Full Frontal Nerdity: Understanding Elitists And Fakes

Posted on December 17, 2012 by Jesse Marczyk

“There is no such thing as “fake geek girls”; there are, only, girls who are at different, varying levels of falling in love with something that society generically considers to fall under the “nerd culture” category” -albinwonderland

About a month ago, Tony Harris (a comic book artist) posted a less-than-eloquently phrased rant about how he perceived certain populations within the geek subculture to be “fakes”; specifically, he targeted many female cosplayers (for a more put-together and related train of thought, see here). Predictably, reactions were had and aspersions were cast. Though I have barely dipped my toes into this particular controversy, the foundations of it are hardly new. This experience – the tensions between the “elites” and “fakes” – is immediately relatable to all people, no matter how big of a fish they happen to be in the various social ponds they inhabit. While the specific informal rules of subcultures (how one should dress, what one may or may not be allowed to like, and so on) may differ from group to group, these superficial differences dissolve into the background when considering the underlying similarities of their logic; nerd culture will just be our guide to it at present.

“NERRRRRRDS!”

I get the sense that, because the issue involved gender, a good deal of the collective cognitive work that went into this debate focused on generating and defending against claims of sexism, which, while an interesting topic in its own right, I find largely unproductive for my current purposes. In the interests of examining the underlying issues without the baggage that gender brings, I’d like to start by answering a seemingly unrelated question: why might Maddox feel that bacon has been “ruined” for him by its surge in popularity?

The Internet needs to collectively stop sucking Neil deGrasse Tyson’s dick. And add bacon and zombies to that list. I love bacon, but fuck you for ruining it, everyone. Holy shit, just shut the fuck up about bacon. Yeah, it’s great, we know. Bacon cups, bacon salt, bacon shirts, bacon gum, bacon, bacon, bacon, WE GET IT. Bacon is your Jesus, we know, now do a shot of bleach and take some buckshot to the face.

This comment likely seems strange (if also a bit relatable) to many people: why should anyone else’s preferences influence Maddox’s? If I like chocolate ice cream, it would indeed be odd if I started liking it less if I was around other people who also seemed to like it, especially if the objective properties of the ice cream in question haven’t changed; it’s still the same ice cream (or bacon) that was there a moment ago. It seems clear from that consideration that bacon per se isn’t what Maddox feels has been ruined. What Maddox doesn’t seem to like is that other people like it; too many other people, however many that works out to be. So now that we’ve honed the question somewhat (why doesn’t Maddox like that other people like bacon?), let’s turn to Dr. Seuss to, at least partially, answer it.

In Dr. Seuss’s story, The Sneetches, we find an imaginary population of anthropomorphic birds, some of which have a star on their belly and others of which do not. The Sneetches form group memberships along these lines, with the stars – or lack thereof – serving as signals for which group any given Sneetch belongs to. Knowing whether or not a Sneetch had a star could, in this world, provide you with useful information about that individual: where might this Sneetch stand socially, relative to its peers; who might this Sneetch tend to associate with; what kind of resources might this Sneetch have access to. However, when a man rolls into town and starts to affix stars to the bellies of the starless Sneetches, this system gets thrown out of order. The special status of the initially-starred Sneetches is now questioned, because every Sneetch is sending an identical signal, meaning that signal can no longer provide any useful information. The initially-starred Sneetches then, apparently feeling that the others have “ruined” stars for them, subsequently remove their stars in an attempt to restore the signal value and everyone eventually learns something about racism. In this example, though, it becomes readily apparently why preferences for having stars changed: it was the signal value of the stars – the information they conveyed – that changed, not the stars themselves, and this information is, or rather, was, a valuable resource.

The key insight here is that if an individual is trying to signal some unique quality about itself, it does them no good to try and achieve that goal through a non-unique or easy-to-fake signal. Any benefits that the signal can bring will soon be driven to non-existence if other organisms are free to start sending that same signal. So let’s apply that lesson back to bacon question: Maddox is likely bothered by too many other people liking bacon because, to some extent, it means the signal strength of his liking bacon has been degraded. As part of Maddox’s affinity for bacon seemed to extend beyond its physical properties, some part of his affinity for the product was lost with that signal value; it no longer said much about him as a person. You’ll notice that I’ve forgone the question of what precisely Maddox might have been trying to signal by advertising his love of bacon. I’ve done this because, while it might be an interesting matter in its own right, it’s entirely beside the point. Regardless of what the signal is supposed to be about, ubiquitousness will always threaten it.

The “Where’s Waldo” principle

While many might be tempted to take this point as a strike against the elitists (“they don’t really like what they say they like; they only like what liking those things says about them”, would resemble how that might get phrased), it’s important to bear in mind that this phenomenon is not restricted to the elites. As Maddox suggests in his post, many of the people whom he deems to be “fake” nerds are attempting to make use of that signal value themselves, despite lacking the trait that the signal is supposed to advertise:

People love science in the same way they love classical music or art. Science and “geeky” subjects are perceived as being hip, cool and intellectual. So people take a passing interest just long enough to glom unto these labels and call themselves “geeks” or “nerds” every chance they get.

Like the starless Sneetches, these counterfeiters are trying to gain some benefit (in this case, perhaps the perception that they’re intelligent or interesting) through a dishonest means (by not being either of those things, but still telling people they are). This poses a very real social problem for signalers to overcome: how to ensure that (their) communication is (perceived as being) honest so the value of the communication can be maintained (for them)? If I can send a signal that advertises some latent quality about myself, I can potentially gain some benefit by doing so. However, if people who do not have that underlying quality also start sending the signal, they can reap those same benefits at my expense. The resources in question here are zero-sum, so more of those resources going to others means less for me, and vice versa. This means it’s in my interests to send signals that others cannot send in order to better monopolize those benefits, and to likewise strive to give receivers the impression that my signal is of a greater value than the signals of others.

Despite being beset by possible deception from senders, it is also in the interests of those receiving the signals that said signals remain honest. Resources, social or otherwise, that I invest in one individual cannot also be invested in another. Accordingly, when deciding how to allocate that limited investment budget, it’s in my interests to do so on the basis of good information; information which I would no longer have access to as the signal value degrades. Appreciating this problem helps answer a question posed by BlackNerdComedy: why does he remember information about an obscure cartoon called “SpaceCats”? More generally, he wonders aloud why people get “challenged” on their gamer credibility on the basis of their obscure knowledge and what purpose such challenges might serve (ironically, he also has another video where he complains about how some nerds consider others to not be “real nerds”, and then goes on to say that the people judging others for not being “real nerds” are, themselves, not “real nerds” because of it). In the light of the communication problem, the function of these challenges seems to become clear: they’re attempts at assessing honesty. Good information about someone’s latent qualities simply cannot be well-assessed by superficial knowledge. In much the same way, the depths of one’s math abilities can’t be well-assessed by testing on basic addition and subtraction alone; testing on the basics simply doesn’t provide much useful information, especially if the basics are widely known. If you start giving people calculus problems to do instead, you now have a better gauge for relative math abilities.

Obscure knowledge is no the only means through which one can try and guarantee the honesty of the signal, however. Another point that has frequently been raised in this debate involves people talk about “paying your dues” in the community, or suffering because of one’s nerdy inclinations. As Maddox puts it:

Well someone forgot to give the “nerds-are-sexy” memo to my friends, because most of them are nerds and none of them are getting laid. Here’s a quick rule of thumb: if you don’t have to make an effort to get laid, you’re not a nerd.…Being a nerd is a byproduct of losing yourself in what you do, often at the expense of friends, family and hygiene. Until or unless you’ve paid your dues, you aren’t welcome.

For starters, the emphasis on costs is enlightening: paying costs helps ensure the signal is harder to fake (Zahavi, 1975), and the greater those costs, the more likely the signal is honest. If someone is socially ridiculed for their hobby, it’s a fairly good sign that they aren’t doing it just to be popular, as this would be rather counterproductive. Maddox’s comment also taps into the distinction that Tooby and Cosmides (1996) made in regards to “genuine” and “fair-weather” friends: genuine friends have a deep interest in your well-being, making them far less likely to abandon you when the goings get tough. By contrast, fair-weather friends stick around only so long as your deliver them the proper benefits, but will be more likely to turn on you or disappear when you become too costly. Again, people are faced with the problem of discriminating one type from the other in the face of less-than-honest communication. Just because someone tells you they deeply value your friendship, it doesn’t mean that they have your best interests at heart. This requires people to make use of other cues in assessing the social commitments of others and, it seems, one good way of doing this involves looking for people who literally have no other social prospects. If one has been rejected by all other social groups except the nerd community, they will be less likely to abandon that community because they have no better alternative. By contrast, those who are deemed to have plenty of viable social alternatives (such as physically attractive people) can be met with a greater degree of skepticism; they have other avenues they could take if the going gets too rough, which might suggest their social commitment is not as strong as it could otherwise be.

His loyalty to the nerd community is the only strong thing about him.

This is only a general sketch of the some of the issues at play in this debate; the specifics can get substantially more complicated. For instance, the goal of a signaler, as mentioned before, is to beat out other signalers, and this can involve a good deal of dishonesty in the signaler’s representations of other signalers. It’s worth bearing in mind that all signalers, whether they’re “real” or “fake”, have this same vested interest: beating the other signalers. Being honest is only one way of potentially doing that. There’s also the matter of social value, in that even if a signaler is sending a completely honest signal about their latent qualities and commitments, they might, for other reasons, simply not be very good social investments to most people, even within the community. As I said, it gets complicated, and because the majority of these calculations seem to be made without any conscious awareness, the subject gets even trickier to untangle.

One final point of the debate that caught my eye was the solution that people from either side of the debate appear to agree on (at least to some extent) for dealing with the problem: people should stop trying to label themselves as “gamers” or “nerds” altogether and simply enjoy their hobbies. In the language of the underlying theory, people can free themselves from harassment (from within the community, anyway) if they stop trying to signal something about themselves to others, and, by proxy, stop competing for whatever resources at are stake, through their hobbies. The problem with this suggestion is two-fold: (a) the resources at stake here are valuable, so it’s unlikely that competition for them will stop, and (b) most people don’t consciously recognize they’re competing in the first place; in fact, most people would explicitly deny such an implication. After all, if one is trying to maintain the perception they’re honestly saying something about themselves, it would do them no favors to acknowledge any ulterior motives, as this acknowledgement would tend to degrade the value of their signals on its own. It would degrade them, that is, unless one is trying to signal they’re more conscious of their own biases than other people, and a good social partner because of it…

References: Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (1996). Friendship and the banker’s paradox: Other pathways to the evolution of adaptations for altruism. Proceedings of The British Academy, 88, 119-143

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

The Drifting Nose And Other “Just-So”s

Posted on December 12, 2012 by Jesse Marczyk

In my last post dealing with PZ Myer’s praise for the adaptationist paradigm, which was confusingly dressed up as criticism, PZ suggested the following hypothesis about variation in nose shape:

Most of the obvious phenotypic variation we see in people, for instance, is not a product of selection: your nose does not have the shape it does, which differs from my nose, which differs from Barack Obama’s nose, which differs from George Takei’s nose, because we independently descend from populations which had intensely differing patterns of natural and sexual selection for nose shape; no, what we’re seeing are chance variations amplified in frequency by drift in different populations.

Today’s post will be a follow-up on this point. Now, as I said before, I currently have no strong hypotheses about what past selection pressures (or lack thereof) might have been at work shaping the phenotypic variation found in noses; noses which differ in shape and size noticeably from chimps, gorillas. orangutans, and bonobos. The cross-species consideration, of course, is a separate matter from phenotypic variation within our species, but these comparisons might at least make one wonder why the human nose might look the way it does compared to other apes. If that reason(s) could be discerned, it might also tell us something about current types of variation we see in modern human populations. The reason why noses vary between species might indeed be “genetic drift” or “developmental constraint” rather than “selection”, just as the answer to within-species variation of that trait might be as well. Before simply accepting those conclusions as “obviously true” on the basis of intuition alone, though, it might do us some good to give them a deeper consideration.

“Follow your nose; it always knows! Alternatively, following evidence can work too!”

One of the concerns I raised about PZ’s hypothesis is that it does not immediately appear to make anything resembling a novel or useful prediction. This concern itself is far from new, with a similar (and more eloquently stated) point being raised by Tooby and Cosmides in 1997 [H/T to one of the commenters for providing the link]:

Modern selectionist theories are used to generate rich and specific prior predictions about new design features and mechanisms that no one would have thought to look in the absence of these theories, which is why they appeal so strongly to the empirically minded….It is exactly this issue of predictive utility, and not “dogma”, that leads adaptationists to use selectionist theories more often than they do Gould’s favorites, such as drift and historical contingency. We are embarrassed to be forced, Gould-style, to state such a palpably obvious thing, but random walks and historical contingency do not, for the most part, make tight or useful prior predictions about the unknown design features of any single species.

That’s not to say that one could not, in principle, derive a useful or novel prediction from the drift hypothesis; just that one doesn’t immediate jump out at me in this case, nor does PZ explicitly mention any specific predictions he had in mind. Without any specific predictions, PZ’s suggestion about variation in nose shape, while it may well be true to some small or large degree (given that PZ’s language chalks most to all of variation up to drift, rather than selection; it’s unclear precisely what proportion he had in mind), his claim also runs the risk of falling prey to the label of “just-so story“.

Since PZ appears to be really concerned that evolutionary psychologists do not make use of drift in their research as often as he’d like, this, it seems, would have been the perfect opportunity for him to show us how things ought to be done: he could have derived a number of useful and novel predictions from the drift hypothesis and/or shown how drift might better account for some aspects of the data in nose variation that he had in mind, relative to other current competing adaptationist theories on nose variation. I’m not even that particular about the topic of noses, really; PZ might prefer to examine a psychological phenomenon instead, as this is evolutionary psychology he’s aiming his criticisms at. This isn’t just a mindless swipe at PZ’s apparent lack of a testable hypothesis either: as long as his predictions derived from a drift hypothesis lead to some interesting research, that would be a welcome addition to any field.

Let’s move on from the prediction point towards the matter of whether selection played a role in determining current nose variation. In this area, there is another concern of mine about the drift hypothesis that reaches beyond the pragmatic one. As PZ mentions in his post, selection pressures are generally “blind” to very small fitness benefits or detriments. If your nose differs in size from mine by 1/10 of a millimeter, that probably won’t have much of an effect on eventual fitness outcomes, so that variation might stick around in the next generation relatively unperturbed. The next generation will, in turn, introduce new variation into the population due to sexual recombination and mutation. If the average difference in nose shape was 1/10 of a millimeter in the previous generation, that difference may now grow to, say, 2/10th of a millimeter. Since that difference still isn’t likely enough to make much of a difference, it sticks around into the next generation, which introduces new variation that isn’t selected for or against, and so on. These growths in average variation, while insignificant when considered in isolation, can begin to become the target of selection as they accumulate and their fitness costs and benefits begin to become non-negligible. In this hypothetical example, nose shape and size might begin to become the target of stabilizing selection where the more extreme variations are weeded out of the population, perhaps because they’re viewed as less sexually appealing or become less functional than other, less extreme variants (the factors that PZ singled out as not being important).

Ladies; start your engines…

So let’s say one was to apply an adaptationist research paradigm to nose variation and compare it to PZ’s drift hypothesis (falsely assuming, for the moment, that an adaptationist research paradigm is in some way supposed to be opposed to a drift one). A researcher might begin by wondering what functions nose shape could have. Note that these need not be definitive conclusions; merely plausible alternatives. Once our researcher has generated some possible functions, they would begin to figure out ways of testing these candidate alternatives. Noback et al (2011), for instance, postulated that the nasal cavity might function, in part, to warm and humidify incoming air before it reaches the lungs and, accordingly, predicted that nasal cavities ought to be expected to vary contingent on the requirements of warming and humidifying across varying climates.

This adaptationist research paradigm generated six novel predictions, which is a good start compared to PZ’s zero. Noback et al (2011) then tested test predictions against 100 skulls from 10 different populations spanning 5 different climates. The resulted indicated significant correlations between nearly every climate factor (temperature and humidity) and nasal cavity shape. Further, the authors managed to disconfirm more than one of their initial hypotheses, and were also able to suggest that these variations in nasal cavity shape were not due solely to allometric effects. They also mention plenty of variation is left unexplained, and some variation in nasal cavity variation might also be due to tradeoffs between warming and humidifying incoming air and functions of the nose (such as olfaction).

So, just to recap, this adaptationist research concerning nose variation yielded a number of testable predictions (it’s useful), found evidence consistent with them in some cases but not others (it’s falsifiable), tested alternative explanations (variation not solely due to allometry), mentioned tradeoffs between functions, and left plenty of variation unexplained (did not assume every feature was an adaptation). This is compared to PZ’s drift hypothesis, which made no explicit predictions, cited no data, made no mention of function (presumably because it would postulate there isn’t one), and would seem to not be able to account well for this pattern of results. Perhaps PZ might note this research deals primarily with internal features of the nose; not external ones, and the external features are what he had mind when he proposed the drift hypothesis. As he’s not explicit about which parts of nose shape were supposed to be under discussion, it’s hard to say whether he feels results like these would pose any problems for his drift hypothesis.

Moving targets can be notoriously difficult to hit

While I still remain agnostic about the precise degree to which variation in nose shape has been the target of selection, as I’m by no means an expert on the subject, the larger point here is how useful adaptationist research can be. It’s not enough to just declare that variation in a trait is obviously the product of drift and not selection and leave it at that in much the same way that one can’t just assume a trait in an adaptation. As far as I see it, neither drift nor adaptation ought to be the null hypothesis in this case. Predictions need to be developed and tested against the available data, and the adaptationist paradigm is very helpful in generating those predictions and figuring out what data might be worth testing. That’s most certainly not to say those predictions will always be right, or that the research flowing from someone using that framework will always be good. The point is just that adaptationism itself is not the problem PZ seems to think it is.

References: Noback, M., Harvati, K., & Spoor, F. (2011). Climate-related variation of the human nasal cavity American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 145 (4), 599-614 DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.21523

PZ Myers: Missing The Mark

Posted on December 11, 2012 by Jesse Marczyk

As this year winds itself to a close, I’ve decided to treat myself to writing another post that allows me to engage more fully in my debating habit. The last post I did along these lines dealt with the apparent moral objection some people have for taking money from the wrong person, and why I felt they were misplaced. Today, the subject will be PZ Myers, who, as normally seems to be the case, appears to still have a dim view of evolutionary psychology. In this recent post, PZ suggested that evolutionary psychology is rotten right down to its theoretical core because of an apparently fatal misconception: adaptationism. Confusingly, PZ begins his attack on this fatal misconception by affirming that selection is an important mechanism, essential for fully understanding evolution, and ought not be ignored by researchers. In essence, PZ’s starting point is that the fatal flaw of evolutionary psychology is, in addition to not being a flaw, a vital conceptual paradigm.

Take that?

If you’re looking for anything in this post about why adaptationism per se is problematic, or a comparison demonstrating that research in psychology that makes use of adaptationism is generally inferior to research conducted without that paradigm, you’re liable to disappointed by PZ’s latest offering. This is probably because very little of his post actually discusses adaptationism besides his praise of it; you know, that thing that’s supposed to be a seriously flawed foundation. So given that PZ doesn’t appear to actually be talking about adaptationism itself being a problem, what is he talking about? His main concern would seem to be that he feels that other evolutionary mechanisms – specifically, genetic drift and chance – are not as appreciated as explanatory factors as he would prefer. He’s more than welcome to his perception of whether or not some factors are under-appreciated. In fact, he’s even willing to share an example:

Most of the obvious phenotypic variation we see in people, for instance, is not a product of selection: your nose does not have the shape it does, which differs from my nose, which differs from Barack Obama’s nose, which differs from George Takei’s nose, because we independently descend from populations which had intensely differing patterns of natural and sexual selection for nose shape; no, what we’re seeing are chance variations amplified in frequency by drift in different populations.

While I currently have no strong hypotheses one way or another about past selections on nose shape, PZ certainly seems to: he feels that current variation in nose shape is obviously due to genetic drift. Now I know it might seem like PZ is advancing a claim about past selections pressures with absolutely no evidence; it also might seem like his claim makes no readily apparent testable predictions, making it more of a just-so story; it might even seem that these sort of claims are the kind that are relatively less likely to ever see publication for the former two reasons. In all fairness, though, all of that only seems that way because all those things happen to also be true.

Moving onto his next point, PZ notes that chance factors are very important in determining the direction evolution will take when selection coefficients are small and the alleles in question aren’t well-represented in the gene pool. In other words, there will be some deleterious mutations that happen to linger around in populations because they aren’t bad enough to be weeded out by selection, and some variations that would be advantageous but never end up being selected. This is a fine point, really; it just has very little to do with adaptationism. It has even less to do with his next point, which involves whether color preference has any functional design. Apparently, as an evolutionary psychologist, I’m supposed to have some kind of feelings about the matter of color preference by association, and these feelings are supposed to be obviously wrong. (If I’m interpreting PZ properly, that is. Of course, if I’m not supposed to share some opinion about color preference, it would be strange indeed for him to bring that example up…)

“Well, I guess I can’t argue with that logic…”

Unfortunately, PZ doesn’t get his fill of the Pop Anti-Evolutionary Psychology Game in this first go of collective guilt by association, so he takes another pass at it by asserting that evolutionary psychologists begin doing research by assuming that what they’re studying is a functional adaptation. For those unwilling to click through the link:

…[T]he “Pop Anti-Evolutionary Psychology Game.” Anyone can play…First, assert something that evolutionary psychologists think. These assertions can come in any of a number of flavors, the only requirement being that it has to be something that is obviously false, obviously stupid, or both…hyper-adaptationism is always a good option, that evolutionary psychologists assume that all traits are adaptations…The second part of the game should be obvious. Once you’ve baldly asserted what evolutionary psychologists believe…point out the blindingly obvious opposite of the view you’ve hung on evolutionary psychology.

This is, I think, supposed to be the problem that PZ was implying he had with evolutionary psychology more generally and adaptationism specifically. If this was supposed to be his point all along, he really should have put it at the beginning. In fact, had he simply written “not all traits and variations of those traits are adaptations” he could have saved a lot of time and been met with agreement from, of all people, evolutionary psychologists.

Breaking with tradition, PZ does mention that there have been some evolutionary psychology papers that he likes. I can only suppose their foundational concept was somehow different from the ones he doesn’t like. Confusingly, however, PZ also goes on to say that he tends to like evolutionary psychology papers more as they gets away from the “psychology” part of things (the quotes are his and I have no idea what they are supposed to mean), and focus more on genetics, which makes me wonder about whether he’s actually reading papers in the field he thinks he is…

“No; I’m not lost, and no, I won’t stop and ask for directions”

Finally, PZ ends his rather strange post by asserting that we can’t learn anything of importance evolutionarily from studying undergraduates (which isn’t a novel claim for him). I’m most certainly in favor of research with more diverse cross-cultural samples, and moving beyond the subject pool is a good thing for all researchers in psychology to do. The assertion that we can’t learn anything of value from this sample of people strikes me as rather strange, though. It would be nice, I suppose, if PZ could helpfully inform us as to which types of people we could potentially learn important psychological things from, what kind of important things those might be, and why those things are specific to those samples, but I suspect he’s saving that wisdom up for another day.

The Sometimes Significant Effects Of Sexism

Posted on November 25, 2012 by Jesse Marczyk

Earlier this week I got an email from a reader, Patrick, who recommended I review a paper entitled, “More than “just a joke”: The prejudice-releasing function of sexist humor” by Ford et al (2007). As I happen to find discussions of sexism quite interesting and this article reviewable, I’m happy to share some of my thoughts about it. I would like to start by noting that the title of the article is a bit off-putting for me due to the author’s use of word “function”. While I’m all for more psychological research taking a functionalist perspective, their phrasing would, at least in my academic circle, carry the implication that the use of sexist humor evolved because of its role in releasing prejudice, and I’m fairly certain that is not the conclusion that Ford et al (2007) intended to convey. Though Ford et al (2007) manage to come close to something resembling a functionalist account (there is some mention of costs and the avoiding of them), it’s far from close enough for the coveted label of “function” to be applied. Until their account has been improved in that regard, I feel the urge to defend my academic semantic turf.

So grab your knife and best dancing shoes.

Concerning the study itself, Ford et al (2007) sought to demonstrate that sexist humor would lead men who were high in “hostile sexism” to act in a discriminatory fashion towards women. Broadly speaking, the authors suggest that people who hold sexist beliefs often try to suppress the expression of those beliefs in the hopes of avoiding condemnation by others who are less sexist; however, when condemnation is perceived to be unlikely, those who hold sexist beliefs will stop suppressing them, at least to some extent. The authors further suggest that humor can serve to create an atmosphere where condemnation of socially unpopular views is perceived as less likely. Stringing this all together, we end up with the conclusion that sexist humor can create an environment that sexist men will perceive as more welcoming for their sexist attitudes, which they will subsequently be more likely to express.

Across two studies, Ford et al (2007) found support for this conclusion. In the first study, male subject’s hostile sexism scores were assessed through the “Ambivalent Sexism Inventory” 2 to 4 weeks prior to the study. The study itself involved presenting the males with one of three vignettes that included sexist jokes, sexist statements, or neutral jokes, followed by asking them how much they would hypothetically be willing to donate to a woman’s organization. The results showed that while measures of hostile sexism alone did not predict how much men were willing to donate, when confronted with sexist humor, those men who scored higher on the sexism measure tended to donate less of their hypothetical $20 to a woman’s group. Further, neither the sexist statements or neutral joke conditions had any effect on a man’s willingness to donate, regardless of his sexism score. In fact, though it was not significant, men who scored higher in hostile sexism were more likely to donate more to a woman’s group relative to those who scored low, following the sexist statements.

There are two important points to consider regarding this first set of findings. The first of these points relates to the sexist statement condition: if the mechanism through which Ford et al (2007) are proposing hostile sexism becomes acted upon is the perception of tolerance of sexist beliefs, the sexist statements condition is rather strange. In that condition, it would appear rather unambiguous that there is a local norm for the acceptance of sexism against women, yet the men high in sexism don’t seem to “release” theirs. This is a point that the authors don’t engage with, and that seems like a rather major oversight. My guess is that the point isn’t engaged in because it would be rather difficult for the author’s model to account for, but perhaps they had some other reason for not considering it (even though it easily could have easily and profitably been examined in their second study). The second point that I wanted to deal with concerns the way in which Ford et al (2007) seem to write about sexism. Like many people (presumably) concerned about sexism, they only appear concerned with one specific type of sexism: the type where men appear biased against women.

“If he didn’t want to get hit, he shouldn’t have provoked her!”

For instance, in the first study, the authors report, truthfully, that men higher in hostile sexism tended to donate less to a woman’s group then men lower in hostile sexism did. What they do not explicitly mention is how those two groups compare to a control: the neutral joke condition. Regardless of one’s sexism score, people donated equally in the neutral condition. In the sexist joke condition, those men high in hostile sexism donate less, relative to the neutral condition; on the other hand, those men low in hostile sexism donated more in the sexist humor condition, relative to the neutral control. While the former is taken as an indication of a bias against women, the latter is not discussed as a bias in favor of women. As I’ve written about before, only discussing one set of biases does not appear uncommon when it comes to sexism research, and I happen to find that peculiar. This entire study is dedicated towards looking at the result of ostensibly sexist attitudes held by men against women; there is no condition where women’s biases (either towards men or women) are assessed before and after hearing sexist jokes about men. Again, this is a rather odd omission if Ford et al (2007) are seeking to study gender biases (that is, unless the costs for expressing sexist beliefs are lower for women, though this point is never talked about either). The authors do at least mention in a postscript that women’s results on the hostile sexism scale don’t predict their attitudes towards other women, which kind of calls into question what this measure of “hostile sexism” is actually supposed to be measuring (but more on that later).

The second study had a few (only 15 per condition) male subjects watching sexist or non-sexist comedic skits in small groups, after which they were asked to fill out a measure concerning how they would allocate a 20% budget cut among 5 different school groups, one of which was a woman’s group (the others were an African American, Jewish, study abroad, and Safe Arrival for Everyone). Following this, subjects were asked how people in their group might approve of their budget cuts, as well as how others outside of the group might approve of their cuts. As before, those who were higher in hostile sexism were more likely to reduce more of the budget of the woman’s group, but only in the sexist joke condition. Those with higher hostile sexism scores were also more likely to deduct more money from the African American group as well, but only in the neutral humor condition, though little is said about this effect (the authors do mention it is unlikely to be driven by the same mechanism; I think it might just reflect chance). Those in the high sexism, sexist humor group were also likely to believe that others in their condition would approve of their budget reductions to the woman’s group, though they were no more likely to think students at large would approve of their budget cuts than other groups.

The sample size for this second study is a bit concerning. There were 30 subjects total, across two groups, and the sample was further divided by sexism scores. If we assume there were equal numbers of subjects with high and low sexism scores, we’re looking at only about 7 or 8 subjects per condition, and that’s only if we divide the sample by sexism scores above and below the mid-point. I can’t think of a good reason for collecting such a small sample, and I have some concerns that it might reflect data-peaking, though I have no evidence that it does. Nevertheless, the authors make a lot of the idea that subjects higher in sexism felt there was more consensus about the local approval rating of their budget cuts, but only in the sexist humor condition; that is, they might have perceived the local norms about sexism to be less condemning of sexist behavior following the sexist jokes. As I mentioned before, it would have been a good idea for them to test their mechanism using other, non-humor conditions, such as the sexist statement they used initially and subsequently dropped. There’s not much more to say about that except that Ford et al (2009) mention in their introduction the statement manipulations seemed to work as a releaser for racial bias without mentioning why they didn’t work for gender.

So it might be safer to direct any derogatory comments you have to the right…

I would like to talk a bit more about the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory before finishing up. I took the test online in order to see what items were being used as research for this post (and you can as well, by following the link above) and I have some reservations as to what precisely it’s measuring. Rather than measuring sexism, per se, the hostile portion of the inventory appears to deal, at least in part, with whether one or one agrees with certain feminist ideas. For instance, two questions which stand out as being explicit about this are (1) “feminists are making entirely reasonable demands of men”, and (2) “feminists are not seeking for women to have more power than men”. Not only do such questions not necessarily reflect one’s views of women more generally (provided one can be said to have a view of women more generally), but they are so hopelessly vague in their wording that they can be interpreted to have a unacceptably wide range of meanings. As the two previous studies and the footnote demonstrate, there doesn’t seem to be a consistent main effect of one’s score on this test, so I have reservations as to whether it’s really tapping sexism per se.

The other part of the sexism inventory involves what is known as “benevolent sexism” – essentially the notion that men ought to do things for women, like gain their affection or protect and provide for them, or that women are in some respects “better” than men. As the website with the survey helpfully informs us, men and women don’t seem to differ substantially in this type of sexism. However, this type of benevolent sexism is also framed as sexism against women that could turn “ugly” for them; not as sexism directed against men, which I find curious, given certain questions (such as, “Women, compared to men, tend to have a superior moral sensibility.” or “Men should be willing to sacrifice their own well being in order to provide financially for the women in their lives.”). Since this is already getting long, I’ll just wonder aloud why no data of the measures of benevolent sexism appear in this paper anywhere, given that the authors appears to have collected it.

References: Ford, T., Boxer, C., Armstrong, J., & Edel, J. (2007). More Than “Just a Joke”: The Prejudice-Releasing Function of Sexist Humor Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34 (2), 159-170 DOI: 10.1177/0146167207310022

(Not So) Simple Jury Persuasion: Beauty And Guilt

Posted on November 5, 2012 by Jesse Marczyk

It should come as no shock to anyone, really, that people have all sorts of interesting cognitive biases. Finding and describing these biases would seem to make up a healthy portion of the research in psychology, and one can really make a name for themselves if the cognitive bias they find happens to be particularly cute. Despite this well-accepted description of the goings-on in the human mind (it’s frequently biased), most research in the field of psychology tends to overlook, explicitly or implicitly, those ever-important “why” questions concerning said biases; the paper by Herrera et al (2012) that I’ll be writing about today (and the Jury Room covered recently) is no exception, but we’ll deal with that in a minute. Before I get to this paper, I would like to talk briefly about why we should expect cognitive biases in the most general terms.

Hypothesis 1: Haters gonna hate?

When it comes to the way our mind perceives and processes information, one might consider two possible goals for those perceptions: (1) being accurate – i.e. perceiving the world in an “objective” or “correct” way – or (2) doing (evolutionarily) useful things. A point worth bearing in mind is that the latter goal is the only possible route by which any cognitive adaptation could evolve; a cognitive mechanism that did not eventually result in a reproductive advantage would, unsurprisingly, not be likely to spread throughout the population. That’s most certainly not to say that accuracy doesn’t matter; it does, without question. However, accuracy is only important insomuch as it leads to doing useful things. Accuracy for accuracy’s sake is not even a potential selection pressure that could shape our psychology. While, generally speaking, having accurate perceptions can often lead towards adaptive ends, when those two goals are in conflict, we should expect doing useful things to win every time, and, when that happens, we should see a cognitive bias as the result.

A quick example can drive this point home: your very good friend finds himself in conflict with a complete stranger. You have arrived late to the scene, so you only have your friend’s word and the word of the stranger as to what’s going on. If you were an objectively accurate type, you might take the time to listen to both of their stories carefully, do your best to figure out how credible each party is, find out who was harmed and how much, and find the “real” victim in the altercation. Then, you might decide whether or not to get involved on the basis of that information. Now that may sound all well and good, but if you opt for this route you also run the risk of jeopardizing your friendship to help out a stranger, and losing the benefits of that friendship is a cost. Suffering that cost is, all things considered, evolutionarily, would be a “bad” thing, even if uninvolved parties might consider it to be it the morally correct action (skirting for the moment the possibility of costs that other parties might impose, though avoiding those could easily be fit in the “doing useful things” sides of the equation). This suggests that, all else being equal, there should be some bias that pushes people towards siding with their friends, as siding against them is a costlier alternative.

So where all this leads us is to the conclusion that when you see someone proposing that a cognitive bias exists, they are, implicitly or explicitly, suggesting that there is a conflict between accuracy and some cost of that accuracy, be that conflict over behaving in a way that generates an adaptive outcome, trade-offs between cognitive costs of computation and accuracy, or anything else. With that out of the way, we can now consider the paper by Herrera et al (2012) that purports to find a strange cognitive bias when it comes to the interaction of (a) perceptions of credibility, responsibility, and control of a situation when it comes to domestic violence against women, (b) their physical attractiveness, and (c) their prototypicality as a victim. According to their results, attractiveness might not always be a good thing.

Though, let’s face it, attractiveness is, on the whole, typically a good thing.

In their study, Herrera et al (2012) recruited a sample of 169 police offers (153 of which were men) from various regions of Spain. They were divided into four groups, each of which read a different vignette about a hypothetical woman who had filed a self-defense plea for killing her husband by stabbing him in the back several times, citing a history of domestic abuse a fear that he would have killed her during an argument. The woman in these stories – Maria – was either described as attractive or unattractive (no pictures were actually included) along the following lines: thick versus thin lips, smooth features versus stern and jarring ones, straight blonde hair versus dark bundled hair, and slender versus non-slender appearance. In terms of whether Maria was a prototypical battered woman, she was either described as having 2 children, no job with an income, hiding her face during the trial, being poorly dressed, and timid in answering questions, or as having no children, a well-paying job, being well dressed, and resolute in her interactions.

Working under the assumption that these manipulations are valid (I feel they would have done better to have used actual pictures of women rather than brief written descriptions, but they didn’t), the authors found an interesting interaction: when Maria was attractive and prototypical, she was rated as being more credible than when she was unattractive and prototypical (4.18 vs 3.30 out of 7). The opposite pattern held for when Maria was not prototypical; here, attractive Maria was rated as being less credible than her unattractive counterpart (3.72 vs 3.85). So, whether attractiveness was a good or a bad thing for Maria’s credibility depended on how well she otherwise met some criteria for your typical victim of domestic abuse. On the other hand, more responsibility was attributed to Maria for the purported abuse when she was attractive overall (5.42 for attractive, 5.99 for unattractive).

Herrera et al (2012) attempt to explain the attractiveness portion of their results by suggesting that attractiveness might not fit in with the prototypical picture of a female version of domestic abuse, which results in less lenient judgments of their behavior. It seems to me this explanation could have been tested with the data they collected, but they either failed to do so or did and did not find significant results. More to the point, this explanation is admittedly strange, given that attractive women were also rated as more credible when they were otherwise prototypical, and the author’s proximate explanation should, it seems, predict precisely the opposite pattern in that regard. Perhaps they might have had ended up with a more convincing explanation for their results had their research been guided with some theory as to why we should see these biases with regard to attractiveness, (i.e. what the conflict in perception should be being driven by) but it was not.

I mean, it seems like a handicap to me, but maybe you’ll find something worthwhile…

There was one final comment in the paper I would like to briefly consider with regard to what the authors consider two fundamental due process requirements in cases of women’s domestic abuse: (1) the presumption of innocence on the part of the woman making the claim of abuse and (2) the woman’s right to a fair hearing without the risk of revictimization; revictimization, in this case, referring to instances where the woman’s claims are doubted and her motives are called into question. What is interesting about that claim is that it would seem to set up an apparently unnoticed or unmentioned double-standard: it would seem to imply that women making claims of abuse are supposed to be, by default, believed; this would seem to do violence to the right that the potential perpetrator is supposed to have with regard to their presumption of innocence. Given that part of the focus of this research is on the matter of credibility, this unmentioned double-standard seems out of place. This apparent oversight might have to do with the fact that this research was only examining moral claims made by a hypothetical woman, rather than another claim also made by a man, but it’s hard to say for sure.

References: Herrera, A., Valor-Segura, I., & Expósito, F (2012). Is Miss Sympathy a Credible Defendant Alleging Intimate Partner Violence in a Trial for Murder? The European Journal of Psychology Applied to Legal Context, 4, 179-196

Differentiating Between Effects And Functions

Posted on October 27, 2012 by Jesse Marczyk

A few days ago, I had the misfortune of forgetting my iPod when I got to the gym. As it turns out, I hadn’t actually forgotten it; it had merely fallen out of my bag in the car and I hadn’t noticed, but the point is that I didn’t have it on me. Without the music that normally accompanies my workout I found the experience to be far less enjoyable than it normally is; I would even go so far as to say that it was more difficult to lift what I normally do without much problem. When I mentioned the incident to a friend of mine she expressed surprise that I actually managed to stick around to finish my workout without it; in fact, on the rare occasions I end up arriving at the gym without any source of music, I typically don’t end up even working out at all, demonstrating the point nicely.

“If you didn’t want that bar to be crushing your windpipe, you probably shouldn’t have forgotten your headphones…”

In my experience, listening to music most certainly has the effect of allowing me to enjoy my workout more and push myself harder. The question remains, however, as to whether such effects are part of the function of music; that is to ask do we have some cognitive adaptation(s) designed to generate that outcome from certain given inputs? On a somewhat related note, I recently got around to reading George C Williams book, Adaptation and Natural Selection (1966). While I had already been familiar with most of what he talked about, it never hurts to actually go back and read the classics. In the book, Williams makes a lot of the above distinction between effects and functions throughout the book; what we might also label as byproducts and adaptations respectively. A simple example would demonstrate the point: while a pile of dung might serve as a valuable resource for certain species of insects, the animals which produce such dung are not doing so because it benefits the insects; the effect in this case (benefiting insects) is not the function of the behavior (excreting wastes).

This is an important theoretical point; one which Williams repeatedly brings to bear against the group selection arguments that people were putting forth at the time he was writing. Just because populations of organisms tend to have relatively stable population sizes – largely by virtue or available resources and predation – that effect does not imply there is a functional group-size-regulation adaptation activity generating that outcome. While effects might be suggestive of functions, or at least preliminary requirements for demonstrating function, they are not alone sufficient evidence for them. Adapted functionality itself is often a difficult thing to demonstrate conclusively, which is why Williams offered his now famous quote about adaptation being an onerous concept.

This finally brings us to a recent paper by Dunbar et al (2012) in which the authors find an effect of performing music on pain tolerance; specifically, it’s the performance of music per se, not the act of passively listening to it, that results in an increased pain tolerance. While it’s certainly a neat effect, effects are a dime a dozen; the question of relevance would seem to be whether this effect bears on a possible function for music. While Dunbar et al (2012) seem to think it does, or at least that it might, I find myself disagreeing with that suggestion rather strongly; what they found strikes me more as an effect without any major theoretical implications.

If that criticism stings too much, might I recommend some vigorous singing?

First, a quick overview of the paper: subjects were tested twice for their pain tolerance (as measured by the time people could stand the application of increasing pressure or holding cold objects), both before and after a situation in which they either performed music (singing, drumming, dancing, or practicing) or listened to it (varying the tempo of the music). In most cases it was the active performance of music which led to a subsequent increase in pain tolerance, rather than listening. The exception to that set of findings was that the groups that were simply practicing in a band setting did not show this increase, a finding which Dunbar et al (2012) suggest has to do with the vigor, likely the physical kind, with which the musicians were engaged in their task, not the performance of music per se.

Admittedly, that last point is rather strange from the point of view of trying to build a functional account for music. If it’s the physical activity that causes an increase in pain tolerance, that would not make the performance of music special with respect to any other kind of physical activity. In other words, one might be able to make a functional account for pain sensitivity, but it would be orthogonal to music. For example, in their discussion, the authors also note that laughter can also lead to an increase in pain tolerance as well. So really there isn’t much in this study that can speak to a function of music specifically. Taking this point further, Dunbar et al (2012) also fail to provide a good theoretical account as to how one goes from an increased pain tolerance following music production to increases in reproductive success. From my point of view, I’m still unclear as to why they bothered to examine the link between music production and pain the first place (or, for that matter, why they included dancing, since while dancing can accompany music, it is not itself a form of music, just like my exercise can accompany music, but it not music-related itself).

Dunbar et al (2012) also mention in passing at the end of their paper that music might provide some help to the ability to entrain synchronized behavior, which in turn could lead to increases in group cooperation which, presumably, they feel would be a good thing, adaptively speaking, for the individuals involved in said group. Why this is in the paper is also a bit confusing to me, since it appears to have nothing to do with anything they were talking about or researching up to that point. While it would appear to be, at least on the face of it, a possible theoretical account for a function of music (or at least a more plausible one than their non-existent reason for examining pain tolerance) nothing in the paper seems to directly or indirectly speak to it.

And believe you me, I know a thing or two about not being spoken to…

While this paper serves as an excellent example of some of the difficulties in going from effect to function, another point worth bearing in mind is how little gets added to this account by sketching out the underlying physical substrates through which this effect is generated. Large sections of the Dunbar et al paper is dedicated to these physiological outlines of the effect without many apparent payoff. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying that exploring the physiological pathways through which adaptations act is a useless endeavor, it’s just that such sketches do not add anything to an account that’s already deficient in the first place. They’re the icing on top of the cake; not it’s substance. Physiological accounts, while they can be neat if they’re your thing, are not sufficient for demonstrating functionality for exactly the same reasons that effects aren’t; all physiological accounts are, essentially, simply detailed accounts of effects, and byproducts and adaptations alike both have effects.

While this review of the paper itself might have been cursory, there are some valuable lessons to learn from it: (1) always try and start your research with some clearly stated theoretical basis, (2) finding effects does not mean you’ve found a function, (3) sketching effects in greater detail at a physiological level does not always help for developing a functional account, and (4) try and make sure the research you’re doing maps onto your theoretical basis, as tacking on an unrelated functional account at the end of your paper is not good policy; that account should come first, not as an afterthought.

References: Dunbar RI, Kaskatis K, Macdonald I, & Barra V (2012). Performance of music elevates pain threshold and positive affect: Implications for the evolutionary function of music. Evolutionary psychology : an international journal of evolutionary approaches to psychology and behavior, 10 (4), 688-702 PMID: 23089077

Williams, G.C. (1966). Adaptation and natural selection: A critique of some current evolutionary thought. Princeton University Press: NJ

No, Really; Domain General Mechanisms Don’t Work (Either)

Posted on October 17, 2012 by Jesse Marczyk

Let’s entertain a hypothetical situation in which your life path had led you down the road to becoming a plumber. Being a plumber, your livelihood depends on both knowing how to fix certain plumbing-related problems and having the right tools for getting the job done: these tools would include a plunger, a snake, and a pair of clothes you don’t mind not wearing again. Now let’s contrast being a plumber with being an electrician. Being an electrician also involves specific knowledge and the right tools, but those sets do not overlap well with those of the plumber (I think, anyway; I don’t know too much about either profession, but you get the idea). A plumber that shows up for their job with a soldering iron and wire-strippers is going to be seriously disadvantaged at getting that job done, just as a plunger and a snake are going to be relatively ineffective at helping you wire up the circuits in a house. The same can be said for your knowledge bases as well: knowing how to fix a clogged drain will not tell you much about how to wire a circuit, and vice versa.

Given that these two jobs make very different demands, it would be surprising indeed to find a set of tools and knowledge that worked equally well for both. If you wanted to branch out from being a plumber to also being an electrician, you would subsequently need new additional tools and training.

And/Or a very forgiving homeowner’s insurance policy…

Of course, there is not always, or even often, a 1-to-1 relationship between the intended function of a tool and the applications towards which it can be put. For example, if your job involves driving in a screw and you happen to not have a screwdriver handy, you could improvise and use, say, a knife’s blade to turn the screw as well. That a knife can be used in such a fashion, however, does not mean it would be preferable to do away with screwdrivers altogether and just carry knives instead. As anyone who has ever attempted such a stunt before can attest to, this is because knives often do not make doing the job very quick or easy; they’re generally inefficient in achieving that goal, given their design features, relative to a more functionally-specific tool. While a knife might work well as a cutting tool and less well as screwdriver, it would function even worse still if used as a hammer. What we see here is that as tools become more efficient at one type of task, they often become less efficient at others to the extent that those tasks do no overlap in terms of their demands. This is why it’s basically impossible to design a tool that simply “does useful things”; the request is massively underspecified, and the demands of one task do not often highly correlate to the demands of another. You first need narrow the request by defining what those useful things are you’re trying to do, and then figure out ways of effectively achieving your more specific goals.

It should have been apparent well before this point that my interest is not in jobs and tools per se, but rather in how these examples can be used to understand the functional design of the mind. I previously touched briefly on why it would be a mistake to assume that domain-general mechanisms would lead to plasticity in behavior. Today I hope to expand on that point and explain why we should not expect domain-general mechanisms – cognitive tools that are supposed to be jacks-of-all-trades and masters of none – to even exist. This will largely be accomplished by pointing out some of the ways that Chiappe & MacDonald (2005) err in their analysis of domain-general and domain-specific modules. While there is a lot wrong with their paper, I will only focus on certain key conceptual issues, the first of which involves the idea, again, the domain-specific mechanisms are incapable of dealing with novelty (in much the same way that a butter knife is clearly incapable of doing anything that doesn’t involve cutting and spreading butter).

Chiappe & MacDonald claim that a modular design in the mind should imply inflexibility: specifically, that organisms with modular minds should be unable to solve novel problems or solve non-novel problems in novel ways. A major problem that Chiappe & MacDonald’s account encounters is a failure to recognize that all problems organisms face are novel, strictly speaking. To clarify that point, consider a predator/prey relationship: while rabbits might be adapted for avoiding being killed by foxes, generally speaking, no rabbit alive today is adapted to avoid being killed by any contemporary fox. These predator-avoidance systems were all designed by selection pressures on past rabbit populations. Each fox that a rabbit encounters in its life is a novel fox, and each situation that fox is encountered in is a novel situation. However, since there are statistical similarities between past foxes and contemporary ones, as well as between the situations in which they’re encountered, these systems can still respond to novel stimuli effectively. This evaporates the novelty concern rather quickly; domain-specific modules can, in fact, only solve novel problems, since novel problems are the only kinds of problems that an organism will encounter. How well they will solve those problems will depend in large part on how much overlap there is between past and current scenarios.

Swing and a miss, novelty problem…

A second large problem in the account involves the lack of distinction on the part of Chiappe and MacDonald between the specificity of inputs and of functions. For example, the authors suggest that our abilities for working memory should be classified as domain-general abilities because many different kinds of information can be stored in working memory. This strikes me as a rather silly argument, as it could be used to classify all cognitive mechanisms as domain-general. Let’s return to our knife example; a knife can be used for cutting all sorts of items: it could cut bread, fabric, wood, bodies, hair, paper, and so on. From this, we could conclude that a knife is a domain-general tool, since its function can be used towards a wide-variety of problems that all involve cutting. On the other hand, as mentioned previously, a knife can efficiently do far fewer things than what it can’t do: knives are awful hammers, fire extinguishers, water purifiers, and information-storage devices. The knife has a relatively specific function which can be effectively applied to many problems that all require the same general solution – cutting (provided, of course, the materials are able to be cut by the knife itself. That I might wish to cut through a steel door does not mean my kitchen knife is up to the task). To tie this back to working memory, our cognitive systems that dabble in working memory might be efficient at holding many different sorts of information in short-term memory, but they’d be worthless at doing things like regulating breathing, perceiving the world, deciphering meaning, or almost any other task. While the system can accept a certain range of different kinds of inputs, its function remains constant and domain-specific.

Finally, there is the largest issue their model encounters. I’ll let Chiappe & MacDonald spell it out themselves:

A basic problem [with domain-general modules] is that there are no problems that the system was designed to solve. The system has no preset goals and no way to determine when goals are achieved, an example of the frame problem discussed by cognitive scientists…This is the problem of relevance – the problem of determining which problems are relevant and what actions are relevant for solving them. (p.7)

Though they mention this problem in the beginning of their paper, the authors never actually take any steps to address that series of rather large issues. No part of their account deals with how their hypothetical domain-general mechanisms generate solutions to novel problems. As far as I can tell, you could replace the processes by which their domain-general mechanisms identify problems, figure out which information is and isn’t useful in solving said problems, figure out how to use that information to solve the problems, and figure out when the problem has been solved, with the phrase “by magic” and not really affect the quality of their account much. Perhaps “replace” is the wrong word, however, as they don’t actually put forth any specifics as to how these tasks are accomplished under their perspective. The closest they seem to come is when they write things along the lines of “learning happens” or “information is combined and manipulated” or “solutions are generated”. Unfortunately for their model, leaving it at that is not good enough.

A lesson that I thought South Park taught us long time ago.

In summary, their novelty problem isn’t one, their “domain-general” systems are not general-purpose at the functional level at all, and the ever-present framing problem is ignored, rather than addressed. That does not leave much of an account left. While, as the authors suggest, being able to adaptively respond to non-recurrent features in our environment would probably be, well, adaptive, so would the ability to allow our lungs to become more “general-purpose” in the event we found ourselves having to breathe underwater. Just because such abilities would be adaptive, however, does not mean that they will exist.

As the classic quote goes, there are far more ways of being dead than there are of being alive. Similarly, there are far more ways of not generating adaptive behavior than there are of behaving adaptively. Domain-general information processors that don’t “know” what to do with the information they receive will tend to get things wrong far more often than they’ll get them right on those simple statistical grounds. Sure, domain-specific information processors won’t always get the right answer either, but the pressing question is, “compared to what?”. If that comparison is made to a general-purpose mechanism, then there wouldn’t appear to be much of a contest.

References: Chiappe, D., & MacDonald, K. (2005). The Evolution of Domain-General Mechanisms in Intelligence and Learning The Journal of General Psychology, 132 (1), 5-40 DOI: 10.3200/GENP.132.1.5-40

No, Really; Group Selection Still Doesn’t Work

Posted on October 10, 2012 by Jesse Marczyk

Back in May, I posed a question concerning why an organism would want to be a member of group: on the one hand, an organism might want to join a group because, ultimately, that organism calculates that joining a group would likely lead to benefits for itself that the organism would not otherwise obtain; in other words, organisms would want to join a group for selfish reasons. On the other hand, an organism might want to join a group in order to deliver benefits to the entire group, not just themselves. In this latter case, the organism would be joining the group for, more or less, altruistic reasons. For reasons that escape my current understanding, there are people who continue to endorse the second reason for group-joining as plausible, despite it being anathema to everything we currently know about how evolution works.

The debate over whether adaptations for cooperation and punishment were primarily forged by selection pressures at the individual or group level has gone on for so long because, in part, much of the evidence that was brought to bear on the matter could have been viewed as being consistent with either theory – if one was creative enough in their interpretation of the results, anyway. The results of a new study by Krasnow et al (2012) should do one of two things to the group selectionists: either make them reconsider their position or make them get far more creative in their interpreting.

Though I think I have a good guess which route they’ll end up taking.

The study by Krasnow et al (2012) took the sensible route towards resolving the debate: they created contexts where the two theories make opposing predictions. If adaptations for social exchange (cooperation, defection, punishment, reputation, etc) were driven primarily by self-regarding interests (as it is the social exchange model), information about how your partner behaved towards you should be more relevant than information about how your partner behaved towards others when you’re deciding how to behave towards them. In stark contrast, a group selection model would predict that those two types of information should be of similar value when deciding how to treat others, since the function of these adaptations should be to provide group-wide gains; not selfish ones.

These contexts were created across two experiments. The first experiment was designed in order to demonstrate that people do, in fact, make use of what the authors called “third-party reputation”, defined as a partner’s reputation for behaving a certain way towards others. Subjects were brought into the lab to play a trust game with a partner who, unbeknownst to the subjects, were computer programs and not real people. In a trust game, a player can either not trust their partner, resulting in an identical mid-range payoff for both (in this case, $1.20 for both), or trust their partner. If the first player trusts, their partner can either cooperate – leading to an identical payoff for both players that’s higher than the mid-range payoff ($1.50 for both) – or defect – leading to an asymmetrical payoff favoring the defector ($1.80 and $0.90). In the event that the player trusted and their partner defected, the player was given an option to pay to punish their partner, resulting in both their payoffs sitting at a low level ($0.60 for both).

Before the subjects played this trust game, they were presented with information about their partner’s third-party reputation. This information came in the form of questions that their partner had ostensibly filled out earlier, which assessed the willingness of that partner to cheat given freedom from detection. Perhaps unsurprisingly, subjects were less willing to trust a partner who indicated they would be more likely to cheat, given a good opportunity. What this result tells us, then, is that people are perfectly capable of making use of third-party reputation information when they know nothing else about their partner. These results do not help us distinguish between group and individual-level accounts, however, as both models predict that people should act this way; that’s where the second study came in.

“Methods: We took 20 steps, turned, and fired”

The second study added in the crucial variable: first-party reputation, or your partner’s past behavior towards you. This information was provided through the results of two prisoner’s dilemma games that were visible to the subject, one which was played between a subject and their partner and the other played between the partner and a third party. This led to subjects encountering four kinds of partners: one who defected both on the subject and a third party, one who cooperated with both, and one who defected on one (either the subject or the third party) but cooperated with the other. Following this initial game, subjects again played a two-round trust game with their partners. This allowed the following question to be answered: when subjects have first-party reputation available, do they still make use of third-party reputation?

The answer could not have been a more resounding, “no”. When deciding whether they were going to trust their partner or not, the third-party reputation did not predict the outcome at all, whereas first-party reputation did, and, unsurprisingly, subjects were less willing to trust a partner who had previously defected on them. Further, a third-party reputation for cheating did not make subjects any more likely to punish their partner, though first-party reputation didn’t have much value in those predictions either. That said, the social exchange model does not predict that punishment should be enacted strictly on the grounds of being wronged; since punishment is costly it should only be used when subjects hope to recoup the costs of that punishment in subsequent exchanges. If subjects do not wish to renegotiate the terms of cooperation via punishment, they should simply opt to refrain from interacting with their partner altogether.

That precise pattern of results was borne out: when a subject were defected on and the subject then punished the defector, that same subject was also likely to cooperate in subsequent rounds with their partner. In fact, they were just as likely to cooperate with their partner as they were cases where the partner did not initially defect. It’s worth repeating that subjects did this while, apparently, ignoring how their partner had behaved towards anyone else. Subjects only seemed to punish the partner in order to persuade their partner to treat them better; they did not punish because their partner had hurt anyone else. Finally, first-party reputation, unlike third-party reputation, had an effect on whether subjects were willing to cooperate with their partner on their first move in the trust game. People were more likely to cooperate with a partner who had cooperated with them, irrespective of how that partner behaved towards anyone else.

Let’s see you work that into your group selection theory.

To sum up, despite group selection models predicting that subjects should make use of first- and third-party information equally, or at least jointly, they did not. Subjects only appeared to be interested in information about how their partner behaved towards others to the extent that such information might predict how their partner would behave towards them. However, since information about how their partner had behaved towards them is a superior cue, subjects made use of that first-party information when it was available to the exclusion of third-party reputation.

Now, one could make the argument that you shouldn’t expect to see subjects making use of information about how their partners behaved towards other parties because there is no guarantee that those other parties were members of the subject’s group. After all, according to group selection theories, altruism should only be directed at members of one’s own group specifically, so maybe these results don’t do any damage to the group selectionist camp. I would be sympathetic to that argument, but there are two big problems to be dealt with before I extend that sympathy: first, it would require that group selectionists give up all the previously ambiguous evidence they have said is consistent with their theory, since almost all of that research does not explicitly deal with a subject’s in-group either; they don’t get to recognize evidence only in cases where it’s convenient for their theory and ignore it when it’s not. The second issue is the one I raised back in May: “the group” is a concept that tends to lack distinct boundaries. Without nailing down this concept more concretely, it would be difficult to build any kind of stable theory around it. Once that concept had been developed more completely, then it would need to be shown that subjects will act altruistically towards their group (and not others) irrespective of the personal payoff for doing so; demonstrating that people act altruistically with the hopes that they will be benefited down the road from doing so is not enough.

Will this study be the final word on group selection? Sadly, probably not. On the bright side, it’s at least a step in the right direction.

References: Krasnow, M.M., Cosmides, L., Pederson, E.J., & Tooby, J. (2012). What are punishment and reputation for? PLOS ONE, 7

Altruism Is Not The Basis Of Morality

Posted on October 2, 2012 by Jesse Marczyk

“Biologists call this behavior altruism, when we help someone else at some cost to ourselves. If you think about it, altruism is the basis of all morality. So the larger question is, Why are we moral?” – John Horgan [emphasis mine]

John Horgan, a man not known for a reputation as a beacon of understanding, recently penned the above thought that expresses what I feel to be an incorrect sentiment. Before getting to the criticism of that point, however, I would like to first commend John for his tone in this piece: it doesn’t appear as outwardly hostile towards the field of evolutionary psychology as several of his past pieces have been. Sure, there might be the odd crack about “hand-wavy speculation” and the reminder about how he doesn’t like my field, but progress is progress; baby steps, and all that.

Just try and keep those feet pointed in the right direction and you’ll do fine.

I would also like to add at the outset that Horgan states that:

“Deceit is obviously an adaptive trait, which can help us (and many other animals) advance our interest” [Emphasis mine]

I find myself interested as to why Horgan seems to feel that deceit is obviously adaptive, but violence (in at least some of its various forms) obviously isn’t. Both certainly can advance an organism’s interests, and both generally advance those interests at the expense of other organisms. Given that Horgan seems to offer nothing in the way of insight into how he arbitrates between adaptations and non-adaptations, I’ll have to chalk his process up to mere speculation. Why one seems obvious and the other does not might have something to do with Trivers accepting Horgan’s invitation to speak at his institution last December, but that might be venturing too far into that other kind of “hand-wavy speculation” Horgan says he dislikes so much. Anyway…

The claim that altruism is the basis of all morality might seem innocuous enough – the kind of thing ostensibly thoughtful people would nod their head at – but an actual examination of the two concepts will show that the sentiment only serves to muddy the waters of our understanding of morality. Perhaps that revelation could have been reached had John attempted to marshal more support for the claim beyond saying, “If you think about it” (which is totally not speculation…alright; I’ll stop), but I suppose we can’t hope for too much progress at once. So let’s begin, then, by considering the ever-quotable line from Adam Smith:

“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we can expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest”

Smith is describing a scenario we’re all familiar with: when you want a good or service that someone else can provide you generally have to make it worth their while to provide it to you. This trading of benefits-at-a-cost is known as reciprocal altruism. However, when I go to the mall and give Express money so they will give me a new shirt, this exchange is generally not perceived as two distinct, altruistic acts (I endure the cost of losing money to benefit Express and Express endures the cost of losing a shirt to benefit me) that just happen to occur in close temporal proximity to one another, nor is it viewed as a particularly morally praiseworthy act. In fact, such exchanges are often viewed as two selfish acts, given that the ostensible altruism on the behavioral level is seen as a means for achieving benefits, not an end in and of itself. One could also consider the example with regards to fishing: if you sit around all day waiting for a fish to altruistically jump into your boat so you can cook it for dinner, you’ll likely be waiting a long time; better to try and trick the fish by offering it a tasty morsel on the end of a hook. You suffer a cost (the loss of the bait and your time spent sitting on a boat) and deliver a benefit to the fish (it gets a meal), whereas the fish suffers a cost (it gets eaten soon after) that benefits you, but neither you or the fish were attempting to benefit the other.

There’s a deeper significance to that point, though: reciprocally altruistic relationships tend to break down in the event that one party fails to return benefits to the other (i.e. when the payments over time for one party actually resembles altruism). Let’s say my friend helps me move, giving up his one day off a month he has in the process. This gives me a benefit and him a cost. At some point in the future, my friend is now moving. In the event I fail to reciprocate his altruism, there are many who might well say that I behaved immorally, most notably my friend himself. This does, however, raise the inevitable question: if my friend was expecting his altruistic act to come back and benefit him in the future (as evidenced by his frustration that it did not do so), wasn’t his initial act a selfish one on precisely the same level as my shopping or fishing example above?

Pictured above: not altruism

What these examples serve to show is that, depending on how you’re conceptualizing altruism, the same act can be viewed as selfish or altruistic, which throws a wrench into the suggestion that all morality is based on altruism. One needs to really define their terms well for that statement to even mean anything worthwhile. As the examples also show, precisely how people behave towards each other (whether selfishly or altruistically) is often a topic of moral consideration, but just because altruism can be a topic of moral consideration it does not mean it’s the basis of moral judgments. To demonstrate that altruism is not the basis of our moral judgments, we can also consider a paper by DeScioli et al (2011) examining the different responses people have to moral omissions and moral commissions.

In this study, subjects were paired into groups and played a reverse dictator game. In this game, person A starts with a dollar and person B has a choice between taking 10 cents of that dollar, or 90 cents. However, if person B didn’t make a choice within 15 seconds, the entire dollar would automatically be transferred to them, with 15 cents subtracted for running out of time. So, person B could be altruistic and only take 10 cents (meaning the payoffs would be 90/10 for players A and B, respectively), be selfish and take 90 cents (10/10 payoff), or do nothing making the payoffs 0/85 (something of a mix of selfish and spite). Clearly, failing to act (an omission) was the worst payoff for all parties involved and the least “altruistic” of the options. If moral judgments use altruism as their basis, one should expect that, when given the option, third parties should punish the omissions more harshly than either of the other two conditions (or, at the very least, punish the latter two conditions equally as harshly). However, those who took the 90 cents were the ones who got punished the most; roughly 21 cents, compared to the 14 cents that those who failed to act were punished. An altruism-based account of morality would appear to have a very difficult time making sense of that finding.

Further still, an altruism-based account of morality would fail to provide a compelling explanation for the often strong moral judgments people have in reaction to acts that don’t distinctly harm or benefit anyone, such as others having a homosexual orientation or deciding not to have children. More damningly still, an altruism basis for moral judgments would have a hell of a time trying to account for why people morally support courses of action that are distinctly selfish: people don’t tend to routinely condemn others for failing to give up their organs, even non-vital ones, to save the lives of strangers, and most people would condemn a doctor for making the decision to harvest organs from one patient against that patient’s will in order to save the lives of many more people.

“The patient in 10B needs a kidney and we’re already here…”

An altruism account would similarly fail to explain why people can’t seem to agree on many moral issues in the first place. Sure, it might be altruistic for a rich person to give up some money in order to feed a poor person, but it would also be altruistic for that poor person to forgo eating in order to not impose that cost on the rich one. Saying that morality is based in altruism doesn’t seem to even provide much information about how precisely that altruism will be enacted, moral interactions will play out, or seem to lend any useful or novel predictions more generally. Then again, maybe an altruism-based account of morality can obviously deal with these objects if I just think about it…

References: DeScioli, P., Christner, J., & Kurzban, R. (2011). The omission strategy Psychological Science, 22, 442-446 DOI: 10.1177/0956797611400616

Your Mama’s So Fat…

Posted on September 14, 2012 by Jesse Marczyk

Recently, there’s been a (free) paper going around the various psychology blogging sites by Swami & Tovee (2012) that deals with how stress appears to affect men’s ratings of women’s attractiveness by body type. The study purports to find that men, when placed in an apparently stressful situation, subsequently report finding heavier women more attractive. My take on the issue, for what it’s worth, is that the authors (and a few bloggers who have picked up the study) might have, in the excitement of talking about this result, seemed to have overlooked the fact that their explanation for it does not appear to make much sense.

On the plus side, at least they tried; “A” for…affort, I guess…

Swami & Tovee (2012) referenced what they call the “Environmental Security Hypothesis”. This hypothesis suggests that when an individual is facing some environmental stress, they will tend to prefer mates that can more successfully navigate those stressful life events. In certain contexts, then, the author’s further suggest that physical attractiveness ideals should change. So, in the case of body size, their general argument would seem to go something like this: since fat stores are a measure of caloric security and physical maturity, when their caloric security is low, men should subsequently find women with more fat more attractive because they hold a higher mate value in those contexts.This argument strikes me as distinctly bad.

Presumably there are a number of modules inside our brain that function to assess the mate value of others. We should expect these modules to being paying attention, so to speak, to traits that correlate with the reproductive potential of those potential mates. Given that the current caloric state of women is one of those traits, we certainly should expect some of men’s mating modules to assess it. That’s all well and good, but here’s where the authors lose me: when a man is assessing a woman’s reproductive potential, how does information about that man’s current state help in that assessment? My being hungry or stressed should, in principle, have little or nothing to do with whether any individual woman is fertile or capable of successfully dealing with stressful life events, or anything, really.

Now maybe if I was chronically hungry or stressed, there might be some value in selecting a mate with more fat, but only insomuch as my levels of hunger and stress are predictive of theirs. This argument would hinge on the notion that stress and hunger are shared, more or less, communally. However, even granting that chronic levels of hunger or stress for me might be predictive of the risks that others will encounter these things as well, this study was not examining chronic levels of these variables; it was examining acute levels of stress or hunger. This makes the argument seem even weaker. The mate value of others should not really change because I have a stressful day (or, in the case of this experiment, a stressful few minutes competing for a fake job and counting backwards in intervals of 13 in front of a few people).

They should only change after I make it to happy hour.

Because of that, the question then becomes: what value would information about my current state have when it comes to assessing another individual’s state? As far as I can tell, this answer amounts to “not much”. If I want to assess someone else’s state my best bet would probably be to, well, assess it directly, rather than assessing mine and assuming mine reflects theirs. Despite this, the research did show that men were assessing heavier figures as more attractive after they had been stressed, so how should we explain this?

We can start by noting that neither men’s BMI or current hunger levels correlated with their ratings of attractiveness. Since adipose tissue is supposed to be signaling caloric security, this casts some doubt on at least part of the Environmental Security Hypothesis put forth by Swami & Tovee (2012). It would also appear to contradict some previous research they present in the introduction about how men’s preferences for female body size shift with their hunger levels. Nevertheless, men in the stressed group did tend to find the heavier figures more attractive. Those same men also happened to find the figures in the normal weight category more attractive, and, even though the preference was slightly shifted, also still found women in the underweight category to be the average ideal. In other words, their ratings of attractiveness shifted up in overall magnitude about as much as they shifted towards the heavier end. While the authors focus on the latter shift, they don’t seem to pay any mind to the former, which is a rather severe oversight.

Let’s consider that finding in light of a hunger analogy. There’s no denying that preferences can shift on the basis of one’s current caloric state. How appealing I find the idea of eating an unpalatable food will change on the basis of how recently I ate and how long I’ll likely have to wait before being able to eat something else. When I’m hungry, normally unpalatable food might appear more acceptable whereas food that was initially appetizing will now be highly appetizing. How attractive food seems, in general, would shift upwards. You might also find that, provided that not all food is equally as attainable, that I shift my standards towards food that I can more easily acquire and away from food that appears more difficult to obtain. When you’re hungry, a meal of lower quality now might seem more appealing than a meal of higher quality later, provided that meal of higher quality would even be available at all. Finally, you might find that no matter how hungry I get, my preference for eating things like bark or sand remains relatively unchanged, no matter how easy or difficult they are to obtain.

It’s not so bad once you ketchup it up…

Returning to the attractiveness ratings in the current study, this is basically what the paper showed: there was little variance in whether or not men found starving or obese women attractive (they didn’t). Stressed men also shifted their ratings to the right (perhaps towards more attainable mates) and similarly shifted them up (women were generally more attractive). Taking both of these effects into account gives us a better grasp for what’s really going on.

Now maybe the title of “stressed men lower their standards” has a bit less of a positive ring to it than the authors and bloggers intended, but it’s certainly consistent with the pattern of data observed here. It would at least appear to be more consistent than the author’s explanation for the pattern of results which hinges on ecological variation in access to resources, since the overall ecology for men wasn’t changing in this study: acute stress levels were. Whether your stress level is more useful for predicting useful things about other people, or whether it’s more useful for predicting which course of action you yourself should pursue, I feel, should be clear.

References: Swami V, & Tovée MJ (2012). The Impact of Psychological Stress on Men’s Judgements of Female Body Size. PloS one, 7 (8) PMID: 22905153

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