Category Archives: EvoPsych

Making Your Business My Business (Part 2)

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Social little creatures that we happen to be, people are found to frequently, and often unpleasantly, involve themselves in the affairs of others. The unpleasantness seems to result from the fact that people’s involvement in these affairs is hardly ever selfless or unattached. After all, we wouldn’t tend to get involved in regulating the behaviors of others if there was no benefit to doing so. Sometimes people’s motives can be fairly transparent: for instance, that single guy who’s sexually interested in a girl will probably give her somewhat-different relationship advice than that girl’s female friends with no such interest. Now that example happens to be one where a consciously-held proximate motive happens to line up fairly-well with the ultimate reason for that motive’s existence (i.e. the man is sexually interested in the girl, and the advice he gives might have functioned to secure additional mating opportunities for himself). Other cases are less transparent, owing to people not having much conscious insight into the reasons they have certain thoughts or feelings: as another for instance, people might be interested in legislating the sexual behavior of others in order to improve the viability of their sexual strategy. However, on a conscious level all they might experience is a feeling of “that’s gross”, or “that’s not right”.

  “I hate mustard. You shouldn’t be allowed to eat it”

These less-transparent cases pose us with some rather interesting mysteries to solve, mostly because explaining why I might not wish to do something is a much different task than explaining why I might want to stop other people from doing that thing. One such mystery has recently landed at my feet, and I wanted to explore it today in order to try and figure out my own thoughts on the matter (despite the Onion recently telling me such a feat is folly). I came across this example owing to my new-found love for an online card game called Hearthstone. The game operates similar to other existing card games: you have a pool of cards from which you can select a certain number to build your deck. Every player starts out with a beginning pool of cards for free which they can then expand and improve by opening online packs or unlocking certain class-specific cards through playing that class enough. If you’re really into showing off, there are also golden versions of the cards, which function precisely as the normal ones do, but are much rarer and harder to get. They’re basically the spinning rims of the game.

Now having access to all of the cards in the game provides an additional degree of flexibility in terms of what decks you can make. Accordingly, many people would prefer to get full collections. Owing to the free-to-play setup of the game, this either takes a lot of time (spent earning in game packs through play) or a lot of money (you can also buy packs). For the most part, I have taken the former route, and during my time not spent playing, when I should be doing other things, I sometimes like to watch YouTube videos of other people playing to learn and improve (and put off meaningful work). If you’re really looking to kill some time without deluding yourself into thinking you’re spending it productively, though, there are also videos of people just opening online packs. It just so happens that one of those videos happens to be what drew my attention. In the video (which can be viewed here if you have over 2 hours to waste), a man has bought 600 of these online packs for his three-year-old son’s account which he records opening. In real money, that works out to roughly $750.

What drew my interest was not the video itself; that part is actually quite dull. Instead, I found my reaction to it rather noteworthy: when I saw the video, the first thought to cross my mind was, in essence, “This guy is an asshole for spending so much money on those packs”. This sentiment was apparently not unique to me, judging by some comments. Choice selections of them include: he’s an idiot (“Blizzard won the battle. Got this idiot to spend more than $750 for his son…“), he’s neglectful of his children (“This isn’t a good dad in any way…I’d take love and care above 600 hearthstone packs anyday“), or just an all-around bad person (“Who is this twat?”). I find my initial reaction, as well as the ones in the comments section, rather puzzling. Specifically, why do such harsh, negative reactions arise to someone spending his money on, at worst, something he likes, and, at best, a gift for his child? At first glance, it certainly doesn’t seem like this purchase is doing any harm to the world.

“Who does that bitch think she is, buying gifts for her child?!”

There are a number of candidate explanations for this apparent moral outrage we might explore. One of these explanations is that perhaps people were outraged because they thought this man was buying a competitive advantage for himself or his child. This is a common complaint leveled by gamers against ostensibly “free-to-play” games: while the game might be “free” to play, one might need to “pay-to-win”, barring an incredible investment of time and energy which very few people with real responsibilities can make. In one respect, then, buying all those packs might have been condemned for the same reason that people condemned wealthy individuals for “renting” disabled tour guides to skip the lines at busy theme parks. If the father is paying to make his child better off relative to other people, then those other people might understandably get a bit salty about their newly-found competitive disadvantage. Without going too in-depth into the mechanics of the game, however, this explanation seems to hinge on the idea that having access to all those cards provides a competitive edge one could not get without them, and there’s a good deal of evidence to suggest that the advantage of the additional cards, if it exists, might be relatively minimal in some cases. In any case, I wouldn’t rule that explanation out as part of the overall picture.

Nevertheless, I don’t think this could possibly be the whole story. I say that for a number of reasons. First, there was a story that I discussed semi-recently: the reactions another comments section had to Kim Kardashian donating 10% of her eBay auction proceeds to charity. In this case, she was not disadvantaging anyone – quite the opposite – but was still branded as a horrible person by many commenters. Second, I try to imagine whether or not people would have the same reaction to the initial father in question buying 600 packs for someone, but instead of that someone being his son, that someone was a stranger. Though I have no data to support this intuition at moment, I would predict that you’d see a marked decrease in the amount of condemnation the act would receive if it were directed towards non-kin, despite the fact that the competitive edge it provides did not change. By contrast, I think people would still condemn my buying a handicapped tour guide for someone else to skip the lines at Disney world. I also get the sense that if the father bought his child a $750 toy (or $750 worth of them) instead, people would similarly condemn his for doing so, even though toys provide no real competitive edge in any sense.

Here’s an alternative explanation, and what I think is going on here: in brief, I think the ultimate function of morality, broadly defined, is to manage association values (how valuable you are to me as an ally relative to others, all things considered). The reason acts like Kim’s or this father’s receive moral condemnation is that they evidence a very low welfare-tradeoff-ratio towards others (which is just what it sounds like; how willing I am to trade my welfare off for yours). To use a simple example, the world is full of people who need various things: let’s use food in this instance. As I acquire food, the marginal value of each additional bit of it drops. That is to say the first bite of food on an empty stomach is worth more than the second bite, which is worth more than the third, and so on. So, as I consumed food, the value of additional food for me drops until it’s hit the point where I am, on a practical level, not getting any real benefit from having more.

However, as I consume food, other people’s desire for it does not change. The value of the resource for me has thus hit negligible returns at a certain point, whereas the value of that resource for others has not diminished. By continuing to acquire resources for myself at that point, my actions would, implicitly, be suggesting that I value my having a relatively small benefit over someone else having a relatively large one. Given that kin share our genes, acquiring those resources for closely-related others likely sends the same message: I care about my own interests much more than I can about others. This, in many instances, can make me seem like a poor associate. A very selfish friend doesn’t tend to be a very good one. It’s for this reason that taking care of an orphaned child receives more praise than caring for one’s own child. If one instead acquires a vast amount of resources for someone else, however, there is still that diminishing returns issue, but you would instead be demonstrating a rather high welfare-tradeoff-ratio towards others, rather than yourself (“I value someone else getting this resource much more than I value myself getting it”). Accordingly, people should probably condemn it less, if not outright praise it.

“Sure; someone has to buy it, and they’re going to hell, but at least you’re good”

While such ultimate considerations might be responsible for shaping the cognitive mechanisms that generated the feelings people expressed in these comments sections, that’s no guarantee that people will understand them as such consciously. All that’s required is that people take the appropriate behavioral actions, such as morally condemning and insulting those who appear to behave overly selfish, or refusing to associate themselves with such individuals. Proximately, all people might experience is a feeling of moral outrage or disgust. They might not be able to tell you why they experience those things, but that’s probably because understanding the why is much less relevant. In much the same way, animals don’t need to know that sex leads to reproduction in order to have it feel good and thus be motivated to engage in it. If the moral condemnation leads people to make different, other-benefiting choices in the future, so much the better for those others. It doesn’t hurt that by expressing how selfish we think other people are we might be able to make ourselves look like better associates in the process (i.e. “I find your behavior overly selfish, so I must not be similarly self-interested…”).

Not-So-Shocking Results About People Shocking Themselves

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I’m bored is a useless thing to say. I mean, you live in a great, big, vast world that you’ve seen none percent of. Even the inside of your own mind is endless; it goes on forever, inwardly, do you understand? The fact that you’re alive is amazing, so you don’t get to say ‘I’m bored’”. – Louis CK

One of the most vivid – and strangely so – memories of my childhood involved stand-up comedy. I used to always have the TV on in the background of my room when I was younger, usually tuned to comedy central or cartoons. Young me would somewhat-passively absorb all that comedic material and then regurgitate it around people I knew without context; a strategy that made me seem a bit weirder than I already was as a child. The joke in particular that I remember so vividly came from Jim Gaffigan: in it, he expressed surprise that the male seahorses are the one’s who give birth, suggesting that they should just call the one that gives birth the female; he also postulates that the reason this wasn’t the case was that a stubborn scientist had made a mistake. One reason this joke stood out to me in particular was that, as my education progressed, it served as perhaps the best example of how people who don’t know much about the subject they’re discussing can be surprised at some ostensible quirks about it that actually make a great deal of sense to more knowledgeable individuals.

In fact, many things about the world are quite shocking to them.

In the case of seahorses, the mistake Jim was making is that biological sex in that species, as well as many others, can be defined by which sex produces the larger gametes (eggs vs. sperm). In seahorses, the females produce the eggs, but the males provide much of the parental investment, carrying the fertilized eggs in a pouch until they hatch. In such species where the burden of parental care is shouldered more heavily by the males, we also tend to see reversals of mating preferences, where the males tend to become more selective about sexual partners, relative to the females. So not only was the labeling of the sexes no mistake, but there are lots of neat insights to be drawn about psychology from that knowledge. Admittedly, this knowledge does also ruin the joke, but here at Popsych we take the utmost care to favor being a buzzkill over being inaccurate (because we have integrity and very few friends). In the interests of continuing that proud tradition, I would like to explain why the second part of the initial Louis CK joke – the part about us not being allowed to be bored because we ought to just be able to think ourselves to entertainment and pleasure – is, at best, misguided.

That part of the joke contains an intuition shared by more than Louis, of course. In the somewhat-recent past, an article was making its way around the popular psychological press about how surprising it was that people tended to find sitting with their own thoughts rather unpleasant. The paper, by Wilson et al (2014), contains 11 studies. Given that number, along with the general repetitiveness of the designs and lack of details presented in the paper itself, I’ll run through them in the briefest form possible before getting to meat of the discussion. The first six studies involved around 400 undergrads being brought into a “sparsely-furnished room” after having given up any forms of entertainment they were carrying, like their cell phones and writing implements. They were asked to sit in a chair and entertain themselves with only their thoughts for 6-15 minutes without falling asleep. Around half the participants rated the experience as negative, and a majority reported difficulty concentrating or their mind wandering.The next study repeated this design with 169 subjects asked to sit alone at home without any distractions and just think. The undergraduates found the experience about as thrilling at home as they did in the lab, the only major difference being that now around a third of the participants reported “cheating” by doing things like going online or listening to music. Similar results were obtained in a community sample of about 60 people, a full half of which reported cheating during the period.

Finally, we reach the part of the study that made the headlines. Fifty-five undergrads were again brought into the lab. Their task began by rating the pleasantness of various stimuli, one of which being a mild electric shock (designed to be unpleasant, but not too painful). After doing this, they were given the sit-alone-and-think task, but were told they could, if they wanted, shock themselves again during their thinking period via an ankle bracelet they were wearing. Despite participants knowing that the shock was unpleasant and that shocking themselves was entirely optional, around 70% of men and 25% of women opted to deliver at least one shock to themselves during the thinking period when prompted with the option. Even among the subjects who said they would pay $5 instead of being shocked again, 64% of the men and 15% of the women shocked themselves anyway. From this, Wilson et al (2014) concluded that thinking was so aversive that people would rather shock themselves than think if given the option, even if they didn’t like the shock.

“The increased risk of death sure beats thinking!”

The authors of the paper posited two reasons as to why people might dislike doing nothing but sitting around thinking, neither of which make much sense to me: their first explanation was that people might ruminate more about their own shortcomings when they don’t have anything else to do. Why people’s minds would be designed to do such a thing is a bit beyond me and, in any case, the results didn’t find that people defaulted to thinking they were failures. The second explanation was that people might find it unpleasant to be alone with their own thoughts because they had to be a “script writer” and an “experiencer” of them. Why that would be unpleasant is also a bit beyond me and, again, that wasn’t the case either: participants did not find having someone else prompting the focus of thoughts anymore pleasant.

Missing from this paper, like many papers in psychology, is an evolutionary-level, functional consideration of what’s going on here: not explored or mentioned is the idea that thinking itself doesn’t really do anything. By that, I mean evolution, as a process, cannot “see” (i.e. select for) what organisms think or feel directly. The only thing evolution can “see” is what an organism does; how it behaves. That is to say the following: if you had one organism that had a series of incredibly pleasant thoughts but never did anything because of them, and another that never had any thoughts whatsoever but actually behaved in reproductively-useful ways, the latter would win the evolutionary race every single time.

To further drive this point home, imagine for a moment an individual member of a species which could simply think itself into happiness; blissful happiness, in fact. What would be the likely result for the genes of that individual? In all probability, they would fair less well than their counterparts who were not so inclined since, as we just reviewed, feeling good per se does not do anything reproductively useful. If those positive feelings derived from just thinking happy thoughts motivated any kind of behavior (which they frequently do) and those feelings were not designed to be tied to some useful fitness outcomes (which they wouldn’t be, in this case), it is likely that the person thinking himself to bliss would end up doing fewer useful things along with many maladaptive ones. The logic here is that there many things they could do, but only a small subsection of those things are actually worth doing. So, if organisms selected what to do on the basis of their emotions, but these emotions were being generated for reasons unrelated to what they were doing, they would select poor behavioral options more than not. Importantly, we could make a similar argument for an individual that thought himself into despair frequently: to the extent that feeling motivate behaviors, and to the extent that those feelings are divorced from their fitness outcomes, we should expect bad fitness results.

Accordingly, we ought to also expect that thinking per se is not what people find aversive in this experiment. There’s no reason for the part of the brain doing the thinking (rather loosely conceived) here to be hooked up to the pleasure or pain centers of the brain. Rather, what the subjects likely found aversive here was the fact that they weren’t doing anything even potentially useful or fun. The participants in these studies were asked to do more than just think about something; the participants were also asked to forego doing other activities, like browsing the internet, reading, exercising, or really anything at all. So not only were the subjects asked to sit around and do absolutely nothing, they were also asked not do the other fun, useful things they might have otherwise spent their time on.

“We can’t figure out why he doesn’t like being in jail despite all that thinking time…”

Now, sure, it might seem a bit weird that people would shock themselves instead of just sit there and think at first glance. However, I think that strangeness can be largely evaporated by considering two factors: first, there are probably some pretty serious demand characteristics at work here. When people know they’re in a psychology experiment and you only prompt them to do one thing (“but don’t worry it’s totally optional. We’ll just be in the other room watching you…”), many of them might do it because they think that’s what the point of the experiment is (which, I might add, they would be completely correct about in this instance). There did not appear to be any control group to see how often people independently shocked themselves when not prompted to do so, or when it wasn’t their only option. I suspect few people would under that circumstance.

The second thing to consider is that most organisms would likely start behaving very strangely after a time if you locked them in an empty room; not just humans. This is because, I would imagine, the minds of organisms are not designed to function in environments where there is nothing to do. Our brains have evolved to solve a variety of environmentally-recurrent problems and, in this case, there seems to be no way to solve the problem of what to do with one’s time. The cognitive algorithms in their mind would be running through a series of “if-then” statements and not finding a suitable “then”. The result is that their mind could potentially start generating relatively-random outputs. In a strange situation, the mind defaults to strange behaviors. To make the point simply, computers stop working well if you’re using them in the shower, but, then again, they were never meant to go in the shower in the first place.

To return to Louis CK, I don’t think I get bored because I’m not thinking about anything, nor do I think that thinking about things is what people found aversive here. After all, we are all thinking about things – many things – constantly. Even when we are “distracted”, that doesn’t mean we are thinking about nothing; just that our attention is on something we might prefer it wasn’t. If thinking it what was aversive here, we should be feeling horrible pretty much all the time, which we don’t. Then again, maybe animals in captivity really do start behaving weird because they don’t want to be the “script writer” and “experiencer” of their own thoughts…

References: Wilson, T., Reinhard, D., Westgate, E., Gilbert, D., Ellerbeck, N., Hahn, C., Brown, C., & Shaked, A. (2014). Just think: The challenges of the disengaged mind. Science, 345, 75-77.

Is There Any Good Evidence That Porn Is Harmful To Relationships?

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In my last post, I noted briefly how technology has made it easier than ever to access a variety of pornographic images, whether produced personally or professionally. Much like concerns about how violent video games might make people who play them more violent, there have also been concerns raised about how pornography becoming more prevalent might also lead to certain, undesirable outcomes, such as rape as weakened relationships. As for the video game concern, there is some evidence that the aggression (or rather anger) caused by video games might have a lot less to do with violent content per se than it has to do with losing (full disclosure: I have been unable to locate the paper, so I can’t assess the claims made in it personally, but this explanation should be easily and intuitively understandable to anyone who has seriously engaged in competitive play. Gamers don’t rage quit over violent content; they rage quit because they lost). Similarly, there have been many concerns raised about pornography over the years, many of which hinge on the idea that pornography might lead to people (specifically men) to develop negative attitudes towards women and, accordingly, be more likely to rape them or to accept rape more generally.

Tissue companies vigorously denied that such a link existed

As pornography has become more widely available – thanks in no small part to the internet – rates of rape appear to have declining rather markedly over the same time period; in much the same way, violence has been declining despite violent video games being more common and accessible than ever. The world is a complex place and there are plenty of variables at play, so those correlations are just that. Nevertheless, the evidence that pornography causes any kind of sexual offending is “inconsistent at best” (Ferguson & Hartley, 2009) and, given the nature of the topic, one might reasonably suspect that at least some of that inconsistency has to do with researchers setting out to find certain conclusions. To be blunt about it, some researchers probably “have their answer”, so to speak, before they even begin the research, and might either game their projects to find that result, or interpret otherwise ambiguous results in a manner consistent with their favored hypothesis.

On that note, there was a recent post by Peg Streep concerning the negative effects that pornography might have on intimate relationships. In no uncertain terms, Peg suggests that (1) relationships with porn are less stable, (2) watching porn makes people less committed to their relationships, and (3) that it leads to people cheating on their partners. The certainty with which these points were made appears to stand in marked contrast to the methodological strength of studies she mentions, even from her own summaries of them (As an aside, in the comments section Peg also appears to insinuate that video games make people more violent as well; just a fun coincidence). Given that the studies are covered in less-than-adequate detail, I decided it track down the research she presented for myself and see if there was any good evidence that pornography use has a negative and causal relationship with commitment and intimate relationships.

The first study comes from Maddox et al (2011). This paper surveyed the pornography viewing habits of around 1,300 individuals (whether alone, with a partner, or not at all) and examined whether there was any relationship between viewing pornography and various relationship measures. Those who reported not viewing pornography tended to be more religious, tended to escalate fights less (d = 0.26), thought their relationship was going better (d = 0.22), and were more dedicated to their relationships (d = 0.25, approximately). Further, those who watched porn were less likely to report being satisfied sexually in their relationship (d = 0.21) and also appeared to be two- to three-times as likely to report infidelity. However, the authors explicitly acknowledge on more than one occasion that their data is correlational in nature and provided no evidence of causality. Such research might simply suggest those who like pornography are different than those who do not like it, or that “…individuals who are unhappy with their relationships seek out [pornography] on their own as an outlet for sexual energy”. The pornography itself might have very little to do with relationship strength.

It might have plenty to do with arm strength, though

The second paper Peg mentions at least contains an experiment, which should, in principle, be better for determining if there is any causal relationship here. Unfortunately, there exists a gap between principle and practice here. The paper, by Lambert et al (2012) is rather long, so I’m only going to focus on the actual experiment within it and ignore the other correlational work (as those issues would be largely a retread of the last paper). The experiment involved having current porn users to either (a) refrain from using porn or (b) eating their favorite food for three weeks. The participants (N = 20) also maintained a daily dairy of their porn use. Initially, the two groups reported similar porn usage (M = 3.73 and 4.07 viewings per month – I think – respectively) and relationship commitment (estimated 72% and 62% chance of being with their partner in the future, respectively). After the three week period, those who attempted to abstain from porn reported less viewing (M = 1.42) than those in the food-abstaining group (M = 3.88); the former group also reported greater relationship commitment (63% chance of staying together over time) relative to the food-abstainers (30% chance) at the end of the three weeks.

So was porn the culprit here? Well, I think it’s very doubtful. First of all, the sample size of 10 per group is pitifully small and I would not want to draw any major conclusions from that. Second, both groups were initially high on their relationship commitment despite both groups also watching porn. Third, and perhaps most importantly, what this study found was not an increase in commitment when people watched less porn, directly contradicting what Peg says about the results (that group saw a decrease as well, albeit only a 10% drop); it just found a large decrease in the group that continued to do what it had been doing this whole time. In other words, the authors are positing that a constant (porn usage) was responsible for a dramatic and sudden decline, whereas their manipulation (less porn usage) was responsible for things staying (sort of) constant. I find that very unlikely; more likely, I would say, is that one or two couples within the food-abstaining group happened to have hit a rough patch unrelated to the porn issue and, because the sample size was so small, that’s all it took to find the result.

The final paper Peg mentions comes from Gwinn et al (2013), and examined the relationship between porn and cheating. The authors report two studies: in the first, 74 students either wrote about a sexually explicit scene or an action scene from a movie or show they had seen in the last month; they were then asked to think about what options they had for alternative sexual partners. Those who wrote about the sexual scene rated their options as an average 3.3 out of 7, compared with the 2.6 for the action group (Of note: only half the subjects in the sex group wrote about porn; the other half wrote about non-porn sex scenes). Further, those in the sexual group did not report any difference in their current relationship satisfaction than those in the action group. In the second study, 291 students had their porn habits measured at time one and their cheating behavior (though this was not exclusively sexual behavior) measured at time two. They found a rather weak but positive correlation between the two: pornography use at time one could uniquely account for approximately 1% of the variance in cheating 12 weeks later. So, much like the first study, this one tells us nothing about causation and, even if it did, the effect was small enough to be almost zero.

But go ahead; blame porn. I’m sure you will anyway.

So, to summarize: the first study suggests that people who like porn might be different than those who do not, the second study found that watching less porn did not increase commitment (in direct contradiction to what Peg said about it), and the final study found that porn usage explains almost no unique variance in infidelity on its own, nor does it effect relationship satisfaction. So, when Peg suggests that “The following three studies reveal that it has a greater effect on relationships than those we usually discuss” and, ”Pornography is not as benign as you think, especially when it comes to romantic relationships“, and, “The fantasy alternative leads to real world cheating“, she doesn’t seem to have an empirical leg to stand on. Similarly, in the comments, when she writes “Who blamed cheating on porn? Neither the research nor I. The research indicates the watching porn elevates the odds of cheating for the reasons noted” (emphasis mine), she seems to either not be very careful about her words, or rather disingenuous about what point she seems to be making. I’m not saying there are absolutely no effects to porn, but the research she presents do not make a good case for any of them.

References: Ferguson, C. & Hartley, R. (2009). The pleasure is momentary…the expense damnable? The influence of pornography on rape and sexual assault. Aggression & Violent Behavior, 14, 323-329.

Gwinn, A., Lambert N., Fincham, F., Maner, J. (2013). Pornography, relationship alternatives, and intimate extradyadic behavior. Social Psychology & Personality Science, 4, 699-704.

Lambert, N., Negash, S., Stillman, T., Olmstead, S., & Fincham, F. (2012). A love that doesn’t last: Pornography consumption and weakened commitment to one’s romantic partner. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 31, 410-438.

Maddox, M., Rhoades, G., & Markman, H. (2011). Viewing sexually-explicit materials alone or together: Associations with relationship quality. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 40, 441-448.

Where Did I Leave My Arousal?

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Jack is your average, single man. Like many single men, Jack might be said to have an interest in getting laid. There are a number of women – and let’s just say they all happen to be called Jill – that he might attempt to pursue to achieve that goal. Now which of these Jills Jack will pursue depends a number of factors: first, is Jack looking for something more short-term and causal, or is he looking for a long-term relationship? Jack might want to consider whether or not any given Jill is currently single, known for promiscuity, or attractive, regardless of which type he’s looking for. If he’s looking for something more long-term, he might also want to know more about how intelligent and kind all these Jills are. He might also wish to assess how interested each of the Jills happens to be in him, given what he offers, as he might otherwise spend a lot of time pursuing sexual dead-ends. If he really wanted to make a good decision, though, Jack might also wish to take into account whether or not he happened to have been scared at the time he met a given Jill, as his fear level at the time is no doubt a useful piece of information.

“Almost getting murdered was much more of a turn-on than I expected”

OK; so maybe that last piece sounded a bit strange. After all, it doesn’t seem like Jack’s experience of fear tells him anything of value when it comes to trying to find a Jill: it doesn’t tell him anything about that Jill as a suitable mate or the probability that he will successfully hook up with her. In fact, by using his level of fear to an unrelated issue to try and make a mating decision, it seems Jack can only make a worse decision than if he did not use that piece of information (on the whole, anyway; his estimates of which Jill(s) are his best bet to pursue might not be entirely accurate, but they’re at least based on otherwise-relevant information). Jack might as well make his decision about who to pursue on the basis of whether he happened to be hungry when he met them or whether it was cloudy that day. However, what if Jack – or some part of Jack’s brain, more precisely – mistook the arousal he felt when he was afraid for sexual attraction?

There’s an idea floating around in some psychological circles that one can, essentially, misplace their arousal (perhaps in the way one misplaces their keys: you think you left them on the steps, but they’re actually in your coat pocket). What this means is that someone who might be aroused due to fear might end up thinking they’re actually rather attracted to someone else instead, because both of those things – fear and sexual attraction – involve physiological arousal (in the form of things like an increased heart rate); apparently, physiological arousal is pretty vague and confusing thing for our brains. One study purporting to show this effect is a classic paper covered in many psychological textbooks: Dutton & Aron (1974). In the most famous experiment of the study, 85 men were approached by a confederate (either a man or a woman) after crossing a fear-inducing bridge or a non-fear-inducing bridge. The men were given a quick survey and asked to write a short story about an ambiguous image of a woman, after which the confederate provides the men with their number if they want to call and discuss the study further. The idea here is that the men might call if they were interested in a date, rather than the study, which seems reasonable.

When the men’s stories were assess for sexual content, those who had crossed the fear-inducing bridge tended to write stories containing more sexual content (M = 2.47 out of 5) compared to when they crossed the non-fear-inducing bridge (M = 1.41). However, this was only the case when the confederate was female; when a male confederate was administering the questions, there was no difference between the two condition in terms of sexual content (M = 0.8 and 0.61, respectively). Similarly, the male subjects were more likely to call the confederate following the interaction when crossing the fear bridge (39%), relative to the non-fear bridge (9%). Again, this difference was only significant when the confederate was a female; male confederates were called at the same rate (8% and 4.5%, respectively).  Dutton & Aron (1974) suggest that these results were consistent with a type of “cognitive relabeling”, where the arousal from fear becomes reinterpreted by the subjects as sexual attraction. The authors further (seem to, anyway) suggest that this relabeling might be useful because anxiety and fear are unpleasant things to feel, so by labeling them as sexual attraction, subjects get to feel good things (like horny) instead.

“There we go; much better”

These explanations – that the mind mistakes fear arousal for sexual arousal, and that this is useful because it makes people feel good – are both theoretically deficient, and in big ways. To understand why with a single example, let’s consider a hiker out in the wood who encounters a bear. Now this bear is none-too-happy to see the hiker and begins to charge at him. The hiker will, undoubtedly, experience a great deal of physiological arousal. So, what would happen if the hiker mistook his fear for sexual interest? At best, he would end up achieving an unproductive copulation; at worse, he would end up inside the bear, but not in the way he might have hoped. The first point to this example, then, is that the appropriate responses to fear and sexual attraction are quite different: fear should motivate you to avoid, escape, or defend against a threat, whereas sexual attraction should motivate you to more towards the object of your desires instead. Any cognitive system that could easily blur the lines between these two (and other) types of arousal would appear to be at a disadvantage, relative to one that did not make such mistakes. We would end up running away from our dates into the arms of bears. Unproductive indeed.

The second, related point is that feeling good per se does not do anything useful. I might feel better if I never experienced hunger; I might also starve to death, despite being perfectly content about the situation. As such, “anxiety-reduction” is not even a plausible function for this ostensible cognitive relabeling. If anxiety reduction were a plausible function, one would be left wondering why people bothered to feel anxiety in the first place: it seems easier to not bother feeling anxiety than to have one mechanism that – unproductively – generates it, and a second which quashes it. What we need here, then, is an entirely different type of explanation to understand these results; one that doesn’t rely on biologically-implausible functions or rather sloppy cognitive design. To understand what that explanation might look like, we could consider the following comic:

“I will take a prostitute, though, if you happen to have one…”

The joke here, obviously, is that the refusal of a cigarette prior to execution by firing squad for health reasons is silly; it only makes sense to worry about one’s health in the future if there is a future to worry about. Accordingly, we might predict that people who face (or at least perceive) uncertainty about their future might be less willing to forgo current benefits for future rewards. That is, they should be more focused on achieving short-term rewards: they might be more likely to use drugs, less likely to save money, less likely to diet, more likely to seek the protection of others, and more likely to have affairs if the opportunity arose. They would do all this not because they “mistook” their arousal from fear about the future for sexual attraction, pleasant tastes, friendship, and fiscal irresponsibility, but rather because information about their likely future has shifted the balance of preexisting cost/benefit ratios in favor of certain alternatives. They know that the cigarette would be bad for their future health, but there’s less of a future to worry about, so they might as well get the benefits of smoking while they can.

Such an explanation is necessarily speculative and incomplete (owing to this being a blog and not a theory piece), but it would certainly begin to help explain why people in relationships don’t seem to “mistake” their arousal from riding a roller-coaster for heightened levels of stranger attractiveness the way single people do (Meston & Frohlich, 2003). Not only that, but those in relationships didn’t rate their partners as any more attractive either; in fact, if anything, the aroused roller-coaster riders in committed relationships rated their partners as slightly less attractive, which might represent a subtle shift in one’s weighing of an existing cost/benefit ratio (related to commitment, in this case) in the light of new information about the future. Then again, maybe people in relationships are just less likely to misplace their arousal than single folk happen to be…

References: Dutton, D. & Aron, A. (1974). Some evidence for heightened sexual attraction under conditions of high anxiety. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 30, 510-517.

Meston, C. & Frohlich, P. (2003). Love at first fright: Partner salience moderates roller-coaster-induced excitation transfer. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 32, 537-544.

Punch-Ups In Bars

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For those of you unfamiliar with the literature in economics, there is a type of experimental paradigm called the dictator game. In this game, there are two players, one of which is given a sum of money and told they can do whatever they want with it. They could keep it all for themselves, or they could divide it however they want between themselves and the other player. In general, you often find that many dictators – the ones in charge of dividing the money – give at least some of the wealth to the other player, with many people sharing it evenly. Some people have taken that finding to suggest there is something intrinsically altruistic about human behavior towards others, even strangers. There are, however, some concerns regarding what those results actually tell us. For instance, when you take the game out of the lab and into a more naturalistic setting, dictators don’t really tend to give other people any money at all, suggesting that most, or perhaps all, of the giving we see in these experiments is being driven by the demand characteristics of the experiment, rather than altruism per se. This should ring true to anyone who has even had a wallet full of money and not given some of it away to a stranger for no reason. Real life, it would seem, is quite unlike dictator games in many respects.

Dictators are not historically known for their benevolence.

Relatedly, around two years ago, Rob Kurzban wondered to what extent the role of ostensibly altruistic punishment had been overstated by laboratory experiments. Altruistic punishment refers to cases in which someone – the punisher – will incur costs themselves (typically by paying a sum of money in these experiments) to inflict costs on others (typically by deducting a sum of money from another person). What inspired this wondering was a video entitled “bike thief“, where a man tries to steal his own bike, using a crowbar, hacksaw, and power tool to cut the locks securing the bike to various objects. Though many people pass by the man as he tries to “steal” his bike, almost no one intervenes to try and determine what’s going on. This video appears to show the same pattern of results as a previous one also dealing with bike theft: in that video, third parties are somewhat more likely to intervene when a white man tries to steal the bike than in the first video one, but, in general, they don’t tend to involve themselves much, if at all (they are more likely to intervene if the ostensible thief is black or a woman. In the former case, people are more likely to confront him or call the police; in the latter case, some people intervened to help the woman, not to condemn her).

I have long found these videos fascinating, in that I feel they raise a lot of questions worthy of further consideration. The first of these is how do people decide when to become involved in the affairs of others? The act itself (sawing through a bike lock) is inherently ambiguous: is the person trying to steal the bike, or is the bike theirs but they have lost the key? Further, even if the person is stealing the bike, there are certain potential risks to confronting them about it that might be better avoided. The second question is, given someone has decided to become involved, what do they do? Do they help or hinder the thief? Indeed, when the “thief” suggests that they lost the key, the third parties passing by seem willing to help, even when the thief is black; similarly, even when the woman all but says she is stealing the bike, people (typically men) continue to help her out. When third parties opt instead to punish someone, do they do so themselves, or do they try to enlist others to do the punishing (like police and additional third parties)? These two questions get at the matter of how prevalent/important is third-party punishment outside of the lab, and under what circumstance might that importance be modified?

Though there is a lack of control one faces from moving outside of the lab into naturalistic field studies, the value of these studies for understanding punishment should be hard to overstate. As we saw initially with the dictator games, it is possible that all the altruistic behavior we observe in the lab is due to experimental demand characteristics; the same might be true of third-party moral condemnation. Admittedly, naturalistic observations of third-party involvement in conflicts is rare, likely owing to how difficult it is to get good observations of immoral acts that people might prefer you didn’t see (i.e. real bike thieves likely go through some pains to not be seen so others might be unlikely to become involved, unlike the actors in the videos). One particularly useful context for gathering these observations, then, is one in which the immoral act is unlikely to be planned and people’s inhibitions are reduced: in this case, when people are drinking at bars. As almost anyone who has been out to a bar can tell you, when people are drinking tempers can flare, people overstep boundaries, and conflicts break out. When that happens, there often tends to be a number of uninvolved third parties who might intervene, making it a fairly ideal context for studying the matter.

“No one else wears this shirt on my watch. No one”

A 2013 paper by Parks et al examined around 800 such incidents of what was deemed to be verbal or physical aggression to determine what kinds of conflicts arose, what types people tends to get involved in them, and how they became involved. As an initial note – and this will become relevant shortly – aggression was defined in a particular way that I find to be troublesome: specifically, there was physical aggression (like hitting or pushing), verbal aggression (like insults), and unwanted or persistent sexual overtures. The problem here is that though failed or crude attempts at flirting might be unwanted, they are by no means aggressive in the same sense that hitting someone is, so aggression might have been defined too broadly here. That said, the “aggressive” acts were coded for severity and intent, third-party intervention was coded as present or absent and, when present, whether it was an aggressive or non-aggressive intervention, and all interactions were coded for the sex of the parties and their level of intoxication.

The first question is obviously how often did third parties become involved in an aggressive encounter? The answer is around a third of the time on average, so third-party involvement in disputes is by no means an infrequent occurrence. Around 80% of the third parties that intervened were also male. Further, when third parties did become involved, they were about twice as likely to become involved in an non-aggressive fashion, relative to an aggressive one (so they were more often trying to diffuse the situation, rather than escalating it). Perhaps unsurprising in the fact that most disputes tended to be initiated by people who appeared to be relatively more intoxicated, and the aggressive third parties tended to be drunker than the non-aggressive ones. So, as is well known, being drunk tended to lead to people being more aggressive, whether it came to initiating conflicts or joining them. Third parties also tended to become more likely to get involved in disputes as the severity of the disputes rose: minor insults might not lead to much involvement on the parts of others, while throwing a punch or pulling out a knife will. This also meant that mutually-aggressive encounters – ones that are likely to escalate – tended to draw more third-party involvement that one-sided aggression.

Of note is that the degree of third party involvement did fluctuate markedly: the disputes that drew the most third-party involvement were the male-on-male mutually-aggressive encounters. In those cases, third parties got involved around 70% of the time; more than double the average involvement level. By contrast, male-on-female aggression drew the least amount of third-party intervention; only around 17% of the time. This is, at first, a very surprising finding, given that women tend to receive lighter sentences for similar crimes, and violence against women appears to be less condoned than violence against men. So why would women garner less support when men are aggressing against them? Well, likely because unwanted sexual attention falls under the umbrella term of aggression in this study. Because “aggressive” does not equate to “violent” in the paper, all of the mixed-sex instances of “aggression” need to be interpreted quite cautiously. The authors note as much, wondering if male-on-female aggression generated less third-party involvement because it was perceived as being less severe. I think that speculation is on the right track, but I would take it further: most of the mixed-sex “aggression” might have not been aggressive at all. By contrast, when it was female-female mutual aggression (less likely to be sexual in nature, likely involving a fight or the threat of one), third parties intervened around 60% of the time. In other words, people were perfectly happy to intervene on behalf of either sex, so long as the situation was deemed to be dangerous.

“It’s only one bottle; let’s not be too hasty to get involved yet…”

Another important caveat to this research is that the relationship of the third parties that became involved to the initial aggressors was not known. That is, there was no differentiation between a friend or a stranger coming to someone’s aid when aggression broke out. If I had to venture a guess – and this is probably a safe one – I would assume that most of the third parties likely had some kind of a relationship to the people in the initial dispute. I would also guess that non-violent involvement (diffusing the situation) would be more common when the third parties had some relationship to both of the people involved in the initial dispute, relative to when it was their friend against a stranger. I happen to feel that the relationship between the parties who become involved in these disputes has some rather large implications for understanding morality more generally but, since that data isn’t available, I won’t speculate too much more about it here. What I will say is that the focus on how strangers behave towards one another in the lab – as is standard for most research on moral condemnation – is likely missing a large part of how morality works, just like how experimental demand characteristics seemed to make people look more altruistic than they are in naturalistic settings. Getting friends together for research poses all sorts of logistically issues, but it is a valuable source of information to start considering.

 References: Parks, M., Osgood, D., Felson, R., Wells, S., & Graham, K., (2013). Third party involvement in barroom conflicts. Aggressive Behavior, 39, 257-268.

Classic Theory In Evolution: The Big Four Questions

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Explanations for things appear to be a truly vexing issue for people in many instances. Admittedly, that might sound a little strange; after all, we seem to explain things all the times without much apparent effort. We could consider a number of examples for explanations of behavior: people punch walls because they’re angry; people have sex because it feels good; people eat certain foods because they prefer those flavors, and so on. Explanations like these seem to come automatically to us; one might even say naturally. The trouble that people appear to have with explanations is with respect to the following issue: there are multiple, distinct, and complimentary ways of explaining the same thing. Now by that I don’t mean that, for instance, someone punched a wall because they were angry and drunk, but rather that there are qualitatively different ways to explain the same thing. For instance, if you ask me what an object is, I could tell you it’s a metallic box that appears to run on electricity and contains a heating element that can be adjusted via knobs; I could also tell you it’s a toaster. The former explanation tells you about various features of the object, while the latter tells you (roughly) what it functions to do (or, at least, what it was initially designed to do).

…And might have saved you that trip to the ER.

More precisely, the two issues people seem to run into when it comes to these different kinds of explanations is that they (a) don’t view these explanations as complimentary, but rather as mutually-exclusive, or (b) don’t realize that there are distinct classes of explanations that require different considerations from one another. It is on the second point that I want to focus today. Let’s start by considering the questions found in the first paragraph in what is perhaps their most basic form: “what causes that behavior?” or, alternatively, “what preceding events contributed to the occurrence of the behavior?” We could use as our example the man punching the wall to guide us through the different classes of explanations, of which there are 4 generally-agreed upon categories (Tinbergen, 1963).

The first two of these classes of explanations can be considered proximate – or immediate – causes of the behavior. The standard explanation many people might give for why the man punched the wall would be to reference the aforementioned anger. This would correspond to Tinbergen’s (1963) category of causation which, roughly, can be captured by considerations of how the cognitive systems which are responsible for generating the emotional outputs of anger and corresponding wall-punching work on a mechanical level: what inputs do they use, how are these inputs operated upon to generate outputs, what outputs are generated, what structures in the brain become activated, and so on. It is on this proximate level of causation that most psychological research focuses, and with good reason: the hypothesized proximate causes for behaviors are generally the most open to direct observation. Now that’s certainly not to say that they are easy to observe and distinguish in practice (as we need to determine what cognitive or behavioral units we’re talking about, and how they might be distinct from others), but the potential is there.

The second type of explanation one might offer is also a proximate-type of explanation: an ontological explanation. Ontology refers to changes to the underlying proximate mechanisms that takes place during the course of development, growth, and aging of an organism. Tinbergen (1963) is explicit in what this does not refer to: behavioral changes that correspond to environmental changes. For instance, a predator might evidence feeding behavior in the presence of prey, but not evidence that behavior in absence of prey. This is not good evidence that anything has changed in the underlying mechanisms that generate the behavior in question; it’s more likely that they exist in the form they did moments prior, but now have been provided with novel inputs. More specifically, then, ontology refers, roughly, to considerations of what internal or external inputs are responsible for shaping the underlying mechanisms as they develop (i.e. how is the mechanism shaped as you grow from a single cell into an adult organism). For instance, if you raise certain organisms in total darkness, parts of their eyes may fail to process visual information later in life; light, then, is a necessary developmental input for portions of the visual system. To continue on with the wall-punching example, ontological explanations for why the man punched the wall would reference what inputs are responsible for the development of the underlying mechanisms that would produce the eventual behavior.

Like their father’s fear of commitment…

The next two classes of explanations refer to ultimate – or distal – causal explanations. The first of these is what Tinbergen calls evolution, though it could be more accurately referred to as a phylogenetic explanation. Species tend to resemble each other to varying degrees because of shared ancestry. Accordingly, the presence of certain traits and mechanisms can be explained by homology (common descent). The more recently two species diverged from one another in their evolutionary history, the more traits we might expect the two to share in common. In other words, all the great apes might have eyes because they all share a common ancestor who had eyes, rather than because they all independently evolved the trait. Continuing on with our example, the act of wall-punching might be explained phylogenetically by noting that the cognitive mechanisms we possess related to, say, aggression, are to some degree shared with a variety of species.

Finally, this brings us to my personal favorite: survival value. Survival value explanations for traits involve (necessarily-speculative, but perfectly testable) considerations about what evolutionary function a given trait might have (i.e. what reproductively-relevant problem, if any, is “solved” by the mechanism in question). Considerations of function help inform some of the “why” questions of the proximate levels, such as “why are these particular inputs used by the mechanism?”, “why do these mechanisms generate the output they do?”, or “why does this trait develop in the manner that it does?”. To return to the punching example, we might say that the man punched the wall because aggressive responses to particular frustrations might have solved some adaptive problem (like convincing others to give you a needed resource rather than face the costs of your aggression). Considerations of function also manage to inform the evolution, or phylogeny, level, allowing us to answer questions along the lines of, “why was this trait maintained in certain species but not others?”. As another for instance, even if cave-dwelling and non-cave dwelling species share a common ancestor that had working eyes, that’s no guarantee that functional eyes will persist in both populations. Homology might explain why the cave-dweller develops non-functional eyes, but it would not itself explain why those eyes don’t work. Similarly, noting that people punch walls when they are angry alone does not explain why we do so.

All four types of explanations answer the question “what causes this behavior?”, but in distinct ways. This distinction between questions of function and questions of causation, ontogeny, and phylogeny, for instance, can be summed up quite well by a quote from Tinbergen (1963):

No physiologist applying the term “eye” to a vertebrate lens eye as well as a compound Arthropod eye is in danger of assuming that the mechanism of the two is the same; he just knows that the word “eye” characterizes achievement, and nothing more.

Using the word “eye” to refer to a functional outcome of a mechanism (processing particular classes of light-related information) allows us to speak of the “eyes” of different species, despite them making use of different proximate mechanisms and cues, developing in unique fashions over the span of an organism’s life, and having distinct evolutionary histories. If the functional level of analysis was not distinct, in some sense, from analyzes concerning development, proximate functioning, and evolutionary history, then we would not be able to even discuss these different types of “eyes” as being types of the same underlying thing; we would fail to recognize a rather useful similarity.

“I’m going to need about 10,000 contact lens”

To get a complete (for lack of a better word) understanding of a trait, all four of these questions need to be considered jointly. Thankfully, each level of analysis can, in some ways, help inform the other levels: understanding the ultimate function of a trait can help inform research into how that trait functions proximately; homologous traits might well serve similar functions in different species; what variables a trait is sensitive towards during development might inform us as to its function, and so on. That said, each of these levels of analysis remains distinct, and one can potentially speculate about the function of a trait without knowing much about how it develops, just as one could research the proximate mechanisms of a trait without knowing much about its evolutionary history.

Unfortunately, there has been and, sadly, continues to be, some hostility and misunderstandings with respect to certain levels of analyzes. Tinbergen (1963) had this to say:

It was a reaction against the habit of making uncritical guesses about the survival value, the function, of life processes and structures. This reaction, of course healthy in itself, did not (as one might expect) result in an attempt to improve methods of studying survival value; rather it deteriorated into lack of interest in the problem – one of the most deplorable things that can happen in science. Worse, it even developed into an attitude of intolerance: even wondering about survival value was consider unscientific

That these same kinds of criticisms continue to exist over 50 years later (and they weren’t novel when Tinbergen was writing either) might suggest that some deeper, psychological issue exists surrounding our understanding of explanations. Ironically enough, the proximate functioning of the mechanisms that generate these criticisms might even give us some insight into their ultimate function. Then again, we don’t want to just end up telling stories and making assumptions about why traits work, do we?

References: Tinbergen, N. (1963). On aims and methods of Ethology. Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie, 20, 410-433.

Should Evolutionary Psychology Be A History Course?

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Imagine for a moment that you happen to live in a Dr. Seuss-style world. Having just graduated from your local institute of educational hobnobbery, you find yourself hired into a lucrative new position: you’re a whatsitdoer. The job description is self-explanatory: it’s your job to examine a series of curious-looking objects and figure out what it is they were designed to do; what their function happens to be. On your first day at work, a shiny metal box comes down the conveyer belt. You begin to examine the object for evidence of special design. That is, does the object appear to be improbably well-designed for a solving various aspects of a particular task with efficiency? You note that the black cord ending in metal prongs running out of the box might suggest that it runs on electricity, the two slots at the top of the box appear to be shaped appropriately so as it fit bread rather well, and there appears to be a heating apparatus within the box. You test each design feature according: the device only functions when plugged it, bread does indeed fit well in the box, and is evenly toasted by the heating element. Importantly, larger items don’t seem to fit in well, smaller items fall in, becoming unreachable, and non-bread items, like CDs tend to melt or catch fire. In other words, the function of this tool appears as if it were designed to use a relatively narrow set of inputs to produce a useful output – toast.

Alternative hypothesis 34: Bath warmer

When you report the results of your tests to your boss, however, he’s not at all pleased with you analysis: “How can you possibly say that this object is designed to make toast when you haven’t recreated the steps of its manufacturing process? Until you have examined the history of how this object has come to be, how the material it is made out of was gathered and shaped, as well as what earlier prototypes of the model might have looked like extending back thousands of years, I can’t accept your suggestion, as you haven’t tested your functional explanation at all!” Now this all strikes you as very strange: you haven’t made any claims about how the object was developed or what earlier versions looked like; you made a claim about how the contemporary object you were given likely functions. As such, understanding the history of the object, while perhaps a neat piece of information that might inform later research on function, is not by any means a requirement for understanding an object’s function. In other words, you should be able to persuade your boss that the toaster is pretty good at making toast without having to give him a complete history of the thing.

Sure; it’s possible that the toaster-like object actually wasn’t designed to make toast at all; toast just happens to be a pretty convenient byproduct of another function it was designed to carry out. However, if we were deriving predictions about what that alternative function was, we still shouldn’t need the history lesson to do that. It’s not that the history information would be necessarily useless: for instance, if you knew the device existed before bread was a thing, then toasting bread certainly couldn’t have been its initial function (though it may well have been co-opted for that function when bread – or pop tarts – became a thing). However, if toasters are well-suited for other functions, you should be able to demonstrate those other functions with design evidence.  History is useful insomuch as it helps inform us about what design evidence to look for, certainly, but does not itself inform us as to functionality.

That said, there have been suggestions that phylogenetic analyzes (examinations of the branching of evolutionary tree) can help inform us as to whether a trait is functional (i.e. an adaptation) or not. Specifically, Fraley, Brumbaugh, & Marks (2005) wrote that, “In order to evaluate the adaptive nature of the relationship between traits, it is necessary to account for phylogenetic relationships among species” (p.733, emphasis mine). The authors go on to note, correctly, that species may be similar to one another because of a shared evolutionary history: rather than all the ape species evolving eyes independently, a common ancestor to all of them might well have had eyes and, because we share that ancestor, we all have eyes as well. Now, as you should be careful to note, this is a claim about the evolutionary history of the trait: whether it was independently evolved multiple times in different lineages, or whether it was evolved once and then maintained into subsequent generations. You should note, however, that this is not a functional claim: it doesn’t tell us what eyes do, what inputs they use, what outputs they generate, and so on. Some examples should make this distinction quite clear.

Figure 1: This ugly bird

Let’s consider, as an example, two species of birds: the ostrich and any variety of parrot you’d prefer. In the interests of full disclosure, I don’t know how recently the two species shared a common ancestor, but at some point we can say they did. Further, for the sake of argument, let’s say that this common ancestor between ostriches and parrots had feathers. The fact that both ostriches and parrots have feathers, then, can be said to be the result of homology (i.e. shared ancestry). However, this does not tell us anything about what the function(s) of these feathers are in their respective species, nor what selective pressures are responsible for their initial appear or maintenance across time. For instance, parrots are capable of flight while ostriches are not. We might expect that parrot feathers show some adaptations for that function, whereas such adaptive designs might have been degraded or lost entirely in ostriches (presuming the common ancestor flew, that is). However, the feathers might also serve other, identical functions in both species: perhaps feathers are also used to keep both species warm, or are advertised during sexual displays. Whatever the respective functions (or lack thereof) of these feathers in different species, we are unable to deduce that function from a phylogenetic analysis alone. What we need are considerations of what adaptive tasks the feathers might serve, and what design evidence we might expect to find because of that.

Fraley et al (2005) go on to suggest that if two traits repeatedly evolve together across species, these, “…correlation[s] between the traits…strongly suggests a functional relationship” (p. 734, emphasis mine). Again, the claim being made is that we can go from history – the two traits tend to show up together – to function. On top of the problems outlined above, such a statement runs into another large obstacle: non-functional or maladaptive byproducts of traits should be expected to correlate as well as adaptive ones. Let’s start with a non-functional example: imagine that placental mammals evolved multiple times over the course of history. If you were examining many different species, you’d probably see a good correlation between the evolution of placentas and presence of belly-buttons. However, the correlation between these two traits doesn’t tell you anything at all about the function (or lack thereof) of either placentas or belly-buttons. In another case, you might notice that there’s a pretty decent correlation between animals with a taste for sugar and the development of cavities in their teeth, but this in no way implies that a preference for sugar has any functional relationship with cavities; bacteria dissolving your teeth generally has poor fitness outcomes, and wouldn’t be selected for.

One final example might help make the point crystal clear: human male investment in children. Let’s say you have two males displaying the same behavior: buying food for their child. That’s awfully charitable of them. However, in one case, the man is the genetic father of the child, whereas the other male is only the child’s stepfather. These behaviors, while ostensible similar, might actually be serving distinct functions. In the case of the genetic father, the investment in that child might involve mechanisms designed for kin-directed altruism (i.e. investing in the child because the child carries some of his genes) and/or mechanisms designed for mating effort (i.e. investing in the child as a means of increasing sexual access to the mother). In contrast, we might expect the stepfather to be investing for the latter reason, but not the former. In other words, we have the same behavior – investing in children – being driven by two very different functional mechanisms. The predictions that can be drawn from these alternative functions are testable even without any reference at all to history or phylogeny: as it turns out, genetic fathers living with the mother invest more than genetic fathers not living with the mother, but genetic fathers continue to invest in offspring even lacking the relationship. On the other hand, stepfathers will invest in children when living with the mother, but when the relationship ends their investment tends to all but dry up entirely. Further, when both are living with the mother, genetic fathers invest more than stepfathers (Anderson, Kaplan, & Lancaster, 1999). This evidence is consistent with a role for both mechanisms designed for investing in children for inclusive fitness and mating reasons. Despite the surface level similarities, then, the investment of these two males might actually be being driven by different functional considerations.

And we didn’t even need a fossil record to figure that out.

So, when it comes to testing claims of biological function, there is no necessity for information about phylogeny: you don’t need to know where traits originated or what earlier versions of the trait were like in order to test competing hypotheses. That’s not to say that such information might not be useful: if you didn’t know about bread, you might have a more difficult time understanding some of the toaster’s design, just as if you didn’t know about toasters you might be hard pressed to explain the shape of pop-tarts (or their name, for that matter). Similarly, correlations between traits do not “strongly suggest” any evidence of a functional relationship either; some correlations might be consistent with a particular functional relationship, sure, but the correlation itself tells you comparatively little when compared with evidence of function (just like correlations between ice cream sales and murder do not strongly suggest any causal relationship, though an experiment examining whether feeding people ice cream made them more violent might). Claims about function should be kept distinct from claims about history. Why the two seem to get conflated from time to time is certainly an interesting matter.

References: Anderson, K., Kaplan, H., & Lancaster, J. (1999). Parental care by genetic fathers and stepfathers I: Reports from Albuquerque men. Evolution and Human Behavior, 20, 405-431.

Fraley, R., Brumbaugh, C., & Marks, M. (2005). The evolution and function of adult attachment: A comparative and phylogenetic analysis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 89, 731-746.

In The World Of The Blind, The Woman With A Low WHR Is Queen

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If you happen to have memories of watching TV in the 90s, chances are you might remember the old advertisements they used to run for the Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal. The general premise of the ads followed the same formula: “Person X is really good at seeing Y, but can they see why kids love the taste of Cinnamon Toast Crunch?”. Inevitably, the answer was always “no”, as adults are apparently so square that they couldn’t wrap their minds around the idea that children happen to like sugar. Difficult concept, I know. Now, obviously, adults aren’t nearly so clueless in reality. In fact, as you’re about to see, even adults who are really rather poor at seeing things can still “see”, so to speak, why men tend to find certain features in women attractive.

Sauron majored in sociology, so he guessed “cultural conditioning”

The first paper up for consideration is a 2010 piece by Karremans et al. The researchers begin by noting that men appear to demonstrate a preference for women with relatively-low waist-to-hip ratios (WHRs). Women with low WHRs tend to have figures that resemble the classic hourglass shape. Low WHRs are thought to be found attractive by men because they are cues to a woman’s fertility status: specifically, women with lower WHRs – around a 0.7 – tend to be more fertile than their more tubular-shaped peers. That said, this preference – just like any of our preferences – does not magically appear in our minds; every preference needs to develop over our lives, and development requires particular input conditions. If these developmental input conditions aren’t met, then the preference should not be expected to form. Simple enough. The question of interest, then, is what precisely these conditions are; what factors are responsible for men finding low WHRs attractive?

One ostensibly obvious condition for the development of a preference for low WHRs might be visual input. After all, if men couldn’t see women’s WHRs – and all those unrealistic expectations of female body type set by the nefarious media – it might seem awfully difficult to develop a taste for them. This poses something of an empirical hurdle to test, as most men have the ability to see, Thankfully for psychological research – though not so thankfully for the subjects of that research – some men, for whatever reasons, happen to have been born blind. If visual input was a key condition for the development of preferences for low WHRs in women, then these blind men should not be expected to show it. While large samples of congenitally blind men are not the easiest to come by, Karremans et al (2010) managed to recruit around 20 of them.

These blind men were presented with two female mannequins wearing tight-fitting dresses. One of these mannequins had a WHR of 0.7 – around what most people rate as the most attractive – and the other had a slightly-higher 0.84. The blind men were asked to feel and rate each mannequins on attractiveness from 1 to 10. Additionally, the researchers recruited about 40 sighted men to complete the task as well: 20 completing it while blindfolded and 20 without the blindfold. Of note is that all data collection was carried out in a van (read: “mobile laboratory room”) because sometimes psychological research is just fun like that.

“How about coming into my van to feel my mannequins?”

The first set of results to consider come from the sighted men, who completed the task with the full use of their eyes: they gave the mannequin with the low WHR a rating of around an 8, whereas the mannequin with the higher WHR received only around a 6.5, as one might expect. In the blindfold condition, this difference was reduced somewhat (with ratings of 7.5 and around 7, respectively), suggesting that visual input might play some role in determining this preference. However, visual input was clearly not necessary: the blind men rated the low WHR mannequin at around a 7, but the high WHR mannequin at about a 6. In the words of the fine people over at Cinnamon Toast Crunch: “even blind men who can’t see much of anything can still see why men love the figures of women with low WHRs”.

Further evidence from earlier research points towards a similar conclusion (that these preferences are unlikely to be the result of portrayals of women in the media). A paper by Singh (1993) analyzed a trove of data on the female bodies that appeared in Playboy as centerfolds (from 1955-1965 and 1976-1990) and that won Miss America pageants (1923-1987). One might imagine that depictions of women in the media or found to be attractive might change somewhat over six decades if the type of women being portrayed were favored for some arbitrary set of reasons. Indeed, there was one noticeable trend: the centerfolds and pageant winners tended to be getting a little bit skinnier over that time period. Despite these changes in overall BMI, however, the WHR of the groups didn’t vary. Both grounds hovered around a consistent 0.7. Presumably, if blind men were consuming pornography, they would prefer the women depicted in Playboy just as much as non-blind men do.

“We’ll be needing more “databases” for the mobile laboratory room…”

Given the correlation between WHR and fertility, this consistency in men’s preferences should be expected. That’s not to say, of course, that these preferences for low WHR aren’t modifiable. As I mentioned before, every preference needs to develop, and to the extent that certain modifications of that preference would be adaptive in different contexts, we should expect it to fluctuate accordingly. Now that matter of precisely what input conditions are responsible for the development of this preference remain shrouded: while visual inputs don’t seem to be necessary, the matter of which cues are – as well as why they are – are questions that have yet to be answered. For what it’s worth, I would recommend turning research away from the idea that the media is responsible for just about everything, but that’s just me.

References: Karremans, J., Frankenhuis, W., & Arons S. (2010). Blind men prefer a low waist-to-hip ratio. Evolution and Human Behavior, 31, 182-186.

Singh, D. (1993). Adaptive significance of female physical attractiveness: Role of waist to hip ratio. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65, 293-307.

The Best Mate Money Can Buy

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There’s a proud tradition in psychological research that involves asking people about how much they value this thing or that one, be it in a supermarket or, for our present purposes, in a sexual partner. Now there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with doing this kind of research, but while there are certain benefits to it, the method does have its shortcomings. One easy way to grasp a potential issue with this methodology is to consider the dating website Okcupid.com. When users create a profile on this site, they are given a standard list of questions to answer in order to tell other people about themselves. Some of these questions deal with matters like, “What are six things you couldn’t do without?” or “what are you looking for in partner?”. The typical sorts of answers you might find to questions like these are highlighted in a video I really like called “The Truth About Being Single“:

“All these people keep interrupting my loneliness!”

The problem with questions like these is that – when they are posed in isolation – their interpretation can get a bit difficult; they often seem to blur the lines between what people require and what they just want. More precisely, the ratings people give to various items or traits in terms of their importance might not accurately capture their degree of actual importance. A quick example concerns cell phones and oxygen. If you were to ask people on Okcupid about five things they couldn’t do without on a day-to-day basis, more people would probably list their phones than the air they breathe. They would also tell you that, in any given year, they likely spend much more money on cell phones than air. Despite this, air is clearly the more important item, as cell phones stop being useful when the owner has long since asphyxiated (even if the cell phone would allow you to go out playing whatever bird-themed game is currently trending).

Perhaps that all seems very mundane, though: “Yes, of course,” you might say, “air is more important than iPhones, but putting ‘I need air’ on your dating profile or asking people how important is the air they breathe on a survey doesn’t tell you much about the person, whereas iPhone ownership makes you a more attractive, cool, and intelligent individual”. While it’s true that “people rate breathing as very important” will probably not land you any good publications or hot dates, when we start thinking about the relative importance of the various traits people look for in a partner, we can end up finding out some pretty interesting things. Specifically, we can begin to uncover what each sex views as necessities and what they view as luxuries in potential partners. The key to this method involves constraining the mate choices people can make: when people can’t have it all, what they opt to have first (i.e. people want air before iPhones if they don’t have either) tells us – to some extent – where their priorities lie.

Enter a paper by Li et al (2002). The authors note that previous studies on mating and partner selection have found sex differences in the importance placed on certain characteristics: men tend to value physical attractiveness in a partner more than women, and women tend to value financial prospects more than men. However, the ratings of these characteristics are not often found to be of paramount importance, relative to ratings of other characteristics like kindness, creativity, or a sense of humor (on which the sexes tend to agree). But perhaps the method used to derive those ratings is missing part of the larger picture, as it was in our air/iPhone example. Without asking people to make tradeoffs between these characteristics, researchers might be, as Li et al put it, “[putting the participants in] the position of someone answering a question about how to spend imaginary lottery winnings”. When people have the ability to buy anything, they will spend proportionately more money on luxuries, relative to necessities. Similarly, when people are asked about what they want in a mate, they might play up the importance of luxuries, rather than necessities if they are just thinking about the traits in general terms.

“I’m spending it all on cans of beans!”

What Li et al (2002) did in the first experiment, then, was to provide 78 participants with a list of 10 characteristics that are often rated as important in a long-term partner. The subjects were told to, essentially, Frankenstein themselves a marriage partner from that list. Their potential partners would start out in the bottom percentile for each of those traits. What this means is that, if we consider the trait of kindness, their partner would be less kind than everyone else in the population. However, people could raise the percentile score of their partner in any domain by 10% by spending a point from their “mating budget” (so if one point was invested in kindness, their partner would now be less kind than 90% of people; if two points were spent, the partner is now less kind than 80% of people, and so on). The twist is that people were only given a limited budget. With 10 traits and 10 percentiles per trait, people would need 100 points to make a partner high in everything. The first budget people started with was 20 points, which requires some tough calls to be made.

So what do people look for in a partner first? That depends, in part, on whether you’re a man or a woman. Women tended to spend the most – about 20% of their initial budget (or 4 points) – on intelligence; men spent comparably in that domain as well, with about 16% of their budget going towards brains. The next thing women tended to buy was good financial prospects, spending another 17% beefing up their partner’s yearly income. Men, on the other hand, seemed relatively unconcerned with their partner’s salary, spending only 3% of their initial budget on a woman’s income. What men seemed much more interested in was getting physical attractiveness, spending about 21% of their initial budget there; about twice what the women spent. The most vital characteristics in a long-term partner, then, seemed to be intelligence and money for women, and attractiveness and intelligence for men, in that order.

However, as people’s mating budget was increased, from 20 points to 60 points, these sex differences disappeared. Both men and women began to spend comparably as their budgets were increased and tradeoffs became less pressing. In other words, once people had the necessities for a relationship, they bought the same kinds of luxuries. These results were replicated in a slightly-modified second study using 178 undergraduates and five traits instead of ten. In the final study, participants were given a number of potential dates to screen for acceptability. These mates were said to be have been rated along the previous 5 characteristics in a high/medium/low fashion. Participants could reveal the hidden ratings of the potential dates for free, but were asked to reveal as few as possible in order to make a decision. As one might expect, men tended to reveal how physically attractive the potential mate was first more than any other trait (43% of the time, relative to women’s 16%), whereas women tended to first reveal how much social status the men had (35% of the time, relative to men’s 16%). Men seem to value good looks and women tend to value access to resources. Stereotype accuracy confirmed.

A now onto the next research project…

This is the reason I liked the initial video so much. The first portion of the video reflects the typical sentiments that people often express when it comes to what they want in a partner (“I just want someone [who gets me/to spend time with/ to sleep next to/ etc]“). These are, however, often expressions of luxuries, rather than necessities. Much like the air we breathe, the presence of the necessities in a potential mate are, more or less, taken for granted – at least until they’re absent, that is. So while traits like “creativity” might make an already-attractive partner more attractive, being incredibly creative will likely suddenly count for quite a bit less if you’re poor and/or unattractive, depending on who you’re trying to impress. I’ll leave the final word on the matter to one of my favorite comedians, John Mulaney, as I think he expresses the point well: “Sometimes I’ll be talking to someone and I’ll be like, “yeah, I’ve been really lonely lately”, and they’ll be like, “well we should hang out!” and I’m like, “no; that’s not what I meant”.

References: Li, N., Bailey, J., Kenrick, D., & Linsenmeier, J. (2002). The necessities and luxuries of mate preferences: Testing the tradeoffs. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82, 947-955.

When Are Equivalent Acts Not Equal?

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There’s been an ongoing debating in the philosophical literature on morality for some time. That debate focuses on whether the morality of an act should be determined on the basis of either (a) the act’s outcome, in terms of its net effects on people’s welfare, or (b) whether the morality of an act is determined by…something else; intuitions, feelings, or what have you (i.e. “Incest is just wrong, even if nothing but good were to come of it”). These stances can be called the consequentialist and nonconsequentialist stances, respectively, and it’s at topic I’ve touched upon before. When I touched on the issue, I had this to say:

There are more ways of being consequentialist than with respect to the total amount of welfare increase. It would be beneficial to turn our eye towards considering strategic welfare consequences that likely to accrue to actors, second parties, and third parties as a result of these behaviors.

In other words, moral judgments might focus not only on the acts per se (the nonconsequentalist aspects) or their net welfare outcomes (the consequences), but also on the distribution of those consequences. Well, I’m happy to report that some very new, very cool research speaks to that issue and appears to confirms my intuition. I happen to know the authors of this paper personally and let me tell you this: the only thing about the authors that are more noteworthy than their good looks and charm is how humble one of them happens to be.

Guess which of us is the humble one?

The research (Marczyk & Marks, in press) was examining responses to the classic trolley dilemma and a variant of it. For those not well-versed in the trolley dilemma, here’s the setup: there’s an out-of-control train heading towards five hikers who cannot get out of the way in time. If the train continues on it’s part, then all five wills surely die. However, there’s a lever which can be pulled to redirect the train onto a side track where a single hiker is stuck. If the lever is pulled, the five will live, but the one will die (pictured here). Typically, when asked whether it would be acceptable for someone to pull the switch, the majority of people will say that it is. However, in past research examining the issue, the person pulling the switch has been a third party; that is, the puller was not directly involved in the situation, and didn’t stand to personally benefit or suffer because of the decision. But what would happen if the person pulling the switch was one of the hikers on one of the tracks; either on the side track (self-sacrifice) or the main track (self-saving)? Would it make a difference in terms of people’s moral judgments?

Well, the nonconsequentist account would say, “no; it shouldn’t matter”, because the behavior itself (redirecting a train onto a side track where it will kill one) remains constant; the welfare-maximizing consequentialist account would also say, “no; it shouldn’t matter”, because the welfare calculations haven’t changed (five live; one dies). However, this is not what we observe. When asked about how immoral it was for the puller to redirect the train, ratings were lowest in the self-sacrifice condition (M = 1.40/1.16 on a 1 to 5 scale in international and US samples, respectively), in the middle for the standard third-party context (M = 2.02/1.95), and highest in the self-saving condition (M = 2.52/2.10). In terms of whether or not it was morally acceptable to redirect the train, similar judgments cropped up: the percentage of US participants who said it was acceptable dropped as self-interested reasons began to enter into the question (the international sample wasn’t asked this question). In the self-sacrifice condition, these judgments of acceptability were highest (98%), followed by the third-party condition (84%), with the self-saving condition being the lowest (77%).

Participants also viewed the intentions of the pullers to be different, contingent on their location in this dilemma: specifically, the more one could benefit him or herself by pulling, the more people assumed that was the motivation for doing so (as compared with the puller’s motivations to help others: the more they could help themself, the less they were viewed as intending to help others). Now that might seem unsurprising: “of course people should be motivated to help themselves”, you might say. However, nothing in the dilemma itself spoke directly to the puller’s intentions. For instance, we could consider the case where a puller just happens to be saving their own life by redirecting the train away from others. From that act alone, we learn nothing about whether or not they would sacrifice their own life to save the lives of others. That is, one’s position in the self-beneficial context might simply be incidental; their primary motivation might have been to save the largest number of lives, and that just so happens to mean saving their own in the process. However, this was not the conclusion people seemed to be drawing.

*Side effects of saving yourself include increased moral condemnation.

Next, we examined a variant of the trolley dilemma that contained three tracks: again, there were five people on the main track and one person on each side track. As before, we varied who was pulling the switch: either the hiker on the main track (self-saving) or the hiker on the side track. However, we now varied what the options of the hiker on the side track were: specifically, he could direct the train away from the five on the main track, but either send the train towards or away from himself (the self-sacrifice and other-killing conditions, respectively). The intentions of the hiker on the side track, now, should have been disambiguated to some degree: if he intended to save the lives of others with no regard for his own, he would send the train towards himself; if he intended to save the lives of the hikers on the main track while not harming himself, he would send the train towards another individual. The intentions of the hiker on the main track, by contrast, should be just as ambiguous as before; we shouldn’t know whether that hiker would or would not sacrifice himself, given the chance.

What is particularly interesting about the results from this experiment is how closely the ratings of the self-saving and other-killing actors matched up. Whether in terms of how immoral it was to direct the train, whether the puller should be punished, how much they should be punished, or how much they intended to help themselves and others, ratings were similar across the board in both US and international samples. Even more curious is that the self-saving puller – the one whose intentions should be the most ambiguous – was typically rated as behaving more immorally and self-interestedly – not less – though this difference wasn’t often significant. Being in a position to benefit yourself from acting in this context seems to do people no favors in terms of escaping moral condemnation, even if alternative courses of actions aren’t available and the act is morally acceptable otherwise.

One final very interesting result of this experiment concerned the responses participants gave to the open-ended questions, “How many people [died/lived] because the lever was pulled?” On a factual level, these answers should be “1″ and “5″ respectively. However, our participants had a somewhat different sense of things. In the self-saving condition, 35% of the international sample and 12% of the US sample suggest that only 4 people were saved (in the other-killing condition, these percentages were 1% and 9%, and in the self-sacrifice condition they were 1.9% and 0%, respectively). Other people said 6 lives had been saved: 23% and 50% in the self-sacrifice condition, 1.7% and 36% in the self-saving condition, and 13% and 31% in the (international and US respectively). Finally, a minority of participants suggested that 0 people died because the train was redirected (13% and 11%), and these responses were almost exclusively found in the self-sacrifice conditions. These results suggest that our participants were treating the welfare of the puller in a distinct manner from the welfare of others in the dilemma. The consequences of acting, it would seem, were not judged to be equivalent across scenarios, even though the same number of people actually lived and died in each.

“Thanks to the guy who was hit by the train, no one had to die!”

In sum, the experiments seemed to demonstrate that these questions of morality are not to be limited to considerations of just actions and net consequences: to whom those consequences accrue seems to matter as well. Phrased more simply, in terms of moral judgments, the identity of actors seems to matter: my benefiting myself at someone else’s expense seems to have much different moral feel than someone else benefiting me by doing exactly the same thing. Additionally, the inferences we draw about why people did what they did – what their intentions were – appear to be strongly affected by whether that person is perceived to have benefited as a result of their actions. Importantly, this appears to be true regardless of whether that person even had any alternative courses of action available to them. That latter finding is particularly noteworthy, as it might imply that moral judgments are, at least occasionally, driving judgments of intentions, rather than the typically-assumed reverse (that intentions determine moral judgments). Now if only there was a humble and certainly not self-promoting psychologist who would propose some theory for figuring out how and why the identity of actors and victims tends to matter…

References: Marczyk, J. & Marks, M. (in press). Does it matter who pulls the switch? Perceptions of intentions in the trolley dilemma. Evolution and Human Behavior.