Is Makeup A Valid Cue Of Sociosexuality?

Nothing like a good makeup exam

Being wrong is costly. If I think you’re aggressive when you’re not, I will behave inappropriately around you and incur costs I need not face. If I think you can help me when you can’t, I will hinder achieving my goals and give up on my search to find valuable assistance. Nevertheless, people are wrong constantly. Being wrong itself isn’t that unusual, as it takes the proper cognitive faculties, time, and energy to be right. The world is just a messy place, and there are opportunity costs to gathering, scrutinizing, and processing information, as well as diminishing returns on that search. Being wrong is costly, but so is being right, and those costs need to be balanced against each other, given limited resources. What is unusual is when people are systematically wrong about something; when they’re wrong in the same particular direction. If, say, 90% of people believe something incorrectly in the same way, that’s certainly a strange state of affairs that requires special kinds of explanations.

As such, if you believe people are systematically wrong about something, there are two things you should probably do: (1) earnestly assess whether your belief about them being wrong is accurate – since it’s often more likely you’re wrong than everyone else is – and then, if they actually are wrong, (2) try to furnish the proper explanation for that state of affairs and test it.

Putting that in an example I’ve discussed before, some literature claims that men over-perceive women’s sexual interest (here). In other words, the belief here is that many men are systematically wrong in the same way; they’re making the same error. One special explanation provided for this was that men over-perceiving sexual interest would lead them to approach more women (they otherwise wouldn’t) and ultimately get more mating opportunities as a result. So men are wrong because being wrong brings more benefits than costs. There are some complications with that explanation, however. First, why would we expect men to not perceive women’s interests more accurately (she’s not interested in me) but approach them anyway (the odds are low, but I might as well go for it)? That would lead to the same end point (approaching lots of women) without the inaccuracy that might have other consequences (like failing to pursue a woman who’s actually interested because you mistakenly believe a different woman is interested when she isn’t). The special explanation also falls apart when you consider that when you ask women about other women’s sexual interest, you get the same result as the men. So either men and women are over-perceiving women’s sexual interest, or perhaps they aren’t wrong. Perhaps individual women are under-reporting their own interest for some social reasons. Maybe the women’s self-reports are inaccurate (consciously or not), rather than everyone else being wrong about them. The explanation that one person is wrong, rather than everyone else is, feels more plausible.

Speaking of women’s sexual interest and people being wrong, let’s talk about a new paper touting the idea that everyone is wrong about women’s makeup usage. Specifically, lots of people seem to be using makeup usage as a cue to a woman’s short-term sexual interest, and the researchers believe they’re all wrong to do so. That makeup is an invalid cue of sociosexuality.

Aren’t they all…

This was highlighted in three studies, which I’ll cover quickly. In the first, 69 women were photographed with and without their day-to-day makeup. Raters – 182 of them – judged those pictures in terms of (1) how much makeup they felt the women were wearing, (2) how attractive the faces were, and (3) how much they felt the women pictured would be comfortable with and enjoy having casual sex with different partners; a measure of sociosexuality. The results showed that male (d = 0.64) and female (d = 0.88) raters judged women with makeup as more attractive than same women without, and also that the women wearing makeup were more comfortable with casual sex than without. For those curious, this latter difference was larger for female raters (d = 1.14) than male ones (d = 0.32). Putting that into numbers, men rated women wearing makeup as about 0.2 points more likely to enjoy casual sex on a scale from 1-9; for women, this difference was closer to 0.5 points. Further, men’s perceptions of women’s interest in casual sex seemed to be driven less by makeup per se, as much as it was driven by a woman’s perceived attractiveness (and since makeup made them look more attractive, they also looked more interested in casual sex). The primary finding here, however, is that the perception was demonstrated: people (men and women) use women’s makeup usage as a cue to their sociosexuality.

Also, men were worse at figuring out when women weren’t wearing any makeup, compared to women likely given a lack of experience with the topic. Here, being wrong isn’t surprising.

The second study asked the women wearing the makeup themselves to answer questions about their own sociosexuality (using several items, rather than a single question). They were also asked about how much time they spent applying makeup and how much they spent on it on each month. The primary result here was a reported lack of correlation between women’s scores on the sociosexuality questions and the time they spent applying makeup. In other words, people thought makeup was correlated to sexual attitudes and behaviors, but it wasn’t. People were wrong, but in predictable ways. This ought to require a special kind of explanation, and we’ll get to that soon.

The final study examined the relationship between people’s perceptions of a woman’s sociosexuality and her own self-reports of it. Both men and women again seemed to get it wrong, with negative correlations showing up between perceived and self-reported sociosexuality. Both went in a consistent direction, though only the male correlations were significant (male raters about r = -0.33; female raters r = -0.21). Once attractiveness was controlled for, however, the male correlation was similarly non-significant and comparable to women’s ratings (average r = -0.22).

The general pattern of results, descriptively, is that men and women seem to perceive women wearing makeup as being more interested in casual sex than women not wearing makeup. However, the women themselves don’t self-report being more interested in casual sex; if anything, they report being less interested in it than people perceive. Isn’t it funny how so many people are consistently and predictably wrong about this? Perhaps. Then again, I think there’s more to say about the matter which isn’t explored in much detail within the paper.

“This paper is an invalid cue of the truth”

The first criticism of this research that jumped out at me is that the researchers only recruited women who used makeup regularly to be photographed, rated, and surveyed. In that context, they report no relationship between makeup use and sociosexuality (which we’ll get to in a minute, as that’s another important matter). Restricting their sample in this way naturally reduces the variance in the population, which might make it harder to find a real relationship that actually exists. For instance, if I was curious whether height is an important factor in basketball skill, I might find different answers to this question if I surveyed the general population (which contains lots of tall and short people) than if I only surveyed professional basketball players (who all tend to be taller than average; often substantially so). To the authors’ credit, they do mention this point…in their discussion, as more of an afterthought. This suggests to me the point was raised by a reviewer and was only added to the paper after the fact, as awareness of this sampling issue would usually encourage researchers to examine the question in advance, instead of just note that they failed to do so at the end. So, if a relationship exists between makeup use and interest in casual sex, they might have missed it through selective sampling.

The second large criticism concerns the actual reported results, and by how much that finding was missed. I find it noteworthy how the researchers interpret the correlation between women’s self-reported time applying makeup and their self-reported sociosexuality. In the statistical sense, the correlation is about as close to the significant threshold as possible; r = .25, p = 0.051. As the cut-off for significance is 0.05 or lower, this is a relationship that could (and likely would) be interpreted as evidence consistent with the possibility that a link between makeup usage and sociosexuality does exist, if one was looking for a connection; that makeup use is, potentially, a valid cue of sexual interests and behaviors. Nevertheless, the authors interpret it as “not significant” and title their paper accordingly (“Makeup is a FALSE signal of sociosexuality”, emphasis mine). That’s not wrong, in the statistical sense. It also feels like a rather bold description for data that is a hair’s breadth away from reaching the opposite conclusion, and suggests to me the authors had a rather specific hypothesis going into this. Again, to their credit, the authors note there is a “trend” there, but that stands in stark contrast to their rather dramatic title and repeated claims that makeup is an invalid cue. In fact, every instance of them noting there’s a trend between makeup use and sociosexuality seems to be followed invariably by a claim that the results suggest there is no relationship.

Further, there is a point never really discussed at all, which is that women might under-report their own sociosexuality, as per the original research I mention, perhaps because they’re wary of incurring social costs from being viewed as promiscuous. In many domains, I would default to the assumption that the self-reports are somewhat inaccurate. For example, when I surveyed women about their self-perceived attractiveness (from 1-10) several years back, not a single one rated herself below a 6 (out of 10), and the average was higher than that. Either I had managed recruited a sample of particularly beautiful women (possible) or people are interested in you believing they’re better than they actually are (more likely).  After all, if you believe something inaccurately about a person that’s flattering, while it may be a cost to you, it’s a benefit to them. So what’s more likely: that everyone believes something that’s wrong about others, or that some people misrepresent themselves in a flattering light?

Doesn’t get much more flattering than that

As a final note on explaining these findings, it is worth exploring the possibility that a woman’s physical attractiveness/makeup use actually is correlated with relatively higher sociosexuality (despite the author’s claims this isn’t true). In other words, people aren’t making a perceptual mistake – the general correlate holds true – but the current sample missed it for whatever reason (even if just barely). Indeed, there is some evidence that more attractive women score slightly higher on measures of sociosexuality (N = 226; Fisher et al, 2016. Ironically, this was published in the same journal 2 years prior). While short-term encounters do carry some adaptive costs for women, this small correlation might arise due to more physically-attractive women receiving offers for short-term encounters that can better offset them. At the very least, it could be expected that because attractive women carry more value in the mating market place these offers are, in principle, more numerous. Increasing numbers of better options should equal greater comfort and interest.

If that is true – that attractiveness does correlate in some small way with sociosexual orientation – then this could also help explain the (also fairly small) correlation between makeup usage and perceived sociosexuality: people view attractive women as more open to short-term encounters, makeup artificially increases attractiveness, and so people judge women wearing makeup as more open to short-term encounters than they are.

We can even go one layer deeper: women generally understand that makeup makes them look more attractive. They also understand that the more attractive they look, the more positive mating attention they’ll likely receive. Applying makeup, then, can be an effort to attract mating attention, in much the same way that I might wear a nice suit if I was going on a job interview. However, neither the suit nor the makeup is a “smart bomb”, so to speak. I might wear a suit to attract the attention of specific employers, but just because I’m wearing a suit that doesn’t mean I want any job (and if Taco Bell wanted to hire me, I might be choosy and say “No thanks”). Similarly, a woman wearing makeup might be interested in attracting mating attention from specific sources – and be perceived as being more sexually motivated, accordingly – without wishing to send a global signal of sexual interest to all available parties. That latter part just happens as a byproduct. Nevertheless, in this narrower sense, makeup usage could rightly be perceived as a sign of sexual signaling; perhaps one that ends up getting perceived a bit more broadly than intended.

Or perhaps it’s not even perceived more broadly. The question asked of raters in the study was whether a woman would be comfortable and enjoying having casual sex with different partners; it’s unspecified as to the nature of those partners. “Different” doesn’t mean “just anyone”. Women who are interested in makeup might be slightly more interested in these pursuits, on average…but only so long as the partners are suitably attractive.

References: Batresa, C., Russella, R., Simpsonb, J., Campbellc, L., Hansend, A., &
Cronke, L. (2018). Evidence that makeup is a false signal of sociosexuality. Personality & Individual Differences, 122, 148-154 

Fisher, C., Hahn, A., DeBruine, L., & Jones, B. (2016). Is women’s sociosexual orientation related to their physical attractiveness? Personality & Individual Differences, 101, 396-399

The Distrust Of Atheists

Atheists are good friends because they keep it real

There’s an interesting finding rolling around about what kinds of people Americans would vote for as a president. When asked:

“If your party nominated a generally well-qualified person for president who happened to be [blank], would you vote for that that person?”

Answers varied a bit depending on the blank: 96% of Americans would vote for a Black president (while only 4% would not); 95% would vote for a woman. Characteristics like that don’t really dissuade people, at least in the abstract. Other groups don’t fare as well: only 68% of people said they would vote for a gay/lesbian candidate, and 58% a Muslim. But bottoming out the list? Atheists. A mere 54% of people said they would vote for an atheist. This is also a finding that changes a bit – but not all that much – between political affiliations. At the low point, 48% of Republicans would vote for an atheist, while at its peak, 58% of Democrats would. An appreciable difference, but not night and day (larger differences exist for Mormon, gay/lesbian and Muslim candidates, coming in at 18%, 26%, and 22%, respectively).

At the outset – and this is a point that will become important later – it is worth noting that the answers to these questions might not tell you how people would feel about any particular atheist, woman, Muslim, etc. They are not asking whether people would vote for a specific atheist; they are asking about voting for an atheist in the abstract sense of the word, so they are relying on stereotype information. It is also worth noting that people have become much more tolerant over time: in 1958, only 18% said they would vote for an atheist, so getting up to over half (and up to 70% in the younger generation) is good progress. Of course, only 38% said they would vote for a black person during that same year which, as we just saw, has changed dramatically to near 100% by 2012. Atheists haven’t made similar gains, in terms of degree.

This is a very interesting finding that begs for a proper explanation. What is it about atheists that puts people off so much? While I can’t provide a comprehensive or definitive answer at the moment, there is some research I wanted to discuss today that helps shed some light on the issue.

Spoilers…

The basic premise of this research is effectively that – to some (perhaps large) degree – religion per se isn’t what people are necessarily concerned about when they’re providing their answers to questions like our voting one. Instead, what concerns people are other, more-relevant factors that religiosity just so happens to correlate with. So people are really concerned with trait X in a candidate, but are using religiosity as a means of indirectly assessing the presence of trait X. In case that all sounds a bit too abstract, let’s make it concrete and think about the trait Moon, Krems, and Cohen (2018) examined: trust.

When considering who you’d like to support politically or interact with socially, trust is an important factor. If you know you can trust someone, this increases the types of cooperation you can safely engage in with them. When you cannot trust someone, for instance, interactions with them need to be relatively immediate for the sake of safety: I give you the money now and I get my product now. If they aren’t trustworthy, you should be less inclined to give them money now for the promise of your product in a day, week, month, year, or beyond, as they might just take your money and run. By contrast, someone who is trustworthy can offer cooperation over the longer term. The same logic applies to a leader. If you cannot trust a leader to work in your interests, why follow them and offer your support?

As it turns out, religious people are perceived to be more trustworthy than the nonreligious. Why might this be the case? One ostensibly obvious explanation that might jump out at you is that religious people tend to believe in deities that punish people for misbehavior. If someone believes they will be punished for breaking a promise, they should be less likely to break that promise, all else being equal. This is one explanation for the trust finding, then, but there’s an issue: it’s quite easy to just say you believe in a punishing deity when you actually do not. Since that signal is so cheap to produce, it wouldn’t be trustworthy.

This is where religion in particular might help, as membership in a religious group often involves some degree of costly investment: visits to houses of worship, following rituals that are a real pain to complete, and any other similar behavior. Those who are unwilling to endure those immediate costs for group membership demonstrate that they’re just talk. Their commitment doesn’t run deep enough for them to be willing to suffer for them. When behavior is no longer cheap, you can believe what people are telling you. Now this might make religious people look more trustworthy because it demonstrates they’re more groupish and – by extension – more cooperative, but this groupishness is a double-edged sword: those who are inclined towards their group are usually less inclined towards others. This might mean that religious people are more trustworthy to their in-group, but not necessarily their outgroup.

“Who’s up next to demonstrate their trustworthiness?”

There are other explanations, though. The one the present paper favors is the possibility that religious people tend to follow slower life history strategies. This means possessing traits like sexual restrictiveness (they’re relatively monogamous, or at least less promiscuous), greater investment in family, and generally more future-looking than they are living in the present. This would be what makes them look more cooperative than the non-religious. Fast life history strategies are effectively the opposite: they view life as short and unpredictable and so take benefits today instead of saving for tomorrow, and invest more in mating effort than parental effort. Looking at religious individuals as slow-life strategists fits well with previous research suggesting that religious attitudes correlate better with sexual morality than they do cooperative morality, and that religions might act as support for long-term, monogamous, high-fertility mating strategies.

As with many stereotypes, those about religious individuals possessing these slow-life-history traits to a greater degree seems to be fairly accurate. So, when people are asked to judge an individual and are given no more information about them than their religion, they may tend to default to using those stereotypes to assess other traits of interest, like trust. This should also predict that when people know more about a particular individual’s life history strategy – be it fast or slow – religion per se should cease to be used as a predictor. After all, why bother to use religion to assess someone’s life history strategy when you can just assess that strategy directly? Religion stops adding anything at that point, and so information about it should be largely discarded.

As it turns out, this is basically what the research uncovered. In the first experiment people (N = 336) were asked whether they perceived targets (dating profiles of religious or non-religious individuals) as possessing traits like aggression, impulsivity, education, whether they thought they came from a rough neighborhood, and whether they trusted the person. As expected, people perceived the religious targets as being less aggressive, impulsive, more educated, more committed in sexual relationships, and – accordingly – trusted them more. These perceptions held even for the non-religious raters on average, who appeared to trust religious people more than those who shared their lack of belief. Experiment three basically replicated these same results, but also found that the effects were partially independent of the specific religion in question. That is, whether the target being judged was Christian or Muslim, they were still both trusted more than the non-religious targets (even if Christians were nominally trusted more than Muslims, likely due to the majority religion of the country in which the research took place).

Mileage may vary on the basis of local religious majorities

Experiment two  is where the real interesting finding emerged. The procedure was generally the same as before, but now the dating profiles contained better individuating information about the person’s life history strategy. In this case, the targets described themselves either as looking for “someone special, settling downing, and starting a family,” or one who, “doesn’t see themselves setting down anytime soon, as they enjoy playing the field” (paraphrased slightly). When rating these profiles with better information about the person (beyond simply their religious behavior/belief), the effect of commitment strategy on trust was much larger (ηp2 = .197) than the effect of religion per se (ηp2 = .008).

The authors also tried to understand which variables predicted this relationship between reproductive strategy and trust. Their first model used “belief in god” as a mediator and did indeed find a small, but significant relationship running from reproductive strategy predicting belief in god which in turn predicted trust. However, when other life history traits were included as mediator variables (like impulsivity, opportunistic behavior, education, and hopeful ecology – which means what kind of neighborhood one comes from, effectively), the belief in god mediator was no longer significant while three of the life history variables were.

In short, this would suggest that belief in god itself is not the thing doing much of the pulling when it comes to understanding why people trust religious people more. Instead, people are using religion as something of a proxy for someone’s likely reproductive strategy and, accordingly, life history traits. As such, when people have information directly bearing on the traits they’re interested in assessing, they largely stop using their stereotypes about religion in general and instead rely on information about the person (which is completely consistent with previous research on how people use stereotype information: when no other information is available, stereotypes are used, but as more individuating information is available, people rely on that more and their stereotypes less).

References: Moon, J., Krems, J., & Cohen, A. (2018). Religious people are trusted because they are viewed as slow life-history strategists. Psychological Science, DOI: 10.1177/0956797617753606

Predicting The Future With Faces

“Your future will be horrible, but at least it will be short. So there’s that”

The future is always uncertain, at least as far as human (and non-human) knowledge is concerned. This is one reason why some people have difficulty saving or investing money for the future: if you give up rewards today for the promise of rewards tomorrow, that might end up being a bad idea if tomorrow doesn’t come for you (or a different tomorrow than the one you envisioned does). Better to spend that money immediately when it can more reliably bring rewards. The same logic extends to other domains of life, including the social. If you’re going to invest time and energy into a friendship or sexual relationship, you will always run the risk of that investment being misplaced. Friends or partners who betray you or don’t reciprocate your efforts are not usually the ones you want to be investing in the first place. You’d much rather invest that effort into the people who will give you better return.

Consider a specific problem, to help make this clear: human males face a problem when it comes to long-term sexual relationships, which is that female reproductive potential is limited. Not only can women only manage one pregnancy at a time, but they also enter into menopause later in life, reducing their subsequent reproductive output to zero. One solution to this problem is to only seek short-term encountered but, if you happen to be a man looking for a long-term relationship, you’d be doing something adaptive by selecting a mate with the greatest number of years of reproductive potential ahead of her. This could mean selecting a partner who is younger (and thus has the greatest number of likely fertile years ahead of her) and/or selecting one who is liable to enter menopause later.

Solving the first problem – age – is easy enough due to the presence of visual cues associated with development. Women who are too young and do not possess these cues are not viewed as attractive mates (as they are not currently fertile), become more attractive as they mature and enter their fertile years, and then become less attractive over time as fertility (both present and future) declines. Solving the second problem – future years of reproductive potential, or figuring out the age at which a woman will enter menopause – is trickier. It’s not like men have some kind of magic crystal ball they can look into to predict a woman’s future expected age at menopause to maximize their reproductive output. However, women do have faces and, as it turns out, those might actually be the next best tool for the job.

Fred knew it wouldn’t be long before he hit menopause

A recent study by Bovet et al (2017) sought to test whether men might be able to predict a woman’s age at menopause in advance of that event by only seeing her face. One obvious complicating factor with such research is that if you want to assess the extent to which attractiveness around, say, age 25 predicts menopause in the same sample of women, you’re going to have to wait a few decades for them to hit menopause. Thankfully, a work-around exists in that menopause – like most other traits – is partially heritable. Children resemble their partners in many regards, and age of menopause is one of them. This allowed the researchers to use a woman’s mother’s age of menopause as a reasonable proxy for when the daughter would be expected to reach menopause, saving them a lot of waiting. 

Once the participating women’s mother’s age of menopause was assessed, the rest of the study involved taking pictures of the women’s faces (N = 68; average age = 28.4) without any makeup and with as neutral as an expression as possible. These faces were then presented in pairs to male raters (N = 156) who selected which of the two was more attractive (completing that task a total of 30 times each). The likelihood of being selected was regressed against the difference between the mother’s age of menopause for each pair, controlling for facial femininity, age, voice pitch, waist-to-hip ratio, and a value representing the difference between a woman’s actual and perceived age (to ensure that women who looked younger/older than they actually were didn’t throw things off).

A number of expected results showed up, with more feminine faces (ß = 0.4) and women with more feminine vocal pitch (ß = 0.2) being preferred (despite the latter trait not being assessed by the raters). Women who looked older were also less likely to be selected (ß = -0.56) Contrary to predictions, women with more masculine WHRs were preferred (ß = 0.13), even though these were not visible in the photos, suggesting WHR may cue different traits than facial ones. The main effect of interest, however, concerned the menopausal variable. These results showed that as the difference between the pair of women’s mother’s age of menopause increased (i.e., one woman expected to go through menopause later than the other), so too did the probability of the later-menopausal woman getting selected (ß = 0.24). Crucially, there was no correlation between a woman’s expected age of menopause and any of the more-immediate fertility cues, like age, WHR, facial or vocal femininity. Women’s faces seemed to be capturing something unique about expected age at menopause that made them more attractive.

Trading off hot daughters for hot flashes

Now precisely what features were being assessed as more attractive and the nature of their connection to age of menopause is unknown. It is possible – perhaps even likely – that men were assessing some feature like symmetry that primarily signals developmental stability and health, but that variable just so happen to correlate with age at menopause as well (e.g., healthier women go through menopause later as they can more effectively bear the costs of childbearing into later years). Whatever systems were predicting age at menopause might not specifically be designed to do so. While it is possible that some features of a woman’s face uniquely cues people into expected age at menopause more directly without primarily cuing some other trait, that remains to be demonstrated. Nevertheless, the results are an interesting first step in that direction worth thinking about.

References: Bovet, J., Barkat-Defradas, M., Durand, V., Faurie, C., & Raymond, M. (2017). Women’s attractiveness is linked to expected age at menopause. Journal of Evolutionary Biology, doi: 10.1111/jeb.13214

If You Got It, Think Hard About Flaunting It

I’ve attended the Gay Pride Parade in New York on more than one occasion. The event itself holds a special significance for many people who have been close to me and I’m always happy to see them happy, even if parades normally aren’t my cup of tea. That said, I have found certain aspects of the event a little peculiar, at least with regard to its execution. I had this to say about it some years ago:

One could be left wondering what a straight pride parade would even look like anyway, and admittedly, I have no idea. Of course, if I didn’t already know what gay pride parades do look like, I don’t know why I would assume they would be populated with mostly naked men and rainbows, especially if the goal is fostering acceptance and rejection of bigotry. The two don’t seem to have any real connection, as evidenced by black civil rights activists not marching mostly naked for the rights afforded to whites, and suffragettes not holding any marches while clad in assless leather chaps.

Colorful exaggerations aside, there’s something very noteworthy to think about here. While it might seem normal for gay pride events to be rather flamboyant affairs, there need not be any displays of promiscuous sexuality inherent to the event. That is, if people were celebrating a straight, monogamous relationship style with a parade, I don’t think we’d see many people dressing down or, in some cases, going without clothing at all. I imagine the event would be substantially more modest as, well, most other parts of life tend to be.

“From: Straight Pride Boat Ride, 2016″

The relevance of this point comes when one begins to consider what types of people in the world are most opposed to homosexual lifestyles and, accordingly, pose the largest obstacles to things like marriage and adoption rights for the gay community. When considering who those people are, the most common idea that will no doubt spring to many minds are the conservative, religious type (likely because that would be the correct answer). But why are such people most likely to condemn homosexuality on a moral level? A tempting answer would be to make reference to some religious texts condemning homosexuality, but that’s a rather circular explanation: religious people condemn homosexuality because they believe in a doctrine that condemns homosexuality. It’s also not entirely complete, as many parts of the doctrine are only selectively followed in other contexts. We’re also left wondering why those doctrines condemned homosexuality in the first place, placing us back at square one.

A more detailed picture begins to emerge when you consider what predicts religiosity in the first place; what type of person is most drawn to such groups. As it turns out, one of the better predictors of who ends up associating themselves with religious groups and who does not is sexual strategy. Those who are more inclined to monogamy (or, more precisely, opposed to promiscuity) tend to be more religious, and this holds across cultures and religions. By contrast, religiosity is not well predicted by general cooperative morals or behavior. It would be remarkable if religions from all parts of the world ended up stumbling upon a common distaste for promiscuity if it was not inherently tied to religious belief. Something about sexual behavior is uniquely predictive of religiosity, which ought to be strange when you consider that one’s sexual behavior should have little bearing on whether a deity (or several deities) exist. It has even been proposed that religious groups themselves function to support particular kinds of relatively monogamous mating arrangements. In that light, religious groups can be viewed as a support structure for monogamous couples who plan on having many children.

With that perspective in mind, the religious opposition to promiscuity becomes substantially clearer: promiscuity makes monogamous arrangements more difficult to sustain, and vice versa. If you plan on having a lot of children, men face risks of cuckoldry (raising a child that was unknowingly sired by another man) while women face risks of abandonment (if their husband runs off with another woman, leaving her to care for the children alone). As such, having lots of promiscuous men and women around who might lure your partner away or stop them from investing in you in the first place does the monogamous type no favors. In order to support their more monogamous lifestyle, then, these people begin to punish those who engage in promiscuous behaviors to make such strategies more costly to engage in and, accordingly, more rare.

The first punishment for promiscuity – spankings – didn’t have the intended effect

While homosexual individuals themselves don’t exactly pose direct risks to heterosexual, long-term mating couples, they may nevertheless be condemned to the extent that the gay community is viewed as promiscuous. There are a few possible reasons for that outcome to obtain. Perhaps homosexuals are viewed as supporting and encouraging promiscuity, and to let that go unpunished would start other people down a path towards promiscuity (similar to how recreational drug use is also condemned by the long-term maters). Perhaps all sorts of non-traditional sexual behavior is condemned by the conservative groups and homosexuality just ends up condemned as a byproduct. Whatever the explanation for this condemnation, however, a key prediction falls out of this framework: moral condemnation of homosexuality ought to increase to the extent they are viewed as promiscuous and decrease to the extent they are viewed as monogamous. As homosexual groups (particularly men) are viewed as more promiscuous than their heterosexual counterparts (because they are, from every data set I’ve seen), this might help explain the condemnation and, in turn, do something about it.

This is exactly what a new paper by Pinsof & Haselton (2017) sought to test. The pair recruited approximately 1,000 participants from online. The participants read either an article that reported gay men had more partners than straight ones, or an article that reported gay men and straight had the same number of partners. Participants were also asked about their own perceptions of how promiscuous gay men are, their stance on gay rights, and on their own mating orientation (whether they thought short-term sexual encounters were acceptable or not).

As expected, there was an appreciable relationship between one’s mating orientation and one’s support of gay rights: the more long-term their mating strategy, the less supportive of gay rights they were (r = -0.4). That said, despite men being more accepting of promiscuity than women, there was no relationship between gender and support for gay rights. Crucially, an interaction was observed between experimental condition and mating orientation when it came to predicting support for gay rights: Those who were particularly accepting of short-term mating arrangements opposed gay rights very little regardless of which article they had read regarding gay men’s sexual behavior (Ms = approximately 2.25 in both groups, on a scale from 1-7). However, among those who were relatively less accepting of short-term mating, there was a significant difference between the two conditions: when reading an article about how gay men were more promiscuous, opposition to gay rights was higher (M = 4.25) than it was in the condition where they read about how gay men were equally promiscuous (M = 3.5).

Acceptable

By manipulating perceptions of whether gay men were promiscuous, the researchers were also able to manipulate opposition to gay rights. So, if one is interested in achieving greater support for the homosexual community, that’s important information to bear in mind. It also brings me back to the initial point I mentioned about the Gay Pride events I have attended. While I was there, I couldn’t help but wonder whether the atmosphere of sexual promiscuity surrounding the parade would be off-putting to a substantial percentage of the population (even within the gay community), and it seems that intuition was borne out by the present data. The Gay Pride events go beyond a simple celebration and acceptance of homosexuality at points, as it is frequently coupled with sexual promiscuity. It seems that many people might have less of a problem with the former issue if the latter one wasn’t tagging along.

Then again, perhaps promiscuity will be a bit more closely linked with the homosexual community in general, given that children do not result from such unions (making them less costly to engage in) and because heterosexual men are usually only as promiscuous as women allow them to be. If women were just as interested in casual sex as men, there would likely be a lot more casual sex going on. When men are attracted to other men, however, the barriers that usually holds promiscuity in check (children and women’s desires) are much weaker. That does raise the interesting question of whether a different pattern holds for lesbian relationships (which are less promiscuous than gay ones), and it’s certainly one worth pursuing.

References: Pinsof, D. & Haselton, M. (2017). The effect of the promiscuity stereotype on opposition to gay rights. PLoS ONE 12(7): e0178534. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0178534

Understanding Sex In Advertising

When people post videos on YouTube, one major point of interest for content creators and aggregators is to capture as much attention as possible. Your video is adrift in a sea of information and you’re trying to get as many eyes/clicks on your work as possible. In that realm, first impressions are all important: you want your video to have an attention-grabbing thumbnail image, as that will likely be the only thing viewers see before they actually click (or don’t) on it. So how do people go about capturing attention in that realm? One popular method is to ensure their thumbnail has a very emotive expression on it; a face of shock, embarrassment, stress, or any similar emotion. That’s certainly one way of attracting attention: trying to convince people there is something worth looking at, not unlike articles titled along the lines of five shocking tips for a better sex life (and number 3 will blow your mind!). Speaking of sex, that’s another popular method of grabbing attention: it’s fairly common for video thumbnails to feature people or body parts in various stages of undress. Not much will pull eyes towards a video like the promise of sex (and if you’re feeling an urge to click on that link, you’ll have experienced exactly what I’m talking about).

Case in point: most of that content is unrelated to the featured women

If sex happens to be attention grabbing, the natural question arises concerning what you might do with that attention once you have it. Much of the time, that answer will involve selling some good or service. In other words, sex is used as a form of advertising to try and sell things. “If you enjoyed that picture of a woman wearing a thong, you’ll surely love our reasonably-costed laptops!”. Something along those lines, anyway. Provided that’s your goal, lots of questions naturally start to crop up: How effective is sex at these goals? Does it capture attention well? Does it help people notice and remember your product or brand? Are those who viewed your sexy advert more likely to buy the product you’re selling? How do other factors – the sex of the person viewing the ad – contribute to your success in these realms?

These are some of the questions examined in a recent meta-analysis by Wirtz, Sparks, & Zimbres (2017). The researchers searched the literature and found about 80 studies, representing about 18,000 participants. They sought to find out what effects featuring sexually provocative material had, on average (defined in terms of style of dress, sexual behavior, innuendo, or sexual embeds, which is where hidden messages or images are placed within the ad, like the word “sex” added somewhere to the picture, which is something people apparently think is a good idea sometimes). These ads had to have been compared against a comparable, non-sexual ad for the same product to be included in the analysis to determine which was more effective.

The effectiveness of these ads were assessed across a number of domains as well, including ad recognition (in aided and unaided contexts), whether the brand being advertised in the ad could be recalled (i.e., were people paying attention to just the sex, or did they remember the product?), the positive or negative response people had to the ad, what people thought about the brand being advertised with sex, and whether the ad actually got them interested in purchasing the product (does sex sell?).

Finally, a number of potentially moderating factors that might influence these effects were considered. The first of these was gender: did these ads have different impacts on men and women? Others factors included the gender of the model used in the advertisement, the date the article was published (to see if attitudes shifted over time), the sample used (college students or not), and – most interestingly – product/ad congruity: did the type of product being advertised matter when it came to whether sex was effective? Perhaps sex might help sell a product like sun-tan lotion (as the beach might be a good place to pick up mates), but be much less effective for selling, say, laptops.

Maybe even political views

In terms of capturing attention, sex works. Of the 20 effects looking at the recall for ads, the average size was d = .38. Interesting, this effect was slightly larger for the congruent ads (d = .45), but completely reversed for the incongruent ones (d = -.45). Sex was good at getting people to remember ads selling a sex-related product, but not just generally useful. That said, they seemed better at getting people to remember just the ads. When the researchers turned to the matter of whether the brands within the ads were more likely to be recalled, the 31 effects looking at brand recognition turned out to barely break zero (d = .09). While sex might be attention-grabbing, it didn’t seem especially good at getting people to remember the objects being sold.

Regarding people’s attitudes towards the ads, sex seems like something of a wash (d = -.07). Digging a little deeper revealed a more nuanced pictured of these reactions, though: while sexual ads seemed to be a modest hit with the men (d = .27), they had the opposite effect on women (d = -.38). Women seemed to dislike the ads modestly more than men liked them, as sexual strategies theory would suggest (for the record, the type of model being depicted didn’t make much of a difference. In order, people liked males models the least (d = -.28), then female models (d = -.20), and couples were mildly positive, d = .08).

Curiously, both the men and women seemed to be agreement regarding their stance towards brands that used sex to sell things: negative, on the whole (d – =.22). For women, this makes some intuitive sense: they didn’t see to be a fan of the sexual ads, so they weren’t exactly feeling too ingratiated towards the brand itself. But why were the men negatively inclined towards the brand if they were favorably inclined towards the ads? I can only speculate on that front, but I assume it would have something to do with their inevitable disappointment: either that the brands were promising on sex the male customers likely knew they couldn’t deliver on, or perhaps the men simply wanted to enjoy the sex part and the brand itself ended up getting in their way. I can’t imagine men would be too happy with their porn time being interrupted by an ad for toilet paper or fruit snacks mid-video.

Finally, turning the matter of purchase intentions – whether the ads encouraged people to want to buy the product or not – it seemed that sex didn’t really sell, but it didn’t really seem to hurt, either (d = .01). One interesting exception in that realm was that sex appeals were actually less likely to get people to buy a product when the product being sold was incongruent with the sexual appeal (d = -.24). Putting that into a simple example, the phrase “strip club buffet” probably doesn’t wet many appetites, and wouldn’t be a strong selling point for such a venue. Sex can be something of a disease vector, and associating your food with that might illicit more than a bit of disgust.

“Oh good, I was starving. This seems like as good a place as any”

As I’ve noted before, context matching matters in advertising. If you’re looking to sell people something that highlights their individuality, then doing so in a mating context works better than in a context of fear (as animals aren’t exactly aiming to look distinct when predators are nearby). The same seems to hold for using sex. While it might be useful for getting eyes on your advertisement, sex is by no mean guaranteed to ensure that people like what they see once you have their attention. In that regard, sex – like any other advertising tool – needs to be used selectively, targeting the correct audience in the correct context if it’s going to succeed at increasing people’s interest in buying. Sex in general doesn’t sell. However, it might prove more effective for those with more promiscuous attitudes than those with more monogamous ones; it might prove useful if advertising a product related to sex or mating, but not useful for selling domain names (like the old GoDaddy commercials; coincidentally, GoDaddy was also the brand I used to register this site); it might work better if you associate your product with things that lead to sex (like status), rather than sex itself. These are all avenues worth pursuing further to see when, where, and why sex works or fails.

That said, it is still possible that sex might prove useful, even in some inappropriate contexts. Consider the following hypothetical example: people will consider buying a product only after they have seen an advertisement for it. Advertisement X isn’t sexual, but when paired with the product will increase people’s intentions to buy it by 10%. However, it will also not really get noticed by many people, as the content is bland. By contrast, advertisement Y is sexual, will decrease people’s intentions to buy a product by 10%, but will also get four-times as many eyes on it. The latter ad might well be more successful, as it will capture the eye of more potential customers that may still buy the product despite the inappropriate use of sexWhile targeting advertisements might be more effective, the attention model of advertising shouldn’t be ruled out entirely, especially if targeting advertising would prove too cumbersome.

References: Wirtz, J., Sparks, J., & Zimbres, T. (2017). The effect of exposure to sexual appeals in advertisements on memory, attitude, and purchase intention: A meta-analytic review. International Journal of Advertising, https://doi.org/10.1080/02650487.2017.1334996

 

Divorced Dads And Their Daughters

Despite common assumptions, parents have less of an impact on their children’s future development than they’re often credited with. Twins reared apart usually aren’t much different than twins reared together, and adopted children don’t end up resembling their adoptive parents substantially more than strangers. While parents can indeed affect their children’s happiness profoundly, a healthy (and convincing) literature exists supporting the hypothesis that differences in parenting behaviors don’t do a whole lot of shaping in terms of children’s later personalities (at least when the child isn’t around the parent; Harris, 2009). This makes a good deal of theoretical sense, as children aren’t developing to be better children; they’re developing to become adults in their own right. What children learn works when it comes to interacting with their parents might not readily translate to the outside world. If you assume your boss will treat you the same way your parents would, you’re likely in for some unpleasant clashes with reality. 

“Who’s a good branch manager? That’s right! You are!”

Not that this has stopped researchers from seeking to find ways that parent-child interactions might shape children’s future personalities, mind you. Indeed, I came upon a very new paper purporting to do just that this last week. It suggested that the quality of a father’s investment in his daughters causes shifts in his daughter’s willingness to engage in risky sexual behavior (DelPriore, Schlomer, & Ellis, 2017). The analysis in the paper is admittedly a bit tough to follow, as the authors examine three- and even four-way interactions (which are difficult to keep straight in one’s mind: the importance of variable A changes contingent on the interaction between B, C, & D), so I don’t want to delve too deeply into the specific details. Instead, I want to discuss the broader themes and design of the paper.

Previous research looking at parenting effects on children’s development often suffers from the problem of relatedness, as genetic similarities between parents and children make it hard to tease apart the unique effects of parenting behaviors (how the parents treat their children) from natural resemblances (nice parents have nice children). In a simple example, parents who love and nurture their children tend to have children who grow up kinder and nicer, while parents who neglect their children tend to have children who grow up to be mean. However, it seems likely that parents who care for their children are different in some important regards than those who neglect them, and those tendencies are perfectly capable of being passed on through shared genes. So are the nice kids nice because of how their parents treated them or because of inheritance? The adoption studies I mentioned previously tend to support the latter interpretation. When you control for genetic factors, parenting effects tend to drop out.

What’s good about the present research is its innovative design to try and circumvent this issue of genetic similarities between children and parents. To accomplish this goal, the authors examined (among other things) how divorce might affect the development of different daughters within the same family. The reasoning for doing so seems to go roughly as follows: daughters should base their sexual developmental trajectory, in part, on the extent of paternal investment they’re exposed to during their early years. When daughters are regularly exposed to fathers that invest in them and monitor their behavior, they should come to expect that subsequent male parental investment will be forthcoming in future relationships and avoid peers who engage in risky sexual behavior. The net result is that such daughters will engage in less risky sexual behavior themselves. By contrast, when daughters lack proper exposure to an investing father, or have one who does not monitor their peer behavior as tightly (due to divorce), they should come to view future male investment as unlikely, associate with those who engage in riskier sexual behavior, and engage in such behavior themselves.

Accordingly, if a family with two daughters experiences a divorce, the younger daughter’s development might be affected differently than the older daughter’s, as they have different levels of exposure to their father’s investment. The larger this age gap between the daughters, the larger this effect should be. After recruiting 42 sister pairs from intact families and 59 sister pairs from divorced families and asking them some retrospective questions about what their life was like growing up, this is basically the result the authors found. Younger daughters tended to receive less monitoring than older daughters in families of divorce and, accordingly, tended to associate with more sexually-risky peers and engage in such behaviors themselves. This effect was not present in biologically intact families. Do we finally have some convincing evidence of parenting behaviors shaping children’s personalities outside the home?

Look at this data and tell me the first thing that comes to your mind

I don’t think so. The first concern I would raise regarding this research is the monitoring measure utilized. Monitoring, in this instance, represented a composite score of how much information the daughters reported their parents had about their lives (rated from (1) didn’t know anything, (2) knew a little, or (3) knew a lot) in five domains: who their friends were, how they spent their money, where they spent their time after school, where they were at night, and how they spent their free time. While one might conceptualize that as monitoring (i.e., parents taking an active interest in their children’s lives and seeking to learn about/control what they do), it seems that one could just as easily think of that measure as how often children independently shared information with their parents. After all, the measure doesn’t specify, “how often did your parents try to learn about your life and keep track of your behavior?” It just asked about how much they knew.

To put that point concretely, my close friends might know quite a bit about what I do, where I go, and so on, but it’s not because they’re actively monitoring me; it’s because I tell them about my day voluntarily. So, rather than talking about how a father’s monitoring of his daughter might have a causal effect on her sexual behavior, we could just as easily talk about how daughters who engage in risky behavior prefer not to tell their parents about what they’re doing, especially if their personal relationship is already strained by divorce.

The second concern I have concerns divorce itself. Divorce can indeed affect the personal relationships of children with their parents. However, that’s not the only thing that happens after a divorce. There are other effects that extend beyond emotional closeness. An important example of these other factors are the financial ones. If a father has been working while the mother took care of the children – or if both parents were working – divorce can result in massive financial hits for the children (as most end up living with their mother or in a joint custody arrangement). The results of entering additional economic problems into an already emotionally-upsetting divorce can entail not only additional resentment between children and parents (and, accordingly, less sharing of information between them; the reduced monitoring), but also major alterations to the living conditions of the children. These lifestyle shifts could include moving to a new home, upsetting existing peer relations, entering new social groups, and presenting children with new logistical problems to solve.

Any observed changes in a daughter’s sexual behavior in the years following a divorce, then, can be thought of as a composite of all the changes that take place post-divorce. While the quality and amount of the father-daughter relationship might indeed change during that time, there are additional and important factors that aren’t controlled for in the present paper.

Too bad the house didn’t split down the middle as nicely

The final concern I wanted to discuss was more of a theoretical one, and it’s slightly larger than the methodological points above. According to the theory proposed at the beginning of the paper:

“…the quality of fathering that daughters receive provides information about the availability and reliability of male investment in the local ecology, which girls use to calibrate their mating behavior and expectations for long-term investment from future mates.”

This strikes me as a questionable foundation for a few reasons. First, it would require that the relationship of a daughter’s parents are substantially predictive of the relationships she is likely to encounter in the world with regard to male investment. In other words, if your father didn’t invest in your mother (or you) that heavily (or at least during your childhood), that needs to mean that many other potential fathers are likely to do the same to you (if you’re a girl). This would further require, then, that male investment be appreciably uniform across time in the world. If male investment wasn’t stable between males and across time within a given male, then trying to predict the general availability of future male investment from your father’s seems like a losing formula for accuracy.

It seems unlikely the world is that stable. For similar reasons, I suggested that children probably can’t accurately gauge future food availability from their access to food at a young age. Making matters even worse in this regard is that, unlike food shortages, the presence or absence of male parental investment doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that will be relatively universal. Some men in a local environment might be perfectly willing to invest heavily in women while others are not. But that’s only considering the broad level: men who are willing to invest in general might be unwilling to invest in a particular woman, or might be willing or unwilling to invest in that woman at different stages in her life, contingent on her mate value shifting with age. Any kind of general predictive power that could be derived about men in a local ecology seems weak indeed, especially if you are basing that decision off a single relationship: the one between your parents. In short, if you want to know what men in your environment are generally like, one relationship should be as informative as another. There doesn’t seem to be a good reason to assume your parents will be particularly informative.

Matters get even worse for the predictive power of father-daughter relationships when one realizes the contradiction between that theory and the predictions of the authors. The point can be made crystal clear simply by considering the families examined in this very study. The sample of interest was comprised of daughters from the same family who had different levels exposure to paternal investment. That ought to mean, if I’m following the predictions properly, that the daughters – the older and younger one – should develop different expectations about future paternal investment in their local ecology. Strangely, however, these expectations would have been derived from the same father’s behavior. This would be a problem because both daughters cannot be right about the general willingness of males to invest if they hold different expectations. If the older daughter with more years of exposure to her father comes to believe male investment will be available and the younger daughter with fewer years of exposure comes to believe it will be unavailable, these are opposing expectations of the world.

However, if those different expectations are derived from the same father, that alone should cast doubt on the ability of a single parental relationship to predict broad trends about the world. It doesn’t even seem to be right within families, let alone between them (and it’s probably worth mentioning at this point that, if children are going to be right about the quality of male investment in their local ecology more generally, all the children in the same area should develop similar expectations, regardless of their parent’s behavior. It would be strange for literal neighbors to develop different expectations of general male behavior in their local environment just because the parents of one home got divorced while the other stayed together. Then again, it should strange for daughters of the same home to develop different expectations, too).

Unless different ecologies have rather sharp boarders

On both a methodological and theoretical level, then, there are some major concerns with this paper that render its interpretation suspect. Indeed, at the heart of the paper is a large contradiction: if you’re going to predict that two girls from the same family develop substantially different expectations about the wider world from the same father, then it seems impossible that the data from that father is very predictive of the world. In any case, the world doesn’t seem as stable as it would need to be for that single data point to be terribly useful. There ought not be anything special about the relationship of your parents (relative to other parents) if you’re looking to learn something about the world in general.

While I fully expect that children’s lives following their parents divorce will be different – and those differences can affect development, depending on when they occur – I’m not so sure that the personal relationship between fathers and daughters is the causal variable of primary interest.

References: DelPriore, D., Schlomer, G., & Ellis, B. (2017). Impact of Fathers on Parental Monitoring of Daughters and Their Affiliation With Sexually Promiscuous Peers: A Genetically and Environmentally Controlled Sibling Study. Developmental Psychology. Advance online publication. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/dev0000327

Harris, J. (2009) The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do. Free Press, NY.

To Meaningfully Talk About Gender

Let’s say I was to tell you I am a human male. While this sentence is short and simple, the amount of information you could glean from it is a potential goldmine, assuming you are starting from a position of near total ignorance about me. First, it provides you with my species identification. In the most general sense, that lets you know what types of organisms in the world I am capable of potentially reproducing with (to produce reproductively-viable offspring in turn). In addition to that rather concrete fact, you also learn about my likely preferences. Just as humans share a great deal of genes in common (which is why we can reproduce with one another), we also share a large number of general preferences and traits in common (as these are determined heavily by our genes). For instance, you likely learn that I enjoy the taste of fruit, that I make my way around the world on two feet, and that hair continuously grows from the top of my head but much more sparingly on the rest of my body, among many other things. While these probable traits might not hold true for me in particular – perhaps I am totally hairless/covered in hair, have no legs, and find fruit vile – they do hold for humans more generally, so you can make some fairly-educated guesses as to what I’m like in many regards even if you know nothing else about me as a person. It’s not a perfect system, but you’ll do better on average with this information than you would if you didn’t have it. To make the point crystal clear, imagine trying to figure out what kind of things I liked if you didn’t even know my species. 

Could be delicious or toxic, depending on my species. Choose carefully.

When you learn that I am a male, you learn something concrete about the sex chromosomes in my body: specifically, that I have an XY configuration and tend to produce particular types of gametes. In addition to that concrete fact, you also learn about my likely traits and preferences. Just as humans share a lot of traits in common, males tend to share more traits in common with each other than they do with females (and vice versa). For instance, you likely learn that the distribution of muscle mass in my upper body is more substantial than females, that I have a general willingness to relax my standards when it comes to casual sex, that I have a penis, and that I’m statistically more likely to murder you than a female (I’m also more likely to be murdered myself, for the record). Again, while these might not all hold true for me specifically, if you knew nothing else about me, you could still make some educated guesses as to what I enjoy and my probable behavior because of my group membership.

One general point I hope these examples illuminate is that, to talk meaningful about a topic, we need to have a clear sense for our terms. Once we know what the terms “human” and “male” mean, we can begin to learn a lot about what membership in those groups entail. We can learn quite a bit about deviations from those general commonalities as well. For instance, some people might have an XY set of chromosomes and no penis. This would pose a biological mystery to us, while someone having an XX set and no penis would pose much less of one. The ability to consistently apply a definition – even an arbitrary one – is the first step in being able to say something useful about a topic. Without clear boundary conditions on what we’re talking about, you can end up with people talking about entirely different concepts using the same term. This yields unproductive discussions and is something to be avoided if you’re looking to cut down on wasted time.

Speaking of unproductive discussions, I’ve seen a lot of metaphorical ink spilled over the concept of gender; a term that is supposed to be distinct from sex, yet is highly related to it. According to many of the sources one might consult, sex is supposed to refer to biological features (as above), while gender is supposed to refer, “…to either social roles based on the sex of the person (gender role) or personal identification of one’s own gender based on an internal awareness (gender identity).” I wanted to discuss the latter portion of that gender definition today: the one referring to people’s feelings about their gender. Specifically, I’ve been getting the growing sense that this definition is not particularly useful. In essence, I’m not sure it really refers to anything in particular and, accordingly, doesn’t help advance our understanding of much in the world. To understand why, let’s take a quick trip through some interesting current events. 

Some very colorful, current events…

In this recent controversy, a woman called Rachel Dolezal claimed her racial identity was black. The one complicating factor in her story is that she was born to white parents.  Again, there’s been a lot of metaphorical ink spilled over the issue (including the recent mudslinging directed at Rebecca Tuvel who published a paper on the matter), with most of the discussions seemingly unproductive and, from what I can gather, mean-spirited. What struck me when I was reading about the issue is how little of those discussions explicitly focused on what should have been the most important, first point: how are we defining our terms when it comes to race? Those who opposed Rachel’s claims to be black appear to fall back on some kind of implicit hereditary definition: that one or more of one’s parents need to be black in order to consider oneself a member of that group. That’s not a perfect definition as we need to then determine what makes a parent black, but it’s a start. Like the definition of sex I gave above, this concept of race references some specific feature of the world that determines one racial identity and I imagine it makes intuitive sense to most people. Crucially, this definition is immune to feelings. It doesn’t matter if one is happy, sad, indifferent, or anything else with respect to their ethnic heritage; it simply is what it is regardless of those feelings. In this line of thinking, Rachel is white regardless of how she feels about it, how she wears her hair, dresses, acts, or even whether we want to accept her identification as black and treat her accordingly (whatever that is supposed to entail). What she – or we – feel about her racial identity is a different matter than her heritage.

On the other side of the issue, there are people (notably Rachel herself) who think that what matters is how you feel when it comes to determining identity. If you feel black (i.e., your internal awareness tells you that you’re black), then you are black, regardless of biological factors or external appearances. This idea runs into some hard definitional issues, as above: what does it mean to feel black, and how is it distinguished from other ethnic feelings? In other words, when you tell me that you feel black, what am I supposed to learn about you? Currently, that’s a big blank in my mind. This definitional issue is doubly troubling in this case, however, because if one wants to say they are black because they feel black, then it seems one first needs to identify a preexisting group of black people to have any sense at all for what those group members feel like. However, if you can already identify who is and is not black from some other criteria, then it seems the feeling definition is out of place as you’d already have another definition for your term. In that case, one could just say they are white but feel like they’re black (again, whatever “feeling black” is supposed to mean). I suppose they could also say they are white and feel unusual for that group, too, without needing to claim they are a member of a different ethnic group.

The same problems, I feel, apply to the gender issue despite the differences between gender and race. Beginning with the feeling definition, the parallels are clear. If someone told me they feel like a woman, a few things have to be made clear for that statement to mean anything. First, I’d need to know what being a woman feels like. In order to know what being a woman feels like, I’d need to already have identified a group of women so the information could be gathered. This means I’d need to know who was a woman and who was not in advance of learning about their specific feelings. However, if I can do that – if I can already determine who is and is not a woman – then it seems I don’t need to identify them on the basis of their feelings; I would be doing so with some other criteria. Presumably, the most common criteria leveraged in such a situation would be sex: you’d go out and find a bunch of females and ask them about what it was like to be a woman. If those responses are to be meaningful, though, you need to consider “female” to equate to “woman” which, according to definitions I listed above, it does not. This leaves us in a bit of a catch-22: we need to identify women by how they feel, but we can’t say how they feel until we identify them. Tricky business indeed (even forgoing the matter of claims that there are other genders).

Just keep piling the issues on top of each other and hope that sorts it out

On the other hand, let’s say gender is defined by some objective criteria and is distinct from sex. So, someone might be a male because of their genetic makeup but fall under the category of “woman” because, say, their psychology has developed in a female-typical pattern for enough key traits. Perhaps enough of their metaphorical developmental dials have been turned towards the female portion. Now that’s just a hypothetical example, but it should demonstrate the following point well enough: regardless of whether the male in question wants to be identified as a female or not, it wouldn’t matter in terms of this definition. It might matter a whole bunch if you want to be polite and nice to them, but not for our definition. Once we had a sense for what dials – or how many of them – needed to be flipped to “female” and had a way of measuring that for a male to be considered a woman, one’s internal awareness seems to be besides the point.

While this definition helps us talk more meaningfully about gender, at least in principle, it also seems like the gender term is a little unnecessary. If we’re just using “man” as a synonym for “male” and “woman” as one for “female”, then the entire sex/gender distinction kind of falls apart, which defeats the whole purpose. You wouldn’t feel like a man; you’d feel like a male (whatever that feels like, and I say that as a male myself). Rather than calling our female-typical male a woman, we could also call him an atypical man.

The second issue with this idea nagging at me is that almost all traits do not run on a spectrum from male to female. Let’s consider traits with psychological sex differences, like depression or aggression. Since females are more likely to experience depression than males, we could consider experiencing depression as something that pushes one towards the “woman” end of the gender spectrum. However, when one feels depressed, they don’t feel like a woman; they feel sad and hopeless. When someone feels aggressive, they don’t feel like a man; they feel angry and violent. The same kind of logic can be applied to most other traits as well, including components of personality, risk-seeking, and so on. These don’t run on a spectrum between male/masculine and female/feminine, as it would make no sense to say that one has a feminine height.

If this still all sounds very confusing to you, then you’re on the same page as me. As far as I’ve seen, it is incredibly difficult for people to verbalize anything of a formal definition or set of standards that tells us who falls into one category or the other when it comes to gender. In the absence of such a standard, it seems profitable to just discard the terms and find something better – something more precise – to use instead.

Semen Quality And The Menstrual Cycle

One lesson I always try to drive home in any psychology course I teach is that biology (and, by extension, psychology) is itself costly. The usual estimate on offer is that our brains consume about 20% of our daily caloric expenditure, despite making up a small portion of our bodily mass. That’s only the cost of running the brain, mind you; growing and developing it adds further metabolic costs into the mix. When you consider the extent of those costs over a lifetime, it becomes clear that – ideally – our psychology should only be expected to exist in an active state to the extent it offers adaptive benefits that tend to outweigh them. Importantly, we should also expect that cost/benefit analysis to be dynamic over time. If a component of our biology/psychology is useful during one point in our lives but not at another, we might predict that it would switch on or off accordingly. This line of thought could help explain why humans are prolific language learners early in life but struggle to learn a second language in their teens and beyond; a language-learning mechanism active during development it would be useful up to a certain age for learning a native tongue, but later becomes inactive when its services are no longer liable to required, so to speak (which they often wouldn’t be in an ancestral environment in which people didn’t travel far enough to encounter speakers of other languages).

“Good luck. Now get to walking!”

The two key points to take away from this idea, then, are (a) that biological systems tend to be costly and, because of that, (b) the amount of physiological investment in any one system should be doled out only to the extent it is likely to deliver adaptive benefits. With those two points as our theoretical framework, we can explain a lot about behavior in many different contexts. Consider mating as a for instance. Mating effort intended to attract and/or retain a partner is costly to engage in (in terms of time, resource invest, risk, and opportunity costs), so people should only be expected to put effort into the endeavor to the extent they view it as likely to produce benefits. As such, if you happen to be a hard “5″ on the mating market, it’s not worth your time pursuing a mate that’s a “9″ because you’re probably wasting your effort; similarly, you don’t want to pursue a “3″ if you can avoid it, because there are better options you might be able to achieve if you invest your efforts elsewhere.

Speaking of mating effort, this brings us to the research I wanted to discuss today. Sticking to mammals just for the sake of discussion, males of most species endure less obligate parenting costs than females. What this means is that if a copulation between a male and female results in conception, the female bears the brunt of the biological costs of reproduction. Many males will only provide some of the gametes required for reproduction, while the females must provide the egg, gestate the fetus, birth it, and nurse/care for it for some time. Because the required female investment is substantially larger, females tend to be more selective about which males they’re willing to mate with. That said, even though the male’s typical investment is far lower than the female’s, it’s still a metabolically-costly investment: the males need to generate the sperm and seminal fluid required for conception. Testicles need to be grown, resources need to be invested into sperm/semen production, and that fluid needs to be rationed out on a per-ejaculation basis (a drop may be too little, while a cup may be too much). Put simply, males cannot afford to just produce gallons of semen for fun; it should only be produced to the extent that the benefits outweigh the costs.

For this reason, you tend to see that male testicle size varies between species, contingent on the degree of sperm competition typically encountered. For those not familiar, sperm competition refers to the probability that a female will have sperm from more than one male in her reproductive tract at a time when she might conceive. In a concrete sense, this translates into a fertile female mating with two or more males during her fertile window. This creates a context that favors the evolution of greater male investment into sperm production mechanisms, as the more of your sperm are in the fertilization race, the greater your probability of beating the competition and reproducing. When sperm competition is rare (or absent), however, males need not invest as many resources into mechanisms for producing testes and they are, accordingly, smaller.

Find the sperm competition

This logic can be extended to matters other than sperm competition. Specifically, it can be applied to cases where a male is (metaphorically) deciding how much to invest into any given ejaculate, even if he’s the female’s only sexual partner. After all, if the female you’re mating with is unlikely to get pregnant at the time, whatever resources are being invested into an ejaculate are correspondingly more likely to represent wasted effort; a case where the male would be better off investing those resources to things other than his loins. What this means is that – in addition to between-species differences of average investment in sperm/semen production – there might also exist within-individual differences in the amount of resources devoted to a given ejaculate, contingent on the context. This idea falls under the lovely-sounding name, the theory of ejaculate economics. Put into a sentence, it is metabolically costly to “buy” ejaculates, so males shouldn’t be expected to invest in them irrespective of their adaptive value.

A prediction derived from this idea, then, is that males might invest more in semen quality when the opportunity to mate with a fertile female is presented, relative to when that same female is not as likely to conceive. This very prediction happens to have been recently examined by Jeannerat et al (2017). Their sample for this research consisted of 16 adult male horses and two adult females, each of which had been living in a single-sex barn. Over the course of seven weeks, the females were brought into a new building (one at a time) and the males were brought in to ostensibly mate with them (also one at a time). The males would be exposed to the female’s feces on the ground for 15 seconds (to potentially help them detect pheromones, we are told), after which the males and females were held about 2 meters from each other for 30 seconds. Finally, the males were led to a dummy they could mount (which had also been scented with the feces). The semen sample from that mount was then collected from the dummy and the dummy refreshed for the next male.

This experiment was repeated several times, such that each stallion eventually provided semen after exposure to each mare two or three times. The crucial manipulation, however, involved the mares: each male had provided a semen sample for each mare once when she was ovulating (estrous) and two to three times when she was not (dioestrous). These samples were then compared against each other, yielding a within-subjects analysis of semen quality.

The result suggested that the stallions could – to some degree – accurately detect the female’s ovulatory status: when exposed to estrous mares, the stallions were somewhat quicker to achieve erections, mount the dummy, and to ejaculate, demonstrating a consistent pattern of arousal. When the semen samples themselves were examined, another interesting set of patterns emerged: relative to dioestrous mares, when the stallions were exposed to estrous mares they left behind larger volumes of semen (43.6 mL vs 46.8 mL) and more motile sperm (a greater percentage of active, moving sperm; about 59 vs 66%). Moreover, after 48 hours, the sperm samples obtained from the stallions exposed to estrous mares showed less of a decline of viability (66% to 65%) relative to those obtained from dioestrous exposure (64% to 61%). The estrous sperm also showed reduced membrane degradation, relative to the dioestrous samples. By contrast, sperm count and velocity did not significantly differ between conditions.

“So what it was with a plastic collection pouch? I still had sex”

While these differences appear slight in the absolute sense, they are nevertheless fascinating as they suggest males were capable of (rather quickly) manipulating the quality of the ejaculate they provided from intercourse, depending on the fertility status of their mate. Again, this was a within-subjects design, meaning the males are being compared against themselves to help control for individual differences. The same male seemed to invest somewhat less in an ejaculate when the corresponding probability of successful fertilization was low.

Though there are many other questions to think about (such as whether males might also make long-term adjustments to semen characteristics depending on context, or what the presence of other males might do, to name a few), one that no doubt pops into the minds of people reading this is whether other species – namely, humans – do something similar. While it is certainly possible, from the present results we clearly cannot say; we’re not horses. An important point to note is that this ability to adjust semen properties depends (in part) on the male’s ability to accurately detect female fertility status. To the extent human males have access to reliable cues regarding fertility status (beyond obvious ones, like pregnancy or menstruation), it seems at least plausible that this might hold true for us as well. Certainly an interesting matter worth examining further.   

References: Jeannerat, E., Janett, F., Sieme, H., Wedekind, C., & Burger, D. (2017). Quality of seminal fluids varies with type of stimulus at ejaculation. Scientific Reports. 7, DOI: 10.1038/srep44339

 

Courting Controversy

“He says true but unpopular things. If you can’t talk about problems, you can’t fix them.”

The above quote comes to us from an interview with Trump supporters. Regardless of what one thinks about Trump and the truth of what he says, that idea holds a powerful truth itself: the world we live in can be a complicated one, and if we want to figure out how to best solve the problems we face, we need to be able to talk about them openly; even if the topics are unpleasant or the ideas incorrect. That said, there are some topics that people tend to purposefully avoid talking about. Not because the topics themselves are in some way unimportant or uninteresting, but rather because the mere mention of them is not unlike the prodding of a landmine. They are taboo thoughts: things that are made difficult to even think without risking moral condemnation and social ostracism. As I’m no fan of taboos, I’m going to cross one of them today myself, but in order to talk about those topics with some degree of safety, one needs to begin by talking about other topics which are safe. I want to first talk about something that is not dangerous, and slowly ramp up the danger. As a fair warning, this does require that this post be a bit longer than usual, but I think it’s a necessary precaution. 

“You have my attention…and it’s gone”

Let’s start by talking about driving. Driving is a potentially dangerous task, as drivers are controlling heavy machinery traveling at speeds that regularly break 65 mph. The scope of that danger can be highlighted by estimates that put the odds of pedestrian death – were they to be struck by a moving vehicle – at around 85% at only 40 mph. Because driving can have adverse consequences for both the driver and those around them, we impose restrictions on who is allowed to drive what, where, when, and how. The goal we are trying to accomplish with these restrictions is to minimize harm while balancing benefits. After all, driving isn’t only risky; it’s also useful and something people want to do. So, how are we going to – ideally – determine who is allowed the ability to drive and who is not? The most common solution, I would think, is to determine what risks we are trying to minimize and then ensure that people are able to surpass some minimum threshold of demonstrated ability. Simply put, we want to know people are good drivers.

Let’s make that concrete. In order to safely operate a vehicle you need to be able: (a) see out of the windows, (b) know how to operate the car mechanically, (c) have the physical strength and size to operate the car, (d) understand the “rules of the road” and all associated traffic signals, (e) have adequate visual acuity to see the world you’ll be driving through, (f) possess adequate reaction time to be able to respond to the ever-changing road environment, and (g) possess the psychological restraint to not take excessive risks, such as traveling at unreasonably high speeds or cutting people off. This list is non-exhaustive, but it’s a reasonable place to start.

If you want to drive, then, you need to demonstrate that you can see out of the car while still being able to operate it. This would mean that those who are too small to accomplish both tasks at once – like young children or very short adults – shouldn’t be allowed to drive. Similarly, those who are physically large enough to see out of the windows but possess exceptionally poor eyesight should similarly be barred from driving, as we cannot trust they will respond appropriately. If they can see but not react in time, we don’t want them on the road either. If they can operate the car, can see, and know the rules but refuse to obey them and drive recklessly, we either don’t grant them a license or revoke it if they already have one.

In the service of assessing these skills we subject people to a number of tests: there are written tests that must be completed to determine knowledge of the rules of the road; there are visual tests; there are tests of driving ability. Once these tests are passed, they are still reviewed from time to time, and a buildup of infractions can yield to a revocation of driving privileges.

However, we do not test everyone for these abilities. All of these things that we want a driver’s license to reflect – like every human trait – need to develop over time. In other words, they tend to fall within some particular distribution – often a normal one – with respect to age. As such, younger drivers are thought to pose more risk than adult drivers along a number of these desired traits. For instance, while not every person who is 10 years old is too small to operate a vehicle, the large majority of them are. Similarly, your average 15-year-old might not appropriately understand the risks of reckless driving and avoid it as we would hope. Moreover, the benefits that these young individuals can obtain from driving are lower as well; it’s not common for 12-year-olds to need a car to commute to work.

Accordingly, we also set minimum age laws regarding when people can begin to be considered for driving privileges. These laws are not set because it is impossible that anyone below the specific age set by it might have need of a car and be able to operate it safely and responsibly, but rather a recognition that a small enough percentage of them can that it’s not really worth thinking about (in the case of two-year-olds, for instance, that percentage is 0, as none could physically operate the vehicle; in the case of 14-year-olds it’s non-zero, but judged to be sufficiently low all the same). There are even proposals floating around concerning something like a maximum driving age, as driving abilities appear to deteriorate appreciably in older populations. As such, it’s not that we’re concerned about the age per se of the drivers – we don’t just want anyone over the age of 18 on the road – but age is a still a good correlate of other abilities and allows us to save a lot of time in not having to assess every single individual for driving abilities from birth to death under every possible circumstance.

Don’t worry; he’s watched plenty of Fast & Furious movies

This brings us to first point of ramping up the controversy. Let’s talk a bit about drunk driving. We have laws against operating vehicles while drunk because of the effects that drinking has: reduced attention and reaction time, reduced inhibitions resulting in more reckless driving, and impaired ability to see or stay awake, all of which amount to a reduction in driving skill and increase potential for harmful accidents. Reasonable as these laws sound, imagine, if you would, two hypothetical drivers: the worst driver legally allowed to get behind a wheel, as well as the best driver. Sober, we should expect the former to pose a much greater risk to himself and others than the latter but, because they both pass the minimum threshold of ability, both are allowed to drive. It is possible, however, that the best driver’s abilities while he is drunk still exceed those of the worst driver’s while he is sober.

Can we recognize that exception to the spirit of the law against drunk driving without saying it is morally or legally acceptable for the best driver to drive drunk? I think we can. There are two reasons we might do so. The first is that we might say even if the spirit of the rule seems to be violated in this particular instance, the rule is still one that holds true more generally and should be enforced for everyone regardless. That is, sometimes the rule will make a mistake (in a manner of speaking), but it is right often enough that we tolerate the mistake. This seems perfectly reasonable, and is something we accept in other areas of life, like medicine. When we receive a diagnosis from a doctor, we accept that it might not be right 100% of the time, but (usually) believe it to be right often enough that we act as if it were true. Further, the law is efficient: it saves us the time and effort in testing every driver for their abilities under varying levels of intoxication. Since the consequences of making an error in this domain might outweigh the benefits of making a correct hit, we work on maximizing the extent to which we avoid errors. If such methods of testing driving ability were instantaneous and accurate, however, we might not need this law against drunk driving per se because we could just be looking at people’s ability, rather than blood alcohol content. 

The second argument you might make to uphold the drunk driving rule is to say that even if the best drunk driver is still better than the worst sober one, the best drunk driver is nevertheless a worse driver than he is while sober. As such, he would be imposing more risk on himself and others than he reasonably needs to, and should not be allowed to engage in the behavior because of that. This argument is a little weaker – as it sets up a double standard – but it could be defensible in the right context. So long as you’re explicit about it, driving laws could be set such that people need to pass a certain threshold of ability and need to be able to perform within a certain range of their maximum ability. This might do things like make driving while tired illegal, just like drunk driving. 

The larger point I hope to hit on here is the following, which I hope we all accept: there are sometimes exceptions (in spirit) to rules that generally hold true and are useful. It is usually the case that people below a certain minimum driving age shouldn’t be trusted with the privilege, but it’s not like something magical happens at that age where an ability appears fully-formed in their brain. People don’t entirely lack the ability to drive at 17.99 years old and possess it fully at 18.01 years. That’s just not how development works for any trait in any species. We can recognize that some young individuals possess exceptional driving abilities (at least for their age, if not in the absolute sense, like this 14-year-old NASCAR driver) without suggesting that we change the minimum age driving law or even grant those younger people the ability to drive yet. It’s also not the case (in principle) that every drunk driver is incapable of operating their vehicle at or above the prescribed threshold of minimum safety and competency. We can recognize those exceptional individuals as being unusual in ability while still believing that the rule against drunk driving should be enforced (even for them) and be fully supportive of it.

That said, 14-year-old drunk drivers are a recipe for disaster

Now let’s crank up the controversy meter further and talk about sex. Rather than talking about when we allow people to drive cars and under what circumstances, let’s talk about when we accept their ability to consent to have sex. Much like driving, sex can carry potential costs, including pregnancy, emotional harm, and the spread of STIs. Also like driving, sex tends to carry benefits, like physical pleasure, emotional satisfaction and, depending on your perspective, pregnancy. Further, much like driving, there are laws set for the minimum age at which someone can be said to legally consent to sex. These laws seem to be set in balancing the costs and benefits of the act; we do not trust the individuals below certain ages are capable of making responsible decisions about when to engage in the act, with whom, in what contexts, and so on. There is a real risk that younger individuals can be exploited by older ones in this realm. In other words, we want to ensure that people are at least at a reasonable point in their physical and psychological development that can allow them to make an informed choice. Much like driving (or signing contracts), we want people to possess a requisite level of skills before they are allowed to give consent for sex.

This is where the matter begins to get complicated because, as far as I have seen throughout discussions on the matter, people are less than clear about what skills or bodies of knowledge people should possess before they are allowed to engage in the act. While just about everyone appears to believe that people should possess a certain degree of psychological maturity, what that precisely means is not outlined. In this regard, consent is quite unlike driving: people do not need to obtain licenses to have sex (excepting some areas in which sex outside of marriage is not permitted) and do not need to demonstrate particular skills or knowledge. They simply need to reach a certain age. This is (sort of) like giving everyone over the age of, say, 16, a license to drive regardless of their abilities. This lack of clarity regarding what skills we want people to have is no doubt as least partially responsible for the greater variation in age of consent laws, relative to age of driving laws, across the globe.   

The matter of sex is complicated by a host of other factors, but the main issue is this: it is difficult for people to outline what psychological traits we need to have in order to be deemed capable of engaging in the behavior. For driving, this is less of a problem: pretty much everyone can agree on what skills and knowledge they want other drivers to have; for sex, concerns are much more strategic. Here’s a great for instance: one potential consequence (intended for some) to sex is pregnancy and children. Because sex can result in children and those children need to be cared for, some might suggest that people who cannot reasonably be expected to be able to provide well enough for said children should be barred from consenting to sex. This proposal is frequently invoked to justify the position that non-adults shouldn’t be able to consent to sex because they often do not have access to child-rearing resources. It’s an argument that has intuitive appeal, but it’s not applied consistently. That is, I don’t see many people suggesting that the age of consent should be lowered for rich individuals who could care for children, nor that people who fall below a certain poverty line be barred from having sex because they might not be able to care for any children it produced.

There are other arguments one might consider on that front as well: because the biological consequences of sex fall on men and women differently, might we actually hold different standards for men and women when considering whether they are allowed to engage in the behavior? That is, would it be OK for a 12-year-old boy to consent to sex with a 34-year-old woman because she can bear the costs of pregnancy, but not allow the same relationship when the sexes were reversed? Legally we have the answer: no, it’s not acceptable in either case. However, there are some who would suggest such the former relationship is actually acceptable. Even in the realm of law, it would seem, a sex-dependent standard has been upheld in the past. 

Sure hope that’s his mother…

This is clearly not an exhaustive list of questions regarding how age of consent laws might be set, but the point should be clear enough: without a clear standard about what capabilities one needs to possess to be able to engage in sex, we end up with rather unproductive discussions. Making things even trickier, sex is more of a strategic act than driving, yielding greater disagreements over the matter and inflamed passions. It is very difficult to make explicit what abilities we want people to demonstrate in order to be able to consent to sex and reach consensus on them for just this reason. Toss in the prospect of adults taking advantage of teenagers and you have all the makings of a subject people really don’t want to talk about. As such, we are sometimes left in a bit of an awkward spot when thinking about whether exceptions to the spirit of age of consent laws exist. Much like driving, we know that nothing magical happens to someone’s body and brain when they hit a certain age: development is a gradual process that, while exhibiting regularities, does not occur identically for all people. Some people will possess the abilities we’d like them to have before the age of consent; some people won’t possess those abilities even after it.

Importantly – and this is the main point I’ve been hoping to make – this does not mean we need to change or discard these laws. We can recognize that these laws do not fit every case like a glove while still behaving as if they do and intuitively judging them as being about right. Some 14-year-olds do possess the ability to drive, but they are not allowed to legally; some 14-year-olds possess whatever requisite abilities we hope those who consent to sex will have, but we still treat them as if they do not. At least in the US: in Canada, the age of consent is currently 16, up from 14 a few years ago, in some areas of Europe it is still 14, and in some areas of Mexico it can be lower than that.

“Don’t let that distract from their lovely architecture or beaches, though”

Understanding the variation in these intuitions both between countries, between individuals, and over time are interesting matters in their own right. However, there are some who worry about the consequences of even discussing the issue. That is, if we acknowledge that even a single individual is an exception to the general rule, we would be threatening the validity of the rule itself. Now I don’t think this is the case, as I have outlined above, but it is worth adding the following point to that concern: recognizing possible exceptions to the rule is an entirely different matter than the consequences of doing so. Even if there are negative consequences to discussing the matter, that doesn’t change the reality of the situation. If your argument requires that you fail to recognize parts of reality because it might upset people – or that your decree, from the get go, that certain topics cannot be discussed – then your argument should be refined.

There is a fair bit of danger in accepting these taboos: while it might seem all well and good when the taboo is directed against a topic you feel shouldn’t be discussed, a realization needs to be made that your group is not always going to be in charge of what topics fall under that umbrella, and to accept it as legitimate when it benefits you is to accept it as legitimate when it hurts you as well. For instance, not wanting to talk about sex with children out of fear it would cause younger teens to become sexually active yielded the widely-ineffective abstinence-only sex education (and, as far as I can tell, talking comprehensive sex education does not result in worse outcomes, but I’m always open to evidence that it does). There is a real hunger in people to understand the world and to be able to voice what is on their mind; denying that comes with very real perils.

The Connection Between Economics and Promiscuity

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

It will help until the research process is automated, anyway

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The dual-purpose marriage/friendship ring

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

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

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