Category Archives: Sexism

The Sometimes Significant Effects Of Sexism

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

So grab your knife and best dancing shoes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

(Not So) Simple Jury Persuasion: Beauty And Guilt

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

Hypothesis 1: Haters gonna hate?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some Thoughts On Gender Bias In Academia

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Gender bias can be something of a “sexy” topic for many; the kind of issue that can easily get large groups of people worked up and in the mood to express opinions full of anger, mockery, and the word “duh”. On a related note, there’s been an article going around by Moss-Rascusin et al (2012) concerning whether some science faculty members tend to be slightly biased in favor of men, relative to women, and whether said subtle biases might be responsible for some portion of some gender gaps. This paper, and some associated commentary, has brought to mind a few thoughts that I happen to find quite interesting; thoughts about bias that I would like to at least give some consideration amidst all the rest of the coverage this article has been getting.

First one to encounter life-altering discrimination… wins, I guess…

First, about the study itself: Moss-Racusin et al (2012) sent out fake undergraduate materials (which included a brief statement about future goals and a little bit of background information regarding things like letters of recommendation and GRE scores) to 127 faculty members in either biology, chemistry, or physics departments. These materials differed only in terms of the name of applications (either John or Jennifer), and the faculty members were asked to evaluate the student, falsely believing that these evaluations would be used to help the student’s career development.The results of this experiment showed that the faculty members tended to rate the student’s competence and hireability lower when it was Jennifer, relative to John. Further, these faculty members offered more mentoring advice to John as well as recommending an annual salary of $4000 less to Jennifer, on average (though that salary was still around $25,000, which isn’t too bad…). Also, the faculty members tended to report that they liked Jennifer more.

What we have here looks like a straightforward case of sex-based discrimination. While people liked the woman more, they also saw her as less competent, at least in these fields particular fields, given identical credentials (even if these credentials were rather merge in scope). Off the top of my head, I see nothing glaringly wrong with this study, so I’m fine with accepting the results; there most certainly did seem to be a bias in this context, albeit not an overtly hostile one. There are, however. a few notes worthy of consideration: first, the authors don’t really examine why this bias exists. The authors suggest (i.e. say it’s reasonable…) that this bias is due to pervasive cultural stereotypes, but as far as I can see, that’s just an assertion; they really didn’t do anything to test in order to see if that’s the case here or not. Sure, they administered the “Modern Sexism Scale*”, but I have my reservations about precisely what that scale is supposed to be measuring. Like many studies in psychology, this paper is big on presenting and restating findings (people discriminate by sex because they’re sexist) but light on explanatory power.

Another interesting piece of information worthy of consideration that comes to mind relates to a previous paper, published the same journal one year prior. Ceci & Williams (2011) documented an impressive amount of evidence that ran counter to claims of women being discriminated against in science fields in terms of having their manuscripts reviewed, being awarded grant funding, and also being interviewed and subsequently hired (at least in regards to PhDs applying for tenure-track positions at R1 institutions in the natural sciences). When discrimination was found in their analysis, it was typically fleeting in size, inconsistent in which gender it favored, and, further, it often wasn’t found at all. So, potentially, the results of the current paper, which are themselves rather modest in size, could just be a fluke, resulting from how little information about these applicants was provided (in other words, faculty members might have been falling back on sex as an important source of information, given that they lacked much else in the way of other useful information). While Moss-Racusin et al (2012) suggest that the subtle biases they found might translate into later discrimination resulting in gender gaps, it would require a fairly odd pattern of discrimination, where, on the one hand, women are discriminated against in some contexts because they’re viewed as less competent, but then are subsequently published, awarded grants, and hired at the same rate as men anyway, despite those perceptions (which could potentially be interpreted as suggesting that the standards are subsequently set lower for women).

“Our hiring committee has deemed you incompetent as a researcher; welcome aboard!”

Peculiar patterns of how and when discrimination would need to work aside, there’s another point that I found to be the most interesting of all, and it’s the one I was hoping to focus on. This point comes in the form of a comment made by Jerry Coyne over at Why Evolution Is True. Coyne apparently finds it very surprising that this bias against women in the Moss-Racusin et al (2012) paper was displayed in equal force by both male and female faculty members. Coyne later repeats his surprise in a subsequent post on the topic, so this doesn’t just appear to be a slip on the keyboard; he really was surprised. What I find so interesting about this surprise is what it would seem to imply: the default assumption is that when a woman is being discriminated against, a man ought to be the culprit.

Granted, that interpretation takes a little bit of reading between the lines, but there’s something to it, I feel. There must have been some expectation that was violated in order for there to be surprise, so if that wasn’t Coyne’s default assumption, I would be curious as to what his assumption was. I get the sense that this assumption would not be limited to Coyne, however; it seems to have come up in other areas as well, perhaps most notably in the case of the abortion issue. Abortion debates often get framed as part of “The War on Women”, with opposition to abortion being seen as the male side and support for abortion being seen as the female side. This is fairly interesting considering the fact that men and women tend to hold very similar views on abortion, with both groups opposing it roughly as often as they support it.

If I had to guess at the underlying psychology behind that read-in assumption (assuming my assessment is correct), it would go something like this: when people perceive a victim, they’re more or less required to perceive a perpetrator as well; it’s a requirement of the cognitive moral template. Whether that perpetrator actually exists or not can be beside the point, but some people are going to look like better perpetrators than others. In this specific instance, when women, as a group, are supposed to be the victims, that really only leaves non-women as potential perpetrators. This is due to two major reasons: first, men may make better perpetrators in general for a variety of reasons and, second, the parties represented in this moral template for perpetrator and victim can’t be the same party; if you want an effective moral claim, you can’t be a victim of yourself. A tendency to assume men are the culprits when women are supposed to be the victims could be further exacerbated in the event that women are also more likely to be seen as victims generally.

An observation made by Alice Cooper (1975) when he penned the line, “Only women bleed…”

The larger point is, assuming that all the effects reported in the Moss-Racusin et al (2012) study were accurately detected and consistently replicated, there are two gender biases reported here: Jennifer is rated as less competent and John is rated as less likable, both strictly on gendered grounds. However, I get the impression that only one of those biases will likely be paid much mind, as has been the case in pretty much all the reporting about the study. While people may talk about the need to remedy the bias against women, I doubt that those same people will be concerned about bridging the “likability gap” between men and women as well. It would seem that ostensible concerns for sexism can be, ironically, inadvertently sexist themselves.

*[EDIT] As an aside, it’s rather odd that the Modern Sexism Scale only concerns itself with (what it assumes is) sexism against women specifically; nothing in that scale would in anyway appear to assess sexism against men.

References: Ceci SJ, & Williams WM (2011). Understanding current causes of women’s underrepresentation in science. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 108 (8), 3157-62 PMID: 21300892

Moss-Racusin CA, Dovidio JF, Brescoll VL, Graham MJ, & Handelsman J (2012). Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favor male students. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America PMID: 22988126

Just A Little Off The Top

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In my last post I suggested that humans likely possess a series of modules designed to assess victim characteristics when it comes to assessing their associated victimhood claims. Simply put, there are some people who make better social investments than others, and, accordingly, would tend to have their victimhood claims seen as more legitimate than those others. Specifically, I noted that men might be at something of a disadvantage when attempting to advance a victimhood claim, relative to women, as women might tend to be better targets of social investment (at least in certain contexts; I would be hesitant to assume that this is the case a prior across all contexts).

Coincidentally, I happened to come across this article (and associated Reddit post) today discussing whether or not male newborns should be circumcised. I feel the article and, more importantly, the comments discussing the article serve as an interesting (if non-scientific) case study in the weight of moral claims between genders. So let’s talk about the moral reactions of people to circumcision.

“There might have been a slight mix-up, but don’t worry; we’ll do your ears for free!”

In the debate over whether male offspring should be circumcised around the time they’re born, those in favor of circumcision seem to tend and phrase their stance in a consequentialist fashion, often claiming one or more of three* things: (1) circumcised penises are more appealing aesthetically, (2) circumcision brings with it health benefits in the form of a reduction in the risk of STI transmission, and (3) that the removal of the foreskin doesn’t really do any serious harm to the child. The function of these arguments would appear fairly self-evident: they are attempts to disengage the moral psychology of others by way of denying a victim, and without a victim the moral template cannot be completed. Those in favor of allowing circumcision, then, are generally claiming that being circumcised is a benefit, or at the very least not a cost, and you don’t get to be a victim without being perceived to have suffered a cost.

Beginning with the second point – the reduction of risk for contracting HIV – there is evidence to suggest that circumcision does nothing of the sort. Though I am unable to access the article, this paper in The Journal of Sexual Medicine reports that not only is circumcision not associated with a lower incidence of STIs in men, including HIV, but it might even be associated with a slightly higher incidence of infection (for whatever reason). The studies that claim to find the 40-60% reduction in the female-to-male transmission rate of HIV in circumcised men seem to have been conducted largely in African populations, where other issues, such as general hygiene, might be a factor. Specifically, one of the proposed reasons why uncircumcised males in these studies are more likely to become infected is that the foreskin traps fluids and pathogens, increasing bodily contact duration with them. In other words, a little soap and water after sex (along with a condom during sex, of course) could likely accomplish the same goal as circumcision in these cases, so the removal of the foreskin might be just a bit extreme of a remedy.

I’m most certainly not an expert in this field so don’t just take my word for it, but my perspective on the matter is that the results about whether circumcision decreases the transmission of HIV are mixed at best. Further, at least some of the hypothesized means through which circumcision could potentially work in this regard appear perfectly achievable through other, non-surgical means. Now that I’ve covered at least some ground on that evidentiary front, we can turn towards the more interesting, moral side. On the basis of this mixed evidence and a general lack of understanding as to how circumcision might work, the report issued by the American Academy of Pediatrics suggested that:

“…the benefits of newborn male circumcision justify access to this procedure for families who choose it” [emphasis mine].

“If you can’t be trusted to wash it properly, I’m going to cut it off”

One interesting facet of our moral judgments is that, to some extent, they are nonconsequentist. That is to say, even if an act leads to a positive consequence, it can still be considered immoral. The classic example of this concerns people’s intuitions in the trolley and footbridge dilemmas: in the former dilemma, roughly 90% of subjects say that diverting an out-of-control trolley away from five hikers and towards one hiker is morally acceptable; in the latter dilemma, a roughly equivalent percentage of subjects say that pushing another person in front of a train to save five hikers is morally impermissible (DeScioli & Kurzban, 2009). Despite the consequences of each action being identical, the moral feel of each action is radically different. Thus, to say that an action is justified strictly by referencing a cost/benefit ratio (and a rather fuzzy and potentially flawed one at that) can be to miss the point morally to some degree. That said, to some other degree it does hit the mark because, as previously mentioned, moral claims need a victim, and without costs there can be no victim.

This conflict between the nonconsequentialist and consequentialist aspect of our moral psychology appear readily visible in the reactions of people when it comes to comparing elective surgery on the genitals of boys to that of elective surgery when performed on girls. A few years back, the American Academy of Pediatrics also recommended reconsidering US law regarding whether or not doctors should be allowed to engage in a “ceremonial” female circumcision. Though not much is said about the details of the procedure explicitly, the sense the various articles discussing it give is that it is a “harmless” one, essentially amounting to a pinprick to the clitoris or clitoral hood capable of drawing a drop of blood.The AAP recommended this reconsideration in order to, hopefully, appease certain cultural groups that might otherwise take their daughters overseas to engage in a much more extreme version of the ritual where piece of the external genitalia are cut or fully removed. This recommendation by the AAP was soon reversed, following a political outcry.

It’s worth noting that, during discussions on the topic of circumcision, there are many people who get rather upset when a comparison is made between the female and male varieties, typically because the female version is more extreme. A complete removal of the clitoris is, no doubt, worse than the removal of the foreskin of the penis. When comparing a pinprick to the clitoris that does no permanent damage to a complete or partial removal of the male foreskin though, that argument would seem to lose some of its weight. Even without that consequentialist weight, however, people were still very strongly opposed the ceremonial pricking on (more or less) nonconsequentialist grounds:

“We retracted the policy because it is important that the world health community understands the AAP is totally opposed to all forms of female genital cutting, both here in the U.S. and anywhere else in the world,” said AAP President Judith S. Palfrey. [emphasis, mine]

The interesting question to me, then, is why male genital cutting isn’t currently opposed as vehemently in all forms when performed on newborn infants who cannot consent to the procedure (Wikipedia puts the percentage of newborn boys being circumcised before they leave the hospital at over 50% in the US). One could try and point, again, to the iffy data on HIV reduction, but even in the event that such data was good and no alternatives were available to reduce the spread of the virus, it would leave one unable to explain why circumcision as a practice dates back thousands of years, well before HIV was ever a concern. It would also still leave the moral question of consent very much alive: specifically, what are the acceptable bounds for parents when making decisions for their dependent offspring? A pinprick to the genitals for culture reasons apparently falls into the non-accepted category, whereas the remove of foreskin for aesthetic or cultural reasons is accepted.

He’ll appreciate all that endorsement cash when he’s grown up.

Now maybe, as some suggest, the female genital pricking would to some extent morally license the more extreme version of the practice. That would certainly be a bad outcome to the procedure, and such an argument seeks to add the consequentialist weight back into the argument. Indeed, most all the articles on the topic, along with many of the commenters, likened the pricking to its far more extreme expression elsewhere. However, I get the sense that such a justification for avoiding pricking might represent a post hoc justification for the aversion. I get that sense because I saw no evidence presented that this moral licensing outcome would actually obtain (just a concern that it would) and no indication that more people would really be OK with the procedure if the moral licensing risks could be reduced or removed. I don’t think I recall anyone saying, “I’d be alright with the clitoral pinprick if…”

Returning to the gender issue, however, why do people not raise similar concerns about male circumcision licensing other forms of harm to men? My sense is that concerns like these are not raised with nearly as much force or as frequently because, in general, people are less bothered by males being hurt, infants or otherwise, for reasons I mentioned in the last post. Even in the event that these people are just incredible swayed by the HIV data, (though why people accept or reject evidence in the first place is also an interesting topic) those potential benefits wouldn’t be realized by the boys until at least the point at which they’re sexually active, so circumcising boys when they’re newborns without any indication they even sort of consent seems premature.

So when people say male and female circumcision aren’t comparable, I feel they have more in their mind then just the consequentialist outcome. I get the sense that the emotional feel of the issues can’t be compared, in part, because one happens to men and one happens to women, and our psychology tends to treat such cases differently.

*Note: this list of three items is not intended to be comprehensive. There are also cultural or religious reasons cited for circumcision, but I won’t be considering them here, as they didn’t appear well represented in the current articles.

References: DeScioli, P., & Kurzban, R. (2009). Mysteries of Morality Cognition , 112, 281-299 DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2009.05.008

No, Really; What About The Men?

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If you’re the kind of person who has frequented internet discussion boards, you’ll know that debates over sexism can get a bit heated. You might also have noticed that many problems men faced are not infrequently dismissed on the grounds of being relative unimportant when compared to issues women face. One common form this dismissal takes is the purposely misspelled, “what about teh poor menz?”, since everyone on the internet is automatically intellectually twelve. In fact, the whole sexism debate is often treated like a zero-sum game, where reducing sexism against one sex makes the other one worse off. We could debate whether that’s the case or not, but that’s not my goal today. Today, my goal is to ask, quite seriously, what about the men?

“Check out the male privilege on that guy”

There were two posts on Reddit that inspired this post: the first is this story of President Obama reacting to the Akin quote regarding rape. Here’s what Obama had to say:

“The views expressed were offensive,” said Obama. “Rape is rape. And the idea that we should be parsing and qualifying and slicing what types of rape we are talking about doesn’t make sense to the American people and certainly doesn’t make sense to me. So what I think these comments do underscore is why we shouldn’t have a bunch of politicians, a majority of whom are men, making health care decisions on behalf of women.” [emphasis mine]

Now, it seems to me that what we should want when it comes to our elected official writing legislation regarding our health care has nothing to do with gender per se; it should have everything to do with the policies themselves, not their proposers. For instance, imagine that Akin was a woman who uttered the same nonsensical quote about rape pregnancies: would that be an opportune time to comment about how women in general can’t be trusted to make their own health care decisions? I’d think not, yet it seemed to be a fine time to draw attention to the male gender.

Here’s the second post: the radically different prices that men and women can be charged for admission to certain venues. This is about as blatant case of sexism as you could think of. It’s also exceedingly common: bars and clubs hold “ladies nights” where women are charged less – if they’re charged at all – for entry and drinks on no basis other than gender. What you rarely, if ever, find is the reverse, where men are given a pass and women are required to pay a higher premium. Now we could argue about whether this is a good business move (whether it ends up profiting the clubs or not) but that’s not the point here. I doubt many people would accept women being charged higher tuition premiums to attend college, for instance, if it ended up causing the college to profit.

One could also argue about whether ladies nights can be said to do men real harm. Complaining about them might even be conceptualized as a first-world problem, or a whiny privileged male problem. Whether they do or not is still besides the point, which is this: it’s probable that even when a policy hurts or discriminates against men, that harm or discrimination will be taken less seriously than a comparable one directed against women. There is likely be some psychological module devoted to taking into account victim characteristics when assessing victimhood claims, and gender would appear to be a very relevant variable. In fact, I would predict that gender will be an important variable above and beyond the extent to which the sexes historically faced different costs from different acts (rape, for instance, entails the additional risk of pregnancy from a male-on-female case, but not the reverse, so we might expect people to say a woman getting raped is worse than a man being raped).

“It’s illegal to talk on your cell while driving without having my number”

Some intriguing data come to us from Mustard (2001), who examined roughly 80,000 federal sentences across different racial groups, men, and women. Doing so requires controlling for a number of relevant variables, such as offense type and severity, past criminal record, and so on, since the variable of interest is, “the extent to which an individual who is in the same district court, commits the same offense, and has the same criminal history and offense level as another person received a different sentence on the basis on race, ethnicity or gender”. Mustard (2001) found that, after controlling for these variables, some of the usual racial bias come through: sentences that were handed out to blacks and Hispanics were, on average, 5.5 and 4.5 months longer than comparable sentences handled out to whites. Seems like a run-of-the-mill case of discrimination so far, I’m sure. However, the male-female discrepancy didn’t fair any better: men, on average, also received sentences 5.5 months longer than women did. Huh; it would seem that the male-female bias is about as bad, if not worse, than racial biases in this case.

It’s potentially worth noting that these disparities could come about for two reasons: sentencing within the guidelines – just differently between genders – or departing from the sentencing guidelines. For example, both men and women could be sentenced within the appropriate guidelines, but women tend to be sentenced towards the low end of the sentencing range while men are sentenced towards the high end. Granted, bias is still bias, whether it’s due to departures or sticking to the accepted range of sentencing length, but, as it turns out, roughly 70% of the gender difference could be accounted for by departures from sentencing guidelines; specifically, women were more often given downward departures from the guidelines, relative to men. When blacks and Hispanics are granted a downward departure, it averages about 5.5 months less than departures given to whites; for women, the average departure was almost 7 months greater than for men. Further, when the option of no jail time is available, females are also more likely to be granted no time, relative to men (just as whites are to blacks).

It’s also worth noting, as Mustard (2001) does, that these disparities were only examined at the level of sentencing. It would not be much of a leap to consider the possibility that similar disparities existed in other aspects of the moral domain, such as suspicion regarding a perpetrator, the devotion of resources to certain varieties of crime, or even assessments concerning whether a crime took place at all. Further still, it doesn’t consider the everyday social, non-criminal, extent to which men may not given certain considerations that women would. If that is the case, the effects of these biases that we see in this paper are likely to be cumulative, and the extent of the differences we see at time of sentencing might only reflect a part of the overall discriminatory pattern. Simply noticing the pattern, however, does not explain it, which means it’s time to consider some potential reasons why women may be assessed more positively than men when it comes to handing out punishment.

Whether he wins or loses here, he still loses.

Perhaps the most obvious issue is one I’ve touched on previously: men could be treating women better (or avoiding punishing them harshly) in hopes of receiving sexual favors later. In this regard, women are often able to offer men something that other men simply can’t, which makes them a particularly appealing social asset. However, such an explanation is likely incomplete, as it would only be able to account for cases in which men treated women preferentially, not cases where women treated other women preferentially as well. While the current data doesn’t speak to that issue (the interaction between the sex of the judge, sex of the convict, and sentencing length was not examined), I wouldn’t doubt it plays a significant role in accounting for this bias.

Another potential explanation is that men may in fact be more likely to be dangerous, leading people, men and women alike, to assume men are more likely to be guilty, acted more intentionally, and should be punished more severely (among other things). If the former proposition is true, then such a bias would likely be useful on the whole. However, that does not imply it would be useful or accurate for any one given case, especially if other, potentially more useful, sources of information are available (such as criminal history). Gender would only be a proxy for the other variables people wish to assess, which means its use would likely lead to inaccurate assessments in many individual cases. 

Finally, one other issue returns to the point I was making last post: if women are, all things considered, better targets of social investment for other people relative to men, punishing them harshly is unlikely to lead to a good strategic outcome. Simply put, punishing women may be socially costlier than punishing men, so people might shy away from it when possible. While this is unlikely to be an exhaustive list of potential explanations for this discriminatory bias, it seems a plausible starting position. Now the only thing left to do is to get people to care about solving (and seeing) the problem in the first place.

References: Mustard, D. B. (2001). Racial, ethnic, and gender disparities in sentencing: Evidence from the U.S. federal courts. Journal of Law and Economics, 44, 285-314 DOI: 10.1086/320276

I Know I Am, But What Are You? Competitive Use Of Victimhood

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It’s no secret; I’m a paragon of mankind. Beyond simply being a wildly-talented genius, I’m also in such peak physical form that it’s common for people to mistake me for a walking Statue of David with longer hair. As the now-famous Old Spice commercial says, “Sadly, you are not me”, but wouldn’t it be nice for you if you could convince other people that you were? There’s no need to answer that; of course it would be, but the chances of you successfully pulling such a feat off are slim to none.

The more general point here is that, in the social world, you can benefit yourself by strategically manipulating what and how other people think about you and those around you. Further, this manipulation is going to be easier to pull off the less objectively observable the object of that manipulation is. For instance, if I could convince you that my future prospects are good – that I would be a powerful social ally – you might be more inclined to invest in maintaining a relationship with me and giving me assistance in the hopes that I will repay you in kind at some later date. However, I would have harder time trying to convince you I have blue eyes when you can easily verify that they are, in fact, brown.

He’s going to have a hell of a time convincing his boyfriend he’s gay now.

As I’ve written about before, one of those fuzzy concepts open to manipulation is victimhood. Given that legitimate victimhood status can be a powerful resource in the social world, and victimhood requires there be one or more perpetrators, it should come as no surprise that people often find themselves in disagreement about almost every facet of it: from harm, to intent, to blame, and far beyond. Different social contexts – such as morally condemning others vs. being morally condemned yourself – pose people with different adaptive problems to solve, and we should expect that people will process information in different ways, contingent on those contexts. A recent paper by Sullivan et al. (2012) examined the matter over the course of five studies, asking about people’s intuitions concerning the extent of their own victimhood in three contexts: one in which there was no harm being done, one in which a group they belong to was accused of doing harm, and one in which another group was accused of doing harm.

In the first study, 49 male undergrads were presented with a news story (though it was actually a fake news story because psychologists are tricksters) that had one of three conclusions: (a) men and women had equal opportunities in modern society, (b) women were discriminated against in modern society, but it was due to their own choices and biology, or (c) women were discriminated against, and this discrimination was intentionally perpetrated by men. Following this, the men indicated on a 7-point scale whether they thought men or women suffered more relative discrimination in modern society (where 1 indicated men suffered less, 4 indicated they suffered equally, and 7 indicated men suffered more). When confronted with the story where women were not discriminated against, men averaged a 1.69 on the scale; a similar set of results was found when women were depicted as suffering from self-inflicted discrimination, averaging a 1.87. However, when men were depicted as being the perpetrators of this discrimination, the ratings of perceived male oppression rose to 2.61. When men, as a group, were accused of causing harm, they reacted by suggesting they were themselves a victim of more discrimination, as if to suggest that the discrimination women faced wasn’t so bad.

What’s curious about those results is that men didn’t rate the discrimination they faced, relative to women, as more equal when the news article suggested equality in that domain. Rather, they only adjusted their ratings up when their group was painted as the perpetrators of discrimination. The information they were being given didn’t seem to phase them much until it got personal, which is pretty neat.

A similar pattern of findings arose for women in a following experiment. One-hundred forty-two women read a fictional news story about how men were discriminated against when it came to hiring practices, and this discrimination either came from other men or women. Following that, the women filled out the same 7-point scale as before. When men were depicted as responsible for the discrimination against other men, women averaged a 5.16 on the scale, but when women were depicted as being the cause of that discrimination, that number rose to a 5.42. While this rise in ratings of victimhood was smaller than the rise seen with the men, it was still statistically significant. The difference in the scale of these results might be due to the subjects, (the males were undergrads whereas the women were recruited on Mturk) or perhaps the nature of the stories themselves, which were notably different across experiments.

Sexist male behavior is the cause of all the problems for women across society. On the other hand, 65% of women might not hire a man. Seems even-handed to me.

Two of the five experiments also examined whether one group discriminating against another in general was enough to trigger competitive victimhood, or whether one’s own group had to be the perpetrator of the discrimination to cause the behavior. Since they had similar results, I’ll focus on the one regarding race. In this experiment, 51 White students read a story about how Black students tended to be discriminated against when it came to university admissions, and this discrimination was perpetrated either predominately by other White people, or by Asian people. Following this, they filled out that same 7-point scale. When Blacks were being discriminated against by Asians, the White participants averaged a 2.0 on the scale, but when it was Whites discriminating against Black students, this average rose to 2.78. What these results demonstrate is that it’s not enough for some group to just be claiming victimhood status; in order to trigger competitive victimhood, your group needs to be named as the perpetrator.

These results fit neatly with previous research demonstrating that when it comes to assigning blame, people are less likely to assign blame to a victim, relative to a non-victim or hero. When people are being blamed for causing some harm, they tend to see themselves as greater victims, likely in order to better dissuade others from engaging in punishment. However, when people are not being blamed, there is no need to deflect punishment, and, accordingly, the bias to see oneself as a victim diminishes.

There is one part of the paper that bothered me in a big way: the authors’ suggestions about which groups face more victimization objectively. As far as I can tell, there is no good way to measure victimhood objectively, and, as the results of this experiment show, subjective claims and assessments of victimhood themselves are likely to modified by outside factors. For example, consider two cases: (a) a woman suggests that her boyfriend is physically abusing her, vs. (b) a man suggesting that his girlfriend is physically abusing him. Strictly in terms of which claim is more likely to be believed – regardless of whether it’s true or not – I would put the man’s claim at a disadvantage. Further, if it is believed, there are likely different costs and benefits for men and women surrounding such a claim. Perhaps women would be more likely to receive support, where a man might just be painted as a wimp and lose status among both his male and female peers.

Whether that pattern itself actually holds is besides the point. The larger issue here is that this strategy of claiming victimhood may not work equally well for all people, and it’s important to consider that when assessing people’s judgments of their victimhood. The third-parties that are assessing these claims are not merely passive pawns waiting to be manipulated by others; they have their own adaptive problems to solve when it comes to assessment. To the extent that these problems entailed reproductive costs and benefits, selection would have fashioned psychological mechanisms to deal with them. A man might have more of a vested interest in concerning himself with an attractive woman’s claim to victimhood over a sexually unappealing man, as preferentially helping one of the two might tend to be more reproductively useful.

How often do you come across stories of knights rescuing strange “dudes in distress”, relative to strange damsels?

It should be noted that claiming victimhood is not the only way of deflecting punishment; shifting the blame back towards the victim would likely work as well. The results indicated that competitive victimhood was not triggered in those contexts, presumably because there was no need for it. That’s not to say that they two could not work together – i.e. you’re the cause of your own misfortune as well as the cause of mine – but rather to note that different strategies are available, and will likely be utilized differently by different groups, contingent on their relative costs and benefits. Further work is going to want to not only figure out what those other tactics are, but assess their effectiveness, as rated by third-parties.

I’d like to conclude by talking briefly about the quality of the “theory” put forth by the authors in this paper to explain their results: social identity theory. Here is how they define it in the introduction:

Individuals are motivated to maintain a positive moral evaluation of their social group…we argue that when confronted with accusations of in-group harm doing…individuals will defensively attempt to bolster the in-group’s moral status in order to diffuse the threat.

As Steven Pinker has noted, explanations like these are most certainly not theories; they are simply restatements of findings that need a theory to explain them. Unfortunately, non-evolutionary minded researchers will often resort to this kind of circularity as they lack any way of escaping it. To suggest that people have all these cognitive biases to just “feel good” about themselves or their group is nonsense (Kurzban, 2010). Feeling good, on its own, is not something that could possibly have been selected for in the first place, but even if it could have been, it would be curious why people wouldn’t simply just feel good about their social group, rather than going through cognitive gymnastics to try and justify it. I find the evolutionary framework to provide a much more satisfying answer to the question, as well as illuminating future directions for research. As far as I can tell, the “feel good” theory does not.

References: Kurzban, R. (2010). Why everyone (else) is a hypocrite. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Sullivan, D., Landau, M.J., Branscombe, N.R., & Rothschild, Z.K. (2012). Competitive victimhood as a response to accusations of ingroup harm doing. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 102, 778-795.

Tucker Max, Hitler, And Moral Contagion.

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Disgust is triggered off not primarily by the sensory properties of an object, but by ideational concerns about what it is, or where it has been…The first law, contagion, states that “things which have once been in contact with each other continue ever afterwards to act on each other”…When an offensive (or revered) person or animal touches a previously neutral object, some essence or residue is transmitted, even when no material particles are visible. – Haidt et al. (1997, emphasis theirs).

Play time is over; it’s time to return to the science and think about what we can learn of human psychology from the Tucker Max and Planned Parenthood incident. I’d like to start with a relevant personal story. A few years ago I was living in England for several months. During my stay, I managed to catch my favorite band play a few times. After one of their shows, I got a taxi back to my hotel, picked up my guitar from my room, and got back to the venue. I waited out back with a few other fans by the tour bus. Eventually, the band made their way out back, and I politely asked if they would mind signing my guitar. They agreed, on the condition that I not put it on eBay (which I didn’t, of course), and I was soon the proud owner of several autographs. I haven’t played the guitar since for fear of damaging it.

This is my guitar; there are many like it, but this one is mine…and some kind of famous people wrote on it once.

My behavior, and other similar behavior, is immediately and intuitively understandable by almost all people, especially anyone who enjoys the show Pawnstars, yet very few people take the time to reflect on just how strange it is. By getting the signatures on the guitar, I did little more than show it had been touched very briefly by people I hold in high esteem. Nothing I did fundamentally altered the guitar in anyway, and yet somehow it was different; it was distinguished in some invisible way from the thousands of others just like it, and no doubt more valuable in the eyes of other fans. This example is fairly benign; what happened with Planned Parenthood and Tucker Max was not. In that case, the result of such intuitive thinking was that a helpful organization was out $500,000 and many men and women lost access to their services locally. Understanding what’s going on in both cases better will hopefully help people not make mistakes like that again. It probably won’t, but wouldn’t it be nice if did?

The first order of business in understanding what happened is to take a step back and consider the universal phenomenon of disgust. One function of our disgust psychology is to deal with the constant threat of microbial and parasitic organisms. By avoiding ingesting or contacting potentially contaminated materials, the chances of contracting costly infections or harmful parasites are lowered. Further, if by sheer force of will or accident a disgusting object is actually ingested, it’s not uncommon for a vomiting reaction to be triggered, serving to expel as much of the contaminant as possible. While a good portion of our most visceral disgust reactions focus on food, animals, or bodily products, not all of them do; the reaction extends into the realm of behavior, such as deviant sexual behavior, and perceived physical abnormalities, like birth defects or open wounds. Many of the behaviors that trigger some form of disgust put us in no danger of infection or toxic exposure, so there must be more to the story than just avoiding parasites and toxins.

One way Haidt et al. (1997) attempt to explain the latter part of this disgust reaction is by referencing concerns about humans being reminded of their animal nature, or thinking of their body as a temple, which are, frankly, not explanations at all. All such an “explanation” does is push the question back a step to, “why would being reminded of our animal nature or profaning a temple cause disgust?” I feel there are two facts that stand out concerning our disgust reaction that help to shed a lot of light on the matter: (1) disgust reactions seem to require social interaction to develop, meaning what causes disgust varies to some degree from culture to culture, as well as within cultures, and (2) disgust reactions concerning behavior or physical traits tend to focus heavily on behaviors or traits that are locally abnormal in some way. So, the better question to ask is: “If the function of disgust is primarily related to avoidance behaviors, what are the costs and benefits to people being disgusted by whatever they are, and how can we explain the variance?” This brings us nicely to the topic of Hitler.

Now I hate V-neck shirts even more.

As Haidt et al. (1997) note, people tend to be somewhat reluctant to wear used clothing, even if that clothing had been since washed; it’s why used clothing, even if undamaged, is always substantially cheaper than a new, identical article. If the used clothing in question belonged to a particularly awful person – in this case, Hitler – people are even less interested in wearing it. However, this tendency is reversed for items owned by well-liked figures, just like my initial example concerning my guitar demonstrated. I certainly wouldn’t let a stranger draw on my guitar, and I’d be even less willing to let someone I personally disliked give it a signature. I could imagine myself even being averse to playing an instrument privately that’s been signed by someone I disliked. So why this reluctance? What purpose could it possibly serve?

One very plausible answer is that the core issue here is signaling, as it was in the Tucker Max example. People are morally disgusted by, and subsequently try and avoid, objects or behaviors that could be construed as sending the wrong kind of signal. Inappropriate or offensive behavior can lead to social ostracism, the fitness consequences of which can be every bit as extreme as those from parasites. Likewise, behavior that signals inappropriate group membership can be socially devastating, so you need to be cautious about what signal you’re sending. One big issue that people need to contend with is that signals themselves can be interpreted many different ways. Let’s say you go over to a friend’s house, and find a Nazi flag hanging in the corner of a room; how should you interpret what you’re seeing? Perhaps he’s a history buff, specifically interested in World War II; maybe a relative fought in that war and brought the flag home as a trophy; he might be a Nazi sympathizer; it might even be the case that he doesn’t know what the flag represents and just liked the design. It’s up to you to fill in the blanks, and such a signal comes with a large risk factor: not only could an interpretation of the signal hurt your friend, it could hurt you as well for being seen as complicit in his misdeed.

Accordingly, if that signaling model is correct, then I would predict that signal strength and sign should tend to outweigh the contagion concerns, especially if that signal can be interpreted negatively by whoever you’re hoping to impress. Let’s return to the Hitler example: the signaling model would predict that people should prefer to publicly wear Hitler’s actual black V-neck shirt (as it doesn’t send any obvious signals) over wearing a brand new shirt that read “I Heart Hitler”. This parallels the Tucker Max example: people were OK with the idea of him donating money so long as he did so in a manner that kept his name off the clinic. Tucker’s money wasn’t tainted because of the source as much as it was tainted because his conditions made sure the source was unambiguous. Since people didn’t like the source and wanted to reject the perceived association, their only option was to reject the money.

This signaling explanation also sheds light on why the things that cause disgust are generally seen as, in some way, abnormal or deviant. Those who physically look abnormal may carry genes that are less suited for the current environment, or be physically compromised in such a way as it’s better to avoid them than invest in them. Those who behave in a deviant, inappropriate, or unacceptable manner could be signaling something important about their usefulness, friendliness, or their status as a cooperative individual, depending on the behavior. Disgust of deviants, in this case, helps people pick which conspecifics they’d be most profitably served by, and, more generally, helps people fit into their group. You want to avoid those who won’t bring you much reward for your investment, and avoid doing things that get on other people’s bad side. Moral disgust would seem to serve both functions well.

Which is why I now try and make new friends over mutual hatreds instead of mutual interests.

Now returning one final time to the Planned Parenthood issue, you might not like the idea of Tucker Max having his name on a clinic because you don’t like him. I understand that concern, as I wouldn’t like to play a guitar that was signed by members of the Westboro Baptist Church. On that level, by criticizing those who don’t like the idea of a Tucker Max Planned Parenthood clinic, I might seem like a hypocrite; I would be just as uncomfortable in a similar situation. There is a major difference between the two positions though, as a quick example will demonstrate.

Let’s say there’s a group of starving people in a city somewhere that you happen to be charge of. You make all the calls concerning who gets to bring anything into your city, so anyone who wants to help needs to go through you. In response to the hunger problem, the Westboro Baptist Church offers to donate a truck load of food to those in need, but they have one condition: the truck that delivers the food will bear a sign reading “This food supplied courtesy of the Westboro Baptist Church”. If you dislike the Church, as many people do, you have something of a dilemma: allow an association with them in order to help people out, or turn the food away on principle.

For what it’s worth, I would rather see people eat than starve, even if it means that the food comes from a source I don’t like. If your desire to help the starving people eat is trumped by your desire to avoid associating with the Church, don’t tell the starving people you’re really doing it for their own good, because you wouldn’t be; you’d be doing it for your own reasons at their expense, and that’s why you’d be an asshole.

References: Haidt, J., Rozin, P., McCauley, C., & Imada, S. (1997). Body, psyche, and culture: The relationship between disgust and morality. Psychology and Developing Societies, 9, 107-131.

Tucker Max V. Planned Parenthood

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My name is Tucker Max, and I am an asshole. I get excessively drunk at inappropriate times, disregard social norms, indulge every whim, ignore the consequences of my actions, mock idiots and posers, sleep with more women than is safe or reasonable, and just generally act like a raging dickhead. -Tucker Max

It should come as no surprise that there are more than a few people in this world who don’t hold Tucker Max in high esteem. He makes no pretenses of being what most would consider a nice person, and makes no apologies for his behavior; behavior which is apparently rewarded with tons of sex and money. Recently, however, this reputation prevented him from making a $500,000 donation to Planned Parenthood. Naturally, this generated something of a debate, full of plenty of moral outrage and inconsistent arguments. Since I’ve been thinking and writing about reasoning and arguing lately, I decided to treat myself and indulge in a little bit. I’ll do my best to make this educational as well as personal, but I make no promises; this is predominately intellectual play for me.

Sometimes you just have to kick back and treat yourself in a way that avoids going outside enjoying the nice weather.

So here’s the background, as it’s been recounted: Tucker find himself with a tax burden that can be written off to some extent if he donates money charitably. Enterprising guy that he is, he also wants to donate the money in such a way that it can help generate publicity for his new book. After some deliberation, he settles on a donation of $500,000 to Planned Parenthood, as he describes himself as always having been pro-choice, having been helped by Planned Parenthood throughout his life, and, perhaps, finding the prospect funny. His condition for the donation is that he wanted his name on a clinic, which apparently is something Planned Parenthood will consider if you donate enough money. A meeting is scheduled to hammer out the details, but is cancelled a few hours before it was set to take place – as Tucker is driving to it – because Planned Parenthood suddenly became concerned about Tucker’s reputation and backs out of the meeting without offering any alternative options.

I’ll start by stating my opinion: Planned Parenthood made a bad call, and those who are arguing that Planned Parenthood made the correct call don’t have a leg to stand on.

Here’s what wasn’t under debate: whether Planned Parenthood needed money. Their funding was apparently cut dramatically in Texas, where the donation was set to take place, and the money was badly needed. So if Planned Parenthood needed money and turned down such a large sum of it, one can only imagine they had some reasons to do so. One could also hope those reasons were good. From the various articles and comments on the articles that I’ve read defending Planned Parenthood’s actions, there are two sets of reasons why they feel this decision was the right one. The first set I’ll call the explicit arguments – what people say – and the second I’ll call the implicit motivations – what I infer (or people occasionally say) the motivations behind the explicit arguments are.

…but didn’t have access to any reproductive care, as the only Planned Parenthood near me closed.

The explicit arguments contain two main points. The first thrust of the attack is that Tucker’s donation is selfish; his major goal is writing off his taxes and generating publicity, and this taints his action. That much is true, but from there this argument flounders. No one is demanding that Planned Parenthood only accept truly selfless donations. Planned Parenthood itself did not suggest that Tucker’s self-interest had anything at all to do with why they rejected the offer. This explicit argument serves only one real purpose, and that’s character assassination by way of framing Tucker’s donation in the worst possible light. One big issue with this is that I find it rather silly to try and malign Tucker’s character, as he does a fine job of that himself; his self-regarding personality is responsible for a good deal of why he’s famous. Another big issue is that Tucker could have donated that money to any non-profit he wanted, and I doubt Planned Parenthood was the only way he could have achieved his main goals. Just because caring for Planned Parenthood might not have been his primary motive with the donation, it does not mean it played no part in motivating the decision. Similarly, just because someone’s primary motivation for working at their job is money, it does not mean money is the only reason they chose the job they did, out of all the possible jobs they could have picked.

The second explicit argument is the more substantial half. Since Tucker Max is a notable asshole, many people voiced concerns that putting his name on a clinic would do Planned Parenthood a good deal of reputational damage, causing other people to withdraw or withhold their financial or political support. Ultimately, the costs of this reputational damage would end up outweighing Tucker’s donation, so really, it was a smart economic (and political, and moral) move. In fact, one author goes so far as to suggest that taking Tucker’s donation could have put the future of Planned Parenthood as a whole in jeopardy. This argument, at it’s core, suggests that Planned Parenthood lost the battle (Tucker’s donation) to win the war (securing future funding).

There are two big problems with this second argument. Most importantly, the negative outcome of accepting Tucker’s donation is purely imagined. It might have happened, it might not have happened, and there’s absolutely zero way of confirming whether it would have. That does not stop people from assuming that the worst would have happened, as making that assumption gives those defending Planned Parenthood an unverifiable potential victim. As I’ve mentioned before, having a victim on your side of the debate is crucial for engaging the moral psychology of others, and when people are making moral pronouncements they do actively search for victims. The other big problem with this second argument is that it’s staggering inconsistent with the first. Remember, people were very critical of Tucker’s motivations for the donation. One of the most frequently trotted out lines was, “If Tucker really cared about Planned Parenthood, he would have made the donation anonymously anyway. Then, he could have helped the women out and avoided the reputational harm he would have done to Planned Parenthood. Since he didn’t donate anonymously (or at least, I think he didn’t; that’s kind of the rub with anonymous donations), he’s just a total asshole”.

“I was going to refill my birth control prescription here, but if Tucker Max helped keep this clinic open, maybe I’ll just get pregnant instead”

The inconsistency is as follows: people assume that other donors would avoid or politically attack Planned Parenthood if Tucker Max was associated with it. Perhaps some women would even avoid the clinic itself, because it would make them feel upset. Again, maybe that would happen, maybe it wouldn’t. Assuming that it would, one could make the case that if those other supporters really cared about Planned Parenthood, then they shouldn’t let something like an association of a single clinic with Tucker Max dissuade them. The only reason that someone who previously supported Planned Parenthood would be put off would be for personal, self-interested reasons. The very same kind of motivation they criticized Tucker for initially. Instead of bloggers and commenters writing well-reasoned posts about how people shouldn’t stop supporting Planned Parenthood just because Tucker Max has his name on one, they instead praise excluding his sizable donation. One would think anyone who truly supported Planned Parenthood would err on the side of making arguments concerning why people should continue to support it, not why it would be justifiable for people to pull their support in fear of association with someone they don’t like.

Which brings us very nicely to the implicit motivations. The core issue here can be best summed up by Tucker himself:

Most charities are not run to help people, they are run because they are ways for people to signal status about themselves to other people…I wasn’t the “right type” of person to take money from so they’d rather close clinics. It’s the worst kind of elitism, the kind that cloaks itself in altruism. They care more about the perception of themselves and their organization than they care about its effectiveness at actually serving the reproductive needs of women.

People object to Tucker Max’s donation on two main fronts: (1) they don’t want to do anything that benefits Tucker in any way, and (2) they don’t personally want to be associated with Tucker Max in any way. Those two motivations are implicitly followed by a, “…and that’s more important to me than ensuring Planned Parenthood can continue to serve the women and men of their communities”. It looks a lot like a costly display on the part of those who supported the decision. They’re demonstrating their loyalty to their group, or to their ideals, and they’re willing to endure a very large, very real cost to do so. At least, they’re willing to let other people suffer that cost, as I don’t assume all, or even most, of the bloggers and commenters will be directly impacted by this decision.

Whatever ideal it is that they’re committed to, whatever group they’re displaying for, it is not Planned Parenthood. Perhaps they feel they’re fighting to end what they perceive as sexism, or misogyny, or a personal slight because Tucker wrote something about fat girls they found insulting. What they’re fighting for specifically is irrelevant. What is relevant is that they’re willing to see Planned Parenthoods close and men and women lose access to their services before they’re willing to compromise whatever it is they’re primarily fighting for. They might dress their objections up to make it look like they aren’t self-interested or fighting some personal battle, but the disguise is thin indeed. One could make the case that such behavior, co-opting the suffering of another group to bolster your own cause, is rather selfish; the kind of thing a real asshole would do.

When Is It Useful To Be A Victim?

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At one point or another, we have all had to deal with at least one person who behaved like a professional victim. Nothing is ever even partially their fault or responsibility, and they never seem to get what they think they deserve. Quite the opposite actually; they like to go on long and frustrated rants about how other people in the world are out to actively snub them. They’re unable to be reasoned with, as to even suggest that things aren’t really that bad is to question their victim status. It will be taken as a slight against them, one that will cause a deep mental wound and be used as just another example to demonstrate how hard their life is.

And the world already has one Trent Reznor for that job; it doesn’t need more.

To some extent, all that has probably described you well at some points throughout your life; perhaps more than you would care to admit and definitely more than you realize. It, of course, has never described me, due to my virtue of consistently being spot-on-correct when it comes to everything. That little facet of my mind coincidentally leaves me in a good position to examine this rather annoying human behavior: specifically, what might the benefits be to being mantled in the label “victim”, and why might some people compete for that label? We’ll start this examination by asking a question that may well offend you, but keep that “I’m offended” card tucked away in your deck for now: why do we have a gay pride parade, but no straight pride one? Bear in mind, this question could apply equally well across a number of different domains (such as a degree in men’s studies or white pride month), but we’ll stick to the sexual orientation one. People have responded to that question in multiple ways, but the answers seem to center around one common theme: you can be proud of your sexual orientation when it negatively impacts you.

What both those linked responses have in common is that they explicitly stress overcoming bigotry and hatred while fostering acceptance, which are certainly worthy goals and accomplishments of which to be proud. That raises the natural question of why we don’t then just call it the acceptance parade, or the overcoming bigotry parade? What’s not clear is where the link to being proud of your sexual orientation specifically – which most people would not class as an accomplishment – enters into the equation. What both answers also imply is that were homosexuals not discriminated against for their orientation, there would be no need for gay pride anymore. This further emphasizes the point that one’s sexual orientation is not the deciding factor in pride despite the parade’s namesake focusing on it. What the calling it gay pride seems to do is, perhaps unsurprisingly, suggest the notion that issues faced by certain groups of people, in this case homosexuals, are more hurtful, more legitimate, and overcoming them is a special accomplishment. Getting people to stop bullying you at school is an accomplishment, but if you get people to stop bullying you for being gay, then you get extra points. After that, they’ll be left with just teasing you for one of the no doubt awkward features of your adolescent body or personality

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. Neither group even had the rainbow behind them; they marched completely in black and white.

There’s a movement that I could really “get behind”. See what I did there? It’s because I’m clever.

These groups, because of their socially disadvantaged status, were able to successfully demand and obtain social change from the advantaged groups. As I’ve mentioned before, people working to change society in some way never use the motto, “Things are pretty good right now, but maybe they could be better” for this very reason. What’s even more impressive is that these groups were able to achieve change without initiating violence. Being seen as a victim legitimized their demands, eliminating a need for force. However, being seen a victim also has the power to help legitimize other behaviors that aren’t quite on the level of demanding equal rights. Being seen a victim can assistant in legitimizing otherwise non-legitimate behaviors as well, so now it’s time to abandon our discussion of pride for one’s sexual orientation and turn our focus towards quasi-thievery.

A recent paper by Gray and Wegner (2011) examined the link between how much someone is to be blamed for a misdeed as a result of their being painted as either more of a hero or more of a victim. Heroes are those who otherwise do good deeds, whereas victims are people who have had bad things happen to them. In the first experiment, subjects read a story about a fictitious character, George. In one case, George gets $100 from his paycheck stolen each week by his boss (victim); in a second case George gives $100 to charity each week (her); in a final case, he spends that $100 on normal purchases (neutral). In all stories, George sees a woman drop $10 and picks it up. Rather than returning it to the owner, George opts to keep the money. Subjects were asked to assess how much blame George deserves for keeping the money. The results indicated that hero George was blamed the most, followed by neutral George, while victim George got the least blame.

Maybe those results aren’t too surprising. Victim George got lots of money stolen from him, so maybe he deserved that money the woman dropped more than the other two. The second experiment in the paper looked at the question from a different angle. In this experiment, subjects read another story about two hypothetical people working as cooks. Among other things found in the story, one person was either described as having started a charity in college (hero), having been hit by a drunk driver in college, but had long since recovered (victim), or had worked in a hardware store (neutral). Later in the story, the cooks ignore a request for a peanut-free salad, almost killing a woman with an allergy to peanuts. The results indicated that people tended to blame heroes more than neutral parties, and blame neutral parties more than victims. It’s important to note here that the status of hero, victim, or neutral, was derived from a completely unrelated incident that happened years prior, yet it still had an effect in determining who was to blame.

In the final experiment, subjects read yet another story about a fictitious person, Graham. In the story, he is described in a number of ways, but at one point, he is described as either a hero (having worked at a charity), victim (again, hit by a drunk driver), or neutrally. Graham is then described as going through his morning routine, doing many normal things, and also picking up and keeping $10 he watched a woman drop at some point. Following the story, subjects did an unrelated task for a few minutes to distract them, and were then asked to recall five things about Graham. When it came to hero Graham, 68% of the participants listed that he had kept the $10 among the five items However, people only listed the keeping of the money incident 42% of the time in the victim condition. The quasi-theft was also listed sooner in the recalled list of the hero or neutral condition, relative to the victim one, suggesting that the misdeed stuck out less when the victim did it.

Man; victim Graham has really been milking that car accident for all it’s worth…

As part of the answer to the question posed by the title, it is useful to be seen as a victim to excuse a misdeed, even if you’re considered a victim for reasons completely unrelated to the current situation. Of course, it probably would only magnify the effect were those reasons related to the situation at hand. I would predict further that the degree to which one is seen as a victim would also be an important variable. The more “victim-y” someone is, the most justified their behavior and demands become. What this further suggests to me is that people are going to be biased in their perceptions of victimhood; they’re going to tend to see themselves as being greater victims than others would, and may go to great lengths to convince others of their victim status.

One point worth keeping in mind is that for a victim to exist, there needs to be a perpetrator. If the results of this research are any indication, that perpetrator will tend to be thought of – by the victim – as being relatively benefited in their life (being more hero-like). Indeed, we would probably expect to find a correlation between how privileged a perpetrator is seen as being and how victim-y their victim is. After all, if the perpetrator is also a victim, that would, to some extent, help excuse and justify their behavior; if the perpetrator’s behavior is somewhat excused, the victim of their actions becomes less of a victim. The results surrounding the people classed as “heroes” also sheds some light on why the, “I have friends who are [X], so I can’t be [X]ist” arguments don’t work. Making yourself sound benevolent towards a group may actively make you look worse; at the very least it probably won’t help make your case. It also helps explain oddities of other arguments, like why some people are quick to suggest that men are privileged in certain areas of society but will generally refuse to admit that anything resembling a female privilege exists. Some even going as far to suggest that women can’t be sexist, but men can. To admit that being a female brings benefits and being a man brings costs, depending on the situation, would be to weaken one’s victim status, and – by extension – your social sway. The same goes for admitting that one’s social group is quite capable of being nasty themselves. (Quick note: some people will point out that men are relatively disadvantaged sometimes, but they are only allowed to do so in an accepted fashion by keeping the perpetrator constant. “The Patriarchy hurts men too” is the compromise.)

While it may be annoying when people seem to actively compete for winner of the “biggest victim” award, or to be asked about obstacles you’ve overcome in life on college applications, understanding the relationship between victimhood status and legitimization of behavior helps to clarify why things like those happen. Being a victim can be a powerful tool in getting what you want when used successfully.

References: Gray, K. & Wegner, D.M. (2011) To escape blame, don’t be a hero – be a victim. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47, 516-519.

The Science Of White Knighting

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As a male, it’s my birthright to be a chauvinistic sexist, sort of like original sin. I still remember the day, though I was still very young, that some representatives from the Patriarchy approached me with my membership card. They extended their invitation to join the struggle to keep gender roles distinct, help maintain male privilege, and make sure the women got the short end of the social stick despite both genders being identical in every way. I’m proud to report that towards this end I’ve watched many movies and played many games where the male protagonist saves an attractive woman from the clutches of some evil force (typically another male character), and almost none where the roles have been reversed. Take that, 19th amendment!

While we having yet figured out how to legally bar women from playing video games, we can at least patronize them while they do.

I have some lingering doubts as to whether I, as a man, am doing enough to maintain my privileged position in the world. Are sexism and recurrent cultural accidents the only reasons that the theme of man-saves-woman is so popular in the media, but the woman-saves-man theme is far less common? While I certainly hope it is to maximize the oppression factor, there have been two recent papers that suggest the theme of a damsel in distress being rescued by their white knight (or Mario, if you’re into short Italian plumbers) has more to do with getting the girl than oppressing her by reinforcing the idea that women need men to save them. A worrying thought for you other sexist pigs, I know.

While there’s always an interest in studying heroic behavior, researchers can’t put people into life-and-death scenarios for experimental purposes without first filling out the proper paperwork, and that can be quite tedious. The next best thing that we’re able to do is to get subjects to volunteer for self-inflicted discomfort. Towards this end, McAndrew & Perilloux (2012) brought some undergraduates into the lab under the pretenses of a “group-problem solving study”, when the actual objective was to see who would volunteer for discomfort. The undergrads were tested in groups of three and given three minutes to assign each group member one of three jobs: astronaut, diver, and pitcher. The astronaut’s job was to write down arguments in favor of taking three items from a hypothetical crashed spaceship. The diver was tasked with, first, submerging their arm in icy water for forty seconds, and then sit under a large water-balloon that the pitcher would attempt to break by throwing balls at a target (in keeping with the “3″ theme, the pitcher had three minutes to accomplish this task).  Needless to say, this would soak the diver, which was pretty clearly the worst job to have. Afterwards, the subjects decided how to split up the $45 payment privately. People who volunteered for the diver role were accordingly paid and liked more, on average.

If that’s where the experiment ended there wouldn’t be much worth caring about. The twist is that the groups were either made up of two men and one women, or two women and one man. In the latter groups, men and women ended up in each role at chance levels. However, when the group was made up of two men and a woman, the men ended up in the diver role 100% of the time, and the pitcher role almost as often (the one exception being a woman who was actually a pitcher for a softball team). It seemed to be that the presence of another man led the men to compete for the position of altruist, as if to show off for the woman and show-up the other man. If we were to translate this result into the world of popular movie themes, a close fit would probably be “male friend tries to convince a girl he really cares about her and he has has been the one for all along, not that jerk of a boyfriend she’s had”.

“Tell me more about all the men you date who aren’t me. I’m selflessly concerned with all your problems and can take the pain; not like those Jerks.”

Now it’s worth pointing out that the mating motive I’m suggesting as an explanation is an assumed one, as nothing in the study directly tested whether the behavior in the two male groups was intended to get the girl. One could be left wondering why the two female groups did not universally have the male volunteering for the diver position as well, were that the case. It could be that a man would only feel the need to compete (i.e. display) when there’s an alternative to him available; when there’s little to no choice for the women (one man, take him or leave him), the motivation to endure these costs and show off might not be aroused. While that answer may be incomplete, it’s at least a plausible starting point.

A second paper paints a broader picture of this phenomena and helps us infer sexual motives more clearly. In this study, Van Vugt & Iredale (2012) looked at contributions to public goods – sacrificing for the good of the group – rather than the willingness to get a little wet. In the first experiment, subjects played an anonymous public goods game with either no observer, an attractive observer of the same sex sitting close by, or one of the opposite sex. Across the three conditions, women were equally as likely to donate money to a group account. Men, however, donated significantly more to the account, but only when being observed by a member of the opposite sex. Further, the amount men donated correlated with how attractive they thought that observer was; the more attractive the men felt the woman was, the nicer the men were willing to behave. I’m sure this facet of the male psychology has not escaped the notice of almost any woman on Earth. To the infuriation of many girlfriends, their significant others will seem to take on a new persona around other women that’s just so friendly and accommodating, leading to all manner of unpleasant outcomes for everyone.

The next experiment in the paper also looked at male-male competition for behaving altruistically in a public goods game. Male subjects were brought into the lab one at a time and photographed. Their photos were then added alongside two others so subjects could see who they were playing with. Feedback on how much money participants gave was made available after each of the five rounds. Additionally, some participants were led to believe there would be an attractive observer – either of the same or opposite sex – watching the game, and the photos of the fake observers were included as well. Finally, at the conclusion of the experiment, participants were asked to make a commitment to a charitable organization. The results showed that men tended to increase their contribution between the beginning and the end of the game, but only when they thought they were being observed by an attractive woman; when they weren’t contributions steadily declined. Similarly, men also volunteered for more charity time following the experiment if they had been observed by an attractive woman.

All the sudden, the plight of abused children just became a lot more real.

While male behavior was only studied under these two situations, I don’t see any reasons to suspect that the underlying psychological mechanisms don’t function similarly in others. Men are willing to compete for women, and that competition can take many forms, altruism being one of them. Everyone is familiar with the stereotypical guy who befriends a woman, is always there to help her, and is constantly looking out for her, with the end goal of course being sex (however vehemently it may be denied). Given that women tend to value kindness and generosity in a partner, being kind and generous as a way to someone’s pants isn’t the worst idea in the world. Demonstrating your ability and willingness to invest is a powerful attractant. That comes with a caveat: it’s important for some frustrated men out there to bear in mind that those two factors are not the only criteria that women use to make decisions about who to hook up with.

I say that because there are many men who bemoan how women always seem to go for “jerks”, though most women – and even some men – will tell you that most guys are pretty nice overall, and being nice does not make one exceptionally attractive. They’ll also tell you that women, despite the stereotype and for the most part, don’t like being with assholes. Real jerks fail to provide many benefits and even inflict some heavy costs than nicer men would. To the extent that women go for guys who don’t really treat them well or care about them, it’s probably due in large part to those men being either exceptionally good looking, rich, or high-status (or all three, if you’re lucky like I am). Those men are generally desirable enough, in one way or another, that they are able to effectively play the short-term mating strategy, but it’s worth bearing in mind their jerkiness is not what makes them more attractive generally; it makes them less attractive, they can just make up for it in other ways. Then again, denigrating your competition has a long and proud history in the world of mating, so calling other guys jerks or uncaring probably isn’t a terrible tactic either.

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

 

Van Vugt, M. & Iredale, W. (2012). Men behaving nicely: Public goods as peacock tails. British Journal of Psychology, Article first published online : 1 FEB 2012