect beliefs. The evolutionary account, on the other hand, provides a real explanation that allows us to escape from that kind of circularity. Still others might point out that these two theories -  the evolutionary and the BTH theory – need not be viewed as competing with one another: on the proximate level they both make the same predictions. The only difference is that one of these theories provides an ultimate explanation for these proximate predictions. The more astute among my readers might even take some issue with those who raise this second point, however, noting that, while both theories could plausibly account for the same proximate findings, my BTH theory is massively underspecified: it doesn’t predict the contexts in which we ought to expect psychologists’ behavior to vary, so it’s not immediately clear how BTH generates its predictions. Perhaps, like many social-psychological theories, BTH generates its predictions through researcher intuitions, personal experiences, or perhaps it simply predicts results on the basis of what other people researching BTH have found.

So BTH theory sounds like an incomplete explanation at it’s very best, unlikely to do much to further our understanding of the phenomenon in question. I would also add that the hypothetical BTH theory has quite a lot in common with belief in a just world theory, or BJW for short. BJW theory begins by asserting that people have a need to believe in a just world; a belief complicated by the fact that the world is frequently not just or fair (whatever just and fair are supposed to mean here, anyway. I think it’s supposed to mean that “good” things are supposed to happen to “good” people and “bad” things are supposed to happen to “bad” people, but that just pushes the definition problem back a step than really dealing with it). As the world seems to frequently not agree with the biases of our just world beliefs, people do the sensible thing and try to “restore balance” by manipulating their perceptions of these “threatening” facts. So, to recap, people are supposed to have some need to believe something wrong, and will do so by manipulating otherwise accurate information. Sure; there are costs to being wrong, and BJW theory doesn’t really explain the adaptive value to being wrong in this case, but, to be fair, BJW theory doesn’t really explain anything, so at least it’s consistent in that regard.

Incorrectly believing that BJW theory helps use explain things, Callan et al (2007) sought to expand the BJW line of research into the realm of physical attractiveness. More precisely, Callan et al (2007) felt that a BJW might help us understand the “beauty is good” stereotype. Somewhat ironically, the authors note that, yes, evolutionary-minded researchers have suggested at least one very plausible reason why people might be more inclined towards physically attractive individuals (I think there happen to be more than one, but one is listed), but then make no attempt to demonstrate how their favored BJW theory is distinguished from or fits within this evolutionary theory. In any case, they did seek to show something neat: that harm directed towards more attractive women might be viewed as more unjust and more deserving of punishment than harm directed towards less attractive women. This was predicted on the supposition that, since people view beauty as a “good” thing, beautiful people will be viewed as having done good things to, in some sense, deserve their beauty.

Like having someone put in all that time with Photoshop.

In the first study, 48 subjects read a fake news story about a woman who died due to poor maintenance of the apartment that she lived in accompanied with either a highly-attractive or unattractive photo of a woman from HotorNot.com. The woman was subsequently described as being “kind, generous, about to graduate from university, a youth center volunteer, and excited about her future”, making her sound like a “good” person. As predicted, people perceived the attractive woman as a better person than the unattractive one, there to have been more injustice in case where the attractive woman was harmed, and felt more punitive towards the people who failed to maintain the apartment. The results here are nice and precisely what the previously-mentioned evolutionary theory would have predicted but, unfortunately, they lack a number of important groups. For instance, there was no group in place to compare an attractive but “bad” person against an unattractive but “good” person, nor is there any control group to compare the results against. Still, it’s a promising first step.

As their second step, the authors had 36 subjects read another story about a woman who was hurt in a house fire, along with a picture of her. In one version of the story, the woman is described as having escaped any serious harm, whereas in the second version the woman was described as having suffered a great deal of harm. Later, subjects were asked to identify the picture of the woman in the story from an array of seven digitally-altered versions of the picture that were either more or less attractive than the original (the original one wasn’t in the display). The authors found that people viewed the greater harm as being more unjust than the minimal harm, as expected. They also tended to pick a less-attractive version of the woman’s picture when the woman experienced greater harm. Finally, people evaluated the woman in the greater-harm condition more positively.

Do these findings support the BJW theory? It’s pretty hard to say for one major reason: it’s unclear as to what counts as evidence for or against BJW theory. In the greater-harm condition, subjects picked a less-attractive picture which, in light of the BJW idea, would seem to suggest the following: that the harm was “bad” and, since “bad” things happen to “bad” people, the woman must have been a “bad” person who didn’t deserve to be attractive. Of course, this is somewhat inconsistent with the idea that the harm itself was viewed as “more unjust” than the minimal harm condition. If the harm was “unjust”, then that would imply that a “bad” thing was happening to a “good” person who should, in turn, deserve to be attractive. So that seems complicated. Further, if the woman was viewed as “bad” and thus less deserving of attractiveness, it’s unclear why people would evaluate her character more positively. This returns to a point I made earlier: the BJW theory seems to derive massively under-specified predictions. With enough creativity, it seems that many possible patterns of data could be viewed as entirely consistent with the theory.

Just like how  with enough creativity, my co-authors on the BTH theory manage to all car-pool together.

Needless to say, as my BTH theory would predict, the authors conclude that their results supported and built upon BJW theory, despite the evidence being ambiguous in that regard. From my reading of their theory, it’s still not at all clear what pattern of results would be inconsistent with BJW theory, much less is it clear as to how the predictions were being derived from this theory in the first place. I find it a bit discouraging that the authors were least aware of the evolutionary ultimate level of analysis, but failed to make any use of it. Then again, perhaps the evolutionary analysis was viewed as too “threatening” to their belief in BJW theory, leading them to downplay the former. I think the evidence is ambiguous enough to reach that conclusion, in any case.

References: Callan, M., Powell, N., & Ellard, J. (2007). The Consequences of Victim Physical Attractiveness on Reactions to Injustice: The Role of Observers’ Belief in a Just World Social Justice Research, 20 (4), 433-456 DOI: 10.1007/s11211-007-0053-9

A New Theory For Homosexuality: A Lot Like The Old Ones

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Homosexuality – male homosexuality in particular – poses a real evolutionary mystery that researchers have been trying to solve for at least the past two decades without much success. Though many explanations have been put forth to try and find the hidden fitness benefits that might allow male homosexuality to persist in the substantial minority of the population that it does despite the substantial fitness costs to the sexual preference, all the adaptive explanations have been left wanting. Decades of failed research has not seemed to have deterred new hypothesizing, though. For better or worse, I find the tenacity of the adaptive hypotheses for homosexuality to be fascinating: it is as if people cannot accept, or even consider the possibility, that homosexuality might not carry any reproductive benefits, hidden, indirectly, or otherwise. Were other key adaptations (that are not sexual orientation) to fail to develop in an adaptive fashion early in life – such as vision or hearing – I don’t think many people would be trying to find the hidden reproductive benefits or functions to being blind or deaf. The causes, certainly, but not the benefits.

“But what if being blind caused him to invest more in kin…?”

On the subject, there’s a new paper out in Evolution and Human Behavior (Barthes, Godelle, & Raymond, 2013: H/T to Dan) that, again, asks whether there might be some hidden fitness benefit associated with male homosexuality. In this case, the focus of the benefits are the female sisters of male homosexuals. The theory goes like this: after the advent of agriculture, social classes began to take root as large quantities of resources could now be generated and defended. Women could thus gain some reproductive advantage were they able to pair with men of higher social status who had these resources; a preference for doing so is known as hypergyny. However, only a small proportion of these pairings occur across social classes: women of higher social classes tended to marry men of higher social classes, and likewise for the lower classes. Accordingly, any trait that could help women mate upwards in the social ladder would have been selected for, even if it came at some expense to male reproductive fitness.

So, in this theory, male homosexual preference is a byproduct of females being able to better pursue their hypergynous inclinations. The male reproductive disadvantage from developing a homosexual preference would be more than offset by the presumed increases to female fertility and/or attractiveness to higher-status males. One distinct advantage that the authors feel this theory has is its ability to explain why male homosexual preference seems to be exclusively human (the one notable exception might be rams, a species with a history of co-residence with humans). Since male homosexuality only came to be after the advent of agriculture, long-term pair bonds, and the establishment of social classes, which other species tend to not have, this helps explain why we don’t see sexually-antagonistic male homosexuality in other species. It’s a neat idea, but neatness alone doesn’t win the day in the world of science, so let’s move on to consider what data they bring to bear on this hypothesis.

The first piece of “evidence” they present in support of this hypothesis is a mathematical model attempting to demonstrate the conditions under which such a genotype could come to exist. I’ve previously made my stance on the usefulness of such models rather explicit, but I’ll restate it here in a sentence: these models are philosophical intuitions written in the form of math, rather than English (or the language of your choice), and can be used to demonstrate literally anything. Since the models are only as good as their match to reality, my concern is, justifiably, on the extent of that match rather than the model itself. The evidence presented in terms of said match is an examination of the anthropological record of 48 societies to find out where the presence of homosexuality has been recorded, where it seems to be absent, and where it might exist. Further, these societies were also assessed in terms of how socially stratified they were, and these results were compared to the presence of male homosexual preference. The results showed that increasing social stratification was correlated with a increases in finding the presence of male homosexual preference.

Does the income disparity in America see a little…gay…to you?

When it comes to the social stratification hypothesis, should you not believe the hype, or does it bring the noise? We can begin by noting that the empirical support here is extremely weak. The paper doesn’t test to see whether more social stratification leads to more homosexuality; it merely examines whether societies that are socially stratified are more likely to have homosexual preference present or absent. Such a correlation is unlikely to be very informative, much less establish any kind of causation. Second, the paper didn’t bother to examine whether the female relatives of male homosexuals tended to actually be any more likely to marry up, or be more fertile, or be more attractive, which seems like necessary components of this model. Positing design features in a trait and then not bothering to see if those design features are present seems like poor research design. Those two points are, however, only the two things the authors talked about and didn’t test: there are also points the authors fail to mention, which I think have a strong bearing on their hypothesis.

The first of these points is that the paper makes no mention of the genetic data showing that monozygotic male twins are only concordant for a homosexual orientation around 30% of the time. This means that though the authors suggest some genes might make it more likely that a male develops a homosexual orientation, they fail to specify precisely which factors are important for developing one and why some twins fail to end up with the same orientation. So that leaves no mention of the genetic data, no mention of a developmental story, and no good test of the paper’s main contentions. I’m not sure to what extent this lack of any good empirical tests is the result of the paper’s reliance on a mathematical model, but I will note that, in my personal experience, there seems to a correlation between generating these models and poorly supporting them empirically.

There is, however, one final point I would like to mention that the authors don’t seem to really make any mention of. Part of their model requires that females have a preference for hypergyny but, in order for this preference to exist, it requires differences in social status to exist. After all, you can’t select mates on a non-existent criteria. If the authors are postulating, which they seem to be, that such a mate criteria didn’t exist in force before the advent of agriculture, it begs the question as to where this female mate preference for higher status men came from in the first place. This would require one of two things for the model: first, either that agriculture arose, followed by the female mate preference, followed by male homosexual preference, which is an awful lot to ask of 10,000 years.

Alternatively, one could argue, that differences in male status and its effect on female fitness likely predated agriculture and, further, that this preference might have been exaggerated to some degree and in some places in relative recent time periods. This would imply, in terms of the social stratification model, that the selection pressures responsible for generating the conditions for homosexuality were already in existence beforehand, so homosexuality is likely older than agriculture. If that is the case, then evolution would have had much more time to strip out the deleterious effects of any sexually antagonism. So, really, neither answer to this last concern bodes well for the model.

At least they had a mathematical model, which really saved things…

As I initially stated, I find the emphasis that people place on finding an adaptive explanation for homosexuality to be a bit curious. I would like to add that I also find the emphasis that some people are willing to place on mathematical models curious as well. There are a not insignificant percentage of academics who seem to find mathematical models to be impressive despite many cases, like this one, where they don’t seem to add much to the discussion. I get the impression that if these models were written in English, rather than math, people would be far less swayed by them, as it would make clear precisely how much many of them appear to just assume or ignore. Once the assumptions are stripped away, all this paper seems to add is a correlation between social stratification and the mere existence of homosexuality. Then again, it seems to persuade the reviewers to publish it, so maybe there’s something I’m missing…

References: Barthes, J., Godelle, B., & Raymond, M. (2013). Human social stratification and hypergyny: toward an understanding of male homosexual preference Evolution and Human Behavior DOI: 10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2013.01.001

Tropes Against Video Games

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Back in mid-May of last year, Anita Sarkeesian launched a Kickstarter project to help fund her video series on portrayals of women in video games called “Tropes vs. Women in Video Games”. Her initial goal was set at $6000 for a planned goal of making 5 videos (or so I can gather from the Kickstarter page), meaning that she wanted approximately $1200 per video. Her project ended up being funded at close to $160,000 and her intent grew to creating 12 videos. This means that, currently, she has successfully netted a little over $13,000 per video she intends to eventually release; an impressive feat. Her first video was released a few days ago (a few months late, relative to her stated delivery, but here nonetheless) and, hot-button topic that her project was, I felt inclined to watch it and see what $13,000 a video buys in terms of research quality, methodology, and explanatory power. From my impression of Anita’s first video, were I to work under the assumption that she was making a reasonable amount of money for her time, effort, and conclusions in this project, I think I could be so bold as to suggest that I’m wildly underpaid for what I do in terms of research and writing.

I may not be as well-paid, but I make up for it in smug self-satisfaction.

Since Anita suggests that it’s important to think critically about the more problematic aspects of things (in this case, the “damsel in distress” story found in some video games), I’m sure she would agree it would be important to think critically about what she presents in her first video, so let’s do just that. The gist of the video appeared to be that, as noted, women are sometimes portrayed as being placed into peril (typically by a male character) from which a male character saves them. How common are such portrayals in video games? That’s an excellent question; perhaps Anita could have mentioned some data that bear on the point. Are these portrayals more or less common in video games, relative to other forms of media, and have they been getting more or less common over time? Those are some other excellent questions, but you won’t find any discussion of them either. Of course, this was only part 1 of the video, so maybe Anita’s saving all of her research findings for part 2. After all, it would surely seem peculiar if, after asking for several thousand dollars to make these videos that she claimed would take her a substantial amount of time and research, she ended up releasing videos stating her preexisting opinions about the matter, putting very little actual research in. Peculiar indeed.

The first set of points that I would be critical about when evaluating this video, then, is that, in the roughly 25 minutes of it, she presents almost nothing that would typically fall under the umbrella of what many people would consider research: there’s no methodology mentioned, no data presented, and there’s no discussion of how she reached the conclusions that she does. What she does present are some anecdotes and a few assertions. Here’s a good for-instance: Anita notes that the theme of “man-saving-woman” is at least several thousand years old. Despite noting this, she then goes on to suggest that, in 1933, there were two things (Popeye and King Kong, apparently) that led to this theme becoming a foundational element in video games 50 years later. Is this theme a foundational element in gaming? Maybe, but from what Anita presents in her video there’s no way to know (a) what she means by “foundational element”, (b) whether she was correct in that assessment, or (c) whether her posited causal link even exists. That is, if Popeye and King Kong never existed, would video games have come to represent this damsel in distress story line as frequently or infrequently as they do? Given that this theme is at least as old as recorded history accordingly to Anita, one could reasonably suggest that Popeye and King Kong did very little stage-setting at all.

What is notably absent from Anita’s video – on top of any mention of methodology or data – is any attempt at an explanation as for why this theme appears to be relatively ubiquitous. Lacking anything resembling a formal explanation concerning this theme’s popularity, much less any attempts at ruling out alternative explanations, Anita sticks largely to just noting that the theme exists in some unspecified proportion of games and that she doesn’t seem to like it very much. So, to recap, that’s no mention of a method, findings, or an explanation of the topic being investigated. Of course, I’m not here to just be critical of the fact that this video likely cost her backers approximately $260 per minute to make, by my estimation, and ended up with nothing of value to show for it; I also want to see if whether, in a few minutes, I can do better than Anita in discussing important questions, analyzing data, and explaining the issues.

“On your mark, get set…Hey, how come only men are racing in this picture?!”

So why might it be that it’s typically men who are portrayed as the saver of the woman, rather than the reverse? Why might it be that men are portrayed as predominately trying to save women, rather than other men? In order to answer those questions, it is helpful to first consider a third question: why is it the case that when a species of animal has one sex that displays a costly ornament – like peacocks – or one sex that engages in costly competition – like bowerbirds or rams – that this sex is most frequently the males? Here’s one candidate explanation that doesn’t work: peacocks have evolved such decorative plumes that they display for peahens in order to reduce the peahens to mere objects. The display itself serves the function of reducing peahens to powerless objects so that male peacocks can thus be empowered protagonists in their own male power fantasies. Though this explanation might sound silly on the grounds that you think that peacocks and peahens don’t think that way, there’s a better reason for discounting such an explanation: objectifying one sex to empowering the other doesn’t do anything biologically useful. As the explanation stands, it’s incomplete at best. Rather than explaining the phenomenon in question, the explanation phase is just pushed back one step to: why would peacocks benefit by objectify peahens? Where’s the reproductive payoff for a psychology that did that?

Here’s an altogether more plausible alternative explanation: peacocks have evolved this trait and display it because peahens were more inclined to mate with males that had larger, costlier, and harder-to-fake signals of phenotypic quality (Zahavi, 1975). Peahens favored such males because these costly signals served as viable reproductive guarantees of healthy offspring, and male behavior and physiology changed to suit the preferences of females so as to capitalize on the increased potential for reproduction. Peacocks behave this certain way, then, to attract mates; not to objectify or disempower them. To couch this in terms of a specific video game example Anita mentions, Mario doesn’t rush into Bowser’s castle in order to reduce Princess Peach to a helpless object; he does so because, by doing so, he’s increasing the chances he’ll have the opportunity to have or maintain a relationship with her (though whether or not this is his conscious motivating drive is a separate question).

With this explanation in mind, let’s do our best to imagine that peacocks and peahens decided to do distinctly human-like things, such as fantasizing and telling stories. What would the content of such things tend to be,? It seems that the sex of the individual in question would matter a great deal: the males might be enthralled by imagining tales of conflicts between other males with impressive ornaments, both displaying them for a desired female, and fantasize about displaying such an impressive ornament that the female who observed it couldn’t help but fall madly in love with him. Females, on the other hand, might find stories about other females deciding between their various competitors to be altogether more engaging, fantasizing about the social intricacies of deciding upon one male or another. You could think the distinction being something along the lines of the peacocks enjoying movies more along the lines of Die Hard and peahens being more inclined towards Twilight. Both stories involve a good deal of male-male competition, but the focus of the story would either center on the male or female perspective in that competition.

Let’s finally assume that this species of bird came across the technological capabilities to translate their fantasies into video games. Arguably, it’s easier to translate certain aspects of the the typical male fantasy into something resembling a video game that’s entertaining to play. While one could easily imagine a game where a peacock moves from level to level by out-competing his rivals, it’s less easy to imagine a game centered around female choice of partners (more succinctly, while Twilight might make an appealing series of books and movies, it might not make a good video game). Tying this back to Anita’s video, she seems to suggest that male video game designers are trying to tap into male power fantasies to sell more video games and, importantly, that they do this to the exclusion of women. What she did not seem to consider are two alternative explanations: (1) how easily are typically male and female fantasies turned into entertaining video games and/or (2) are the people making these games simply expressing their own preferences for what they find appealing, rather than trying to explicitly appeal to the preferences of others? Regarding that second point, imagine asking men to write a story that they were either trying to sell or not sell: would the content of these stories between the two groups differ significantly in terms of major themes, like the use of a damsel in distress? Certainly an interesting question: perhaps it’s one that Anita might have considered answering…

Or, you know, she could just take pictures in front of video games; that works too.

So we now have the beginnings of a plausible explanation for understanding the first question (why are men typically rescuing women, rather than the reverse) and have considered some alternative explanations as to why such a theme might be as common as it is across time and genres. It might not be too much, but it’s at least a start, providing us with some considerations that help us interpret the meager amount of information Anita offers.

To conclude, let’s briefly consider further why some of Anita’s beliefs about the motivations of male video game characters and designers, are, at the very least, likely in need if revision. There is another research finding that casts severe doubt on the “men view women as helpless objects in need of saving” angle that Anita seems to favor. When a mixed-sex group of 3 people was made up of 2 men and 1 woman, men were found to universally volunteer and end up in a role that caused them discomfort; what awful paternalistic sexist crap, right? Surely women could handle that discomfort just as well as the men, so men must be pushing women out of the hero role to fulfill their own power fantasies. By contrast, however, when then groups were made up of 1 man and 2 women, men ended up in this “protective” role at chance levels (McAndrew & Perilloux, 2012). So unless the hypothesis is to be amended to “men tend to view women as powerless and in need of rescue but only in the presence of other men (or, perhaps, when women are relatively scarce); oh, and also women tend feel the same way about the whole being protected by men thing”, one could conclude there’s likely some wrong with Anita’s hypothesis. If only she had done some kind of research to figure that out…

(I’d also like to note, as a bit of off-topic point, the apparent contrast between Anita’s proposed videos #4 and #9. It looks like she’s exploring the trope of women being sexy and evil in 4, and the trope of being unattractive and evil in 9, both of which are apparently unacceptable. Damned if the villainess is attractive; damned if she isn’t. But hey, only an approximate $260 per minute for this knowledge, right?)

References: McAndrew, F.T. & Perilloux, C. (2012). Is self-sacrifical competitive altruism primarily a male activity? Evolutionary Psychology, 10, 50-65

Zahavi, A. (1975). Mate selection—A selection for a handicap Journal of Theoretical Biology, 53 (1), 205-214 DOI: 10.1016/0022-5193(75)90111-3

 

 

 

 

How Much Does Amanda Palmer Trust Her Fans?

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A new TED talk was put out today (though it won’t be today anymore by the time you read this) by Amanda Palmer entitled, “The Art of Asking”, which you can watch here. If the comments on the YouTube page of the talk are to be believed, it truly was an inspiring affair. Professional cynic that I am, the talk didn’t do much to inspire me; at least not in the way that Amanda probably intended it to. Now, for those of who you don’t know her, Amanda is (primarily, I think) famous for her music in The Dresden Dolls. One of the main thrusts of her talk centers around the question she poses towards the end: how do we let people pay for music, rather than how do we get people to pay for music. Part of Amanda’s answer to this question was to allow people to download her music on her website and let them pay whatever price they wanted for the download. So, if someone downloaded Amanda’s music from her site, they had the option of paying $0, $1, $5, $10, $15, $20, or $100 for it. Amanda further suggests that she views this as a sort of “trust” in her fans, presumably because she had given people the option of paying nothing, which is the option most economists would consider the “rational” one. While her talk is delivered with a strong emotional tone and the message is ostensibly positive, Amanda is still a human, so my guess is that there’s more to her trust than meets the eye.

And more than meets the shaved-off eyebrows as well

Admittedly, I don’t know much about Amanda beyond what I just heard. Though I am familiar with her music to some degree, I’ve never followed her personal life at all. Here’s what I do know: a quick browsing of her website shows me that while she will indeed allow people to choose their own price for her music and download it, she doesn’t seem to have that same policy towards shirts, CDs, vinyl, posters, art books, or the shipping and handling required to send any of them out. Something (the tour section of her website) also tells me the venues she plays at – which I’m imagining represent a substantial proportion of her income – don’t allow anyone to come in to see the show and pay whatever they feel like for tickets. It would seem that telling people, rather than asking them, to pay is the norm; not her exception. This raises the inevitably question: to what extent does the choose-your-own-price option reflect a genuine leap of faith, and how much of her TED talk is actually cheap talk?

Cheap talk is just what it sounds like: it’s a signal that is easy to produce. Like all signals, it functions to attempt and persuade another individual to change their behavior. Cheap talk, however, is of very questionable value precisely because it’s so easy to manufacture. For instance, let’s say that a man tries to convince a woman at a bar to have sex with him. He tells her that he’s fabulously wealthy, will remain faithful to her throughout his life, and see to it that she wants for nothing if she agrees. Tempting offer no doubt, but what’s guaranteeing that any of the information that the man is sending is true? It costs the man almost nothing to say the words, and once the two have sex, he’s free to go back on his word without penalty. However, if that same offer is made after a month of courtship where the man has paid for multiple dates, consistently dressed in expensive clothes, and accompanies the offer with a diamond ring, wedding ceremony, and legal contract that entitles the woman to half of everything he owns, we’ve stepped out the realm of cheap talk into costly signals. Because of those high costs, the signal is much harder to fake, so its honesty can be better guaranteed.

Now Amanda would like us to think that her choose-your-own-price option represents a costly signal of trust towards her fans. Indeed, she may well consciously believe that it is one, just as most people consciously believe they’re better than average at things that the majority of other people or less likely to have bad things happen to them. Since her personal, potentially self-serving feelings about the whole thing don’t necessarily reflect reality, this brings us back to the “how costly is her gesture?” question. As the internet stands right now, whether a musician provides the option for free downloading on their own website or not, the option likely exists somewhere. It took me all of three seconds to find a list of websites where I could have downloaded Amanda’s album for free anyway. In other words, if someone wanted to download her album without paying, they likely could have. This suggests that her pay-nothing option isn’t as trusting as it initially comes across. Not only is she not creating that option where it didn’t exist before, but, in all likelihood, it would exist regardless of whether she wanted it to or not. Counting this as “trust” is a bit like my saying that I “trust” gravity to do what it does; I don’t really have a choice in the matter.

Physics has yet to disappoint

On top of that preexisting problem of music downloads already being available, there’s another: to the best of my knowledge, the costs to letting someone download her album are minimal. While one could argue about how much money she would lose on account of people not paying, I’m talking more about the physical costs of sending the information to someone’s computer. Since there really is no cost there – and because the option to download for free would exist with or without Amanda’s seal of approval – Amanda is essentially undertaking zero risk in providing her ostensibly-trusting option. It requires no investment and no need for desire. Without that risk, assessing the credibility of the signal becomes very difficult, as was the case with the sex example above. How trusting would Amanda be when there are some actual risks involved? When she has the ability to create that trusting option, will she? This is where Amanda’s other merchandise comes to the rescue.

Things like shirts, posters, and physical copies of CDs cost actual money to produce, and the option to get these things for free doesn’t already exist. Nothing is stopping Amanda from paying out of pocket to have these items made and allowing her fans to pay whatever they want for them (from $0 a shirt a $100, for instance), yet this isn’t what she does. Once actual risk enters the picture – once Amanda needs to make a real initial investment – her trust sees to dry up in a hurry. Apparently, she doesn’t trust her fans enough to adequately compensate her on a shirt and the shipping cost when she has the option to. One could argue, I suppose, that a handful of amoral people could, in principle, ruin her financially by ordering dozens or hundreds of shirts from her for free online, and that same risk isn’t posed by the downloading of a CD. That would be a fair point, except there are multiple ways around it: the requirement of a credit card for the purchase (whatever the purchase price ended up being), a limit on the number of free or cheap items, or the option available to pay whatever you want for the merchandise, but only at live concerts. Admittedly, I don’t know if she does the last one; I just suspect she doesn’t offer it as default option.

Forgetting about the merchandise, we could also discuss ticket prices to the shows as well. A quick browsing of the links for tickets on her tour schedule shows tickets that can range from $15 to $60. Now of course ticket prices aren’t being set by Amanda herself, but, then again, venues aren’t set in stone either. Presumably Amanda could, if she wanted to, only schedule herself to play at venues where ticket prices could be determined (at least largely) by the willingness of the people who show up to pay. I’m sure there are plenty of venues – though not necessarily traditional ones – that would at least consider such an offer. Rather than take this approach, however, Amanda’s “art of asking” seems to involve first demanding people pay full price for tickets and merchandise and, in addition, asking them to then pay more, whether that more came in the form of additional money placed into a hat she passes around the crowd, giving her food, places to stay, practice space, or other items of interest.

“How can we let people pay $7 for a cup of coffee and then let them pay us even more?”

Now none of this is to say that Amanda is a bad person. As I said, I don’t know nearly enough about her to make that judgment one way or the other. This is merely to point out that the “trust” Amanda has in her fans certainly has its limits – many of them – as pretty much anyone’s does. That’s just the point though; there doesn’t seem to be anything particularly special going on here. Despite there being nothing special about it, Amanda seems to be trying to play it off as if it’s some great exercise in trust. The impossible-to-assess pretense is the part of the talk that inspired this post. There’s also the matter of the kickstarter she mentions. Amanda asked for $100,000 on kickstarter and ended up making over a million. Now I don’t find anything particularly egregious about that; if her fans wanted to support her, nothing was stopping them. What I did find curious, though, what her analysis of how that money would be spent. It seemed that she had a legitimate need for almost the full million. While that’s fine if she does, what’s curious about that was is if she needed the full million, why didn’t she ask for, well, the full million? Why only ask for the hundred thousand that clearly would have been grossly insufficient for her plans? Something about that analysis strikes me as off as well. Then again, if a pretense of trust is easy to manufacture, so is a pretense of need.

“Nice Guys”, The Friend Zone, And Social Semantics

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A little over a year ago, a video entitled, “Why men and women can’t be friends” was uploaded to YouTube. In the video, a man approaches various men and women and presents them with the question, “can men and women just be friends?”. While many of the woman answered in the affirmative, most of the men seemed to answer in the negative, suggesting that men would generally be interested in something more; something sexual. When asked about whether their male friends were interested in having sex them, many of the women seemed to similarly acknowledge that, yes, their male friends probably were interested, so maybe there was more lurking behind that “just friendship”. In a follow-up video, the same man asked whether it would be alright for people in relationships to hang out alone with same-sex friends. While the men seemed to be of relatively one mind (no, it would not be appropriate), women, again, initially stated that opposite-sex friends are fine. However, when confronted with the possibility of their significant other hanging out alone with a member of opposite-sex, the tune seemed to change dramatically: now men and women agreed that they would, indeed, be bothered by that state of events.

“And here I thought his sudden interest in jogging was purely platonic”

So why the discrepancy in women’s responses, but not men’s? Perhaps it’s simply due to the magic of video editing, where only certain responses were kept to make a point, but, working under the assumption that’s not happening, I think there’s something interesting going on here. Understanding what that something is will require us to dig deeper into two concepts that have been floating around for some time: “the friend zone” and “Nice guys”. The friend zone, as many of you know, refers to the context where someone wants a relationship with another, but that other doesn’t return the affection. Since the interest isn’t mutual, the party interested in the relationship settles for a friendship with the target of their affections, often with the hope that someday things will change. “Nice guys” on the other hand, are typically men who are stuck in the friend zone and, upon the eventual realization that their friendship will probably not transition into a relationship, become irritated with the person they were interested in, resulting in the friendship being called off and feelings being hurt. The friendship, after all, is not what they were after; they wanted the full relationship (or at least an occasional hook up).

“Nice guys”, in other words, are only being nice because they want to get sex, so they’re not really nice, people seem to feel; hence the quotation marks. Further, “nice guys” are frequently socially maligned, seemingly because of their (actually held or assumed to be held) attitude that women are obligated to have sex or start a relationship with them because they are nice (whether any substantial number of them consciously think this is another matter entirely). Alternatively, “nice guys” are looked down on because they view the friendship – or the friend zone – as, at best, a consolation prize to what they were actually going after or, at worst, something they couldn’t care less about having. The nerve of these people; insisting that just a friendship isn’t enough! There are some very peculiar things about the label of “nice guy”, though; things that don’t quite fit at first glance. The first of these is that the earning of the “nice guy” label appears to be contingent on the target of the affections not returning them. If whomever the “nice guy” is interested in does return the affections, there is no way to tell whether he was “nice guy” or one of those actually nice guys. In other words, you could have two identical guys enacting identical sets of behavior right up to the moment of truth: if the target returns the man’s affections, he’s a nice guy; if she doesn’t and the man doesn’t find that state of affairs satisfactory, he is now a “nice guy”; not a nice guy.

That, however, is only a surface issue. The much more substantial issue is in the label itself, which would, given its namesake, seem to imply that the problem is the nice behavior of the guys, rather than the attitude of entitlement that the label is ostensibly aimed at. This is very curious. If the entitled attitude is what is supposed to be the problem of the people this term is aimed at, why would the label focus on their otherwise nice behavior; behavior that might not differ in any substantial way from the behavior of genuine nice guys? Further, why is the label male-specific (it’s “nice guys” not “nice people”, and even when it’s a woman doing it, well, she’s just being a “nice guy” too)? With these two questions in mind, we’re now prepared to begin to tackle the initial question: why do women’s response to the friendship questions, but not men’s, seem discrepant?

“Thanks for taking me shopping; I’m so lucky to have a friend like you…”

Let’s take the questions in a partially-reversed order: the first is why the term focuses on the nice behavior. The answer here is would seem to revolve around the matter of cooperation and reciprocity more generally. In the social world, when an altruistic individual provides you with a benefit at a cost to themselves, the altruist generally expects repayment at some point down the line. It’s what’s called reciprocal altruism – or, less formally, cooperation – and forms the backbone of pretty much every successful social relationship among non-kin (Trivers, 1971). However, sometimes relationships are not quite as reciprocal in nature: one individual will continuously reap the benefits of altruism without returning them in kind. Names for those types of individuals abound, though the most common are probably exploiters or cheaters. Having a reputation as a cheater is, generally speaking, bad for business when it comes to making and maintaining friendships, so it’s helpful to maintain a good reputation amongst others.

The implications for why the “nice guy” label focuses on otherwise nice behavior should be immediately apparent: if someone is behaving nicely towards you – even if that nice behavior might be unwanted – it creates the expectation of reciprocity, both among the altruist and potentially other third parties. Failing to return the favor, then, can make one look like a social cheater. This obviously puts the recipient in a bind: while they would certainly like to enjoy the benefits of the nice individual’s behavior (free meals, social support, and so on), they don’t want to have the obligation to repay it if it’s avoidable (it’s that expectation that makes people uncomfortable about accepting gifts; not because they don’t want said gifts). So how can that obligation be effectively avoided? One way seems to be to question the altruist’s motives: if the altruist was only giving to get something else (like sex), and if that something else is viewed to be of substantially more valuable than what was initially given (also like sex tends to be), one can frame the ostensible altruist as the exploiter, the cheater, or, in this case, the “nice guy”. If a woman wants to either (a) reap the benefits of nice guys, (b) avoid the costs in not reciprocating what the nice guy wants, or (c) both, then the label of “nice guy” can be quite effective. Since there behavior wasn’t actually nice, there’s no need to reciprocate it.

Bear in mind, none of this needs to be consciously entertained. In fact, in some cases it’s better to not have conscious awareness of such things. For instance, to make that reframing (nice to “nice”) more successful, the person doing the reframing has to come off as having innocent motives themselves: if the woman in question was explicit about her desire to take advantage of men’s niceness towards her with no intentions of any repayment, she’s back to being the cheater in the situation (just as the “nice guy’s” behavior is back to just being plain old nice, if a bit naive). Understanding this point helps us answer the third question: why are women’s responses to the friendship question seemingly discrepant? Conscious awareness of these kinds of mental calculations will typically do a woman no favors, as they might “leak out” into the world, so to speak. To think of it in another way, you’ll have an easier time trying to convince people that you didn’t do something wrong if you legitimately can’t access any memories of you doing something wrong (as opposed to having access to those memories and needing to suppress them). To relate this to the answers in the videos, when a woman is receiving benefits from her male friends, keeping the knowledge that her male friends are trying to get something more from her out of mind can help her defend against the criticism of being a social cheater, as well as avoid the need to pay her male friends back. On the other hand, when it’s her boyfriend who’s now being “nice” to other women, there are benefits to her being rather aware of the underlying motives.

“I swear I was just giving her my opinion about her new bra as a friend!”

Finally, we turn to the answer to second question, the answer to which ought to be obvious by now: why is the “nice guy” term male-specific? This answer has a lot to do with the simple fact that, all else being equal, women do prefer men who invest in them, both in the short and long term, but investment plays a substantially lessened role for women in drawing and maintaining male interest (Buss, 2003). Put simply, males invest because females tend to find that investment attractive. So, to sum up, women want to receive investment and males are generally willing to provide that investment. However, male investment typically comes contingent on the possibility or reality of mating, and when that possibility is withdrawn, so too does male investment wane. The term “nice guy” might serve to both avoid the costs that come with receiving that investment but not returning it, as well as a potential shaming tactic for men who withdraw their niceness when it becomes clear that niceness will not pay off as intended. Similarly, a woman might doubt her partner’s “niceness” when it’s directed towards another. This analysis, however, only examines the female-end of things; males face a related set of problems, just from a different angle. Further, the underlying male strategy is, I assure you, not any less strategic.

References: Buss, D. (2003). The evolution of desire: Strategies of human mating. Basic Books: New York

Trivers, R. (1971). The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism The Quarterly Review of Biology, 46 (1) DOI: 10.1086/406755