Delusions of Objectivity

As a psychologist, I find it extremely frustrating when people attempt to explain away gender differences as genetic or evolutionary, rather than exploring the role of socialization by an imperfect society. For one thing, it gives people an excuse not to confront injustice. After all, they’re just doing what they’re biologically programmed to do. For another, it’s frequently shoddy science.

Now, I don’t believe that evolutionary psychology is worthless. I find tremendous value in evo psych approaches to altruism, for instance, and I think it’s a great source for counter-intuitive hypotheses. If you steer clear of sex differences, it’s a vibrant and fascinating field. But if you don’t, you get peer-reviewed nonsense about why women love to shop. The researchers I’ve talked to about this will admit, if pressed, that it’s a somewhat embarrassing phenomenon. But everyone else either believes the hype or uses it as an excuse to dismiss evo psych - sometimes even psychology as a whole - and who can blame them?

All of this is why it’s so pleasant to see some mainstream push back, in the form of this Guardian article: Male and female ability differences down to socialisation, not genetics. I’m excited to discover a word for this (“neurosexism”) and to read Cordelia Fine’s book, Delusions of Gender, when it comes out. I think it’s important not just to point out the flaws in any particular study but to talk more generally about the harm done when we speak about women (and men!) in this way.

When a study is published in a peer-reviewed journal, and publicized in regular mags, it gains a legitimacy that it doesn’t always deserve. It usually takes a fair bit of digging, and sometimes costs money, to access the article in question. It can be difficult to parse the methods and results sections for a non-expert. And I’ve TA’d classes where it was clear that students had only read the introductions and conclusions of assigned papers. Hell, most researchers I know will simply read abstracts of most of the papers we see. How can we expect a layperson to think critically about how the researchers came to their conclusions?

And so when a woman sees a newspaper article claiming that scientists have shown why women love to shop, or why we don’t like sex as much as men, or why we’re not as good at math, or why we’re attracted to men who are bad for us - she might have the presence of mind to doubt the reporting or the researchers, but she isn’t going to be able to explain it. She is going to have a hard time arguing against it when a guy (in her class, in her office, on the bus, on the internet) says, “But research has shown…”

Because research has shown these things. And unless you’re involved in research, if you’ve seen the file drawer phenomenon, the pressures to publish, the simple human ignorance and bias and fallibility that all people, even those with PhD’s, possess, unless you’ve seen it up close and realized that research, like laws and sausages, is not always pleasant or perfect, you’re going to think that because research has shown something, it’s likely to be true.

Let me give you an example of the kind of study I’m talking about.

I found this one, a recent study on casual sex in college students on The Journal of Evolutionary Psychology’s website. It was one of the ten most recent studies. (Another, which I did not read, looked at influences on women’s marital age and was by the same researcher as the shopping study referenced above.)

The authors admit in the introduction that “it is possible that novel sociocultural factors are currently driving up the prevalence of contemporary NSA sexual hook-up behavior”. They forge boldly ahead, however: “We expect that the evolved psychology underlying sexual behavior will still be apparent and contributing to contemporary expressions of sexual behavior.” What reason do they have to expect this? How is it possible to tease the two apart? There’s nothing in their study’s design that can distinguish between behavior caused by sociocultural factors and behavior caused by evolution. A simple understanding of modern social norms could provide the same predictions as their evolutionary theory:

“First, men are predicted to be more comfortable than women with all hook-up behaviors.”

Their take: Men evolved to want sex more than women. An alternative take: Our society pushes men to pursue and desire sex, but shames and judges women who do the same.

“Second… compared to their own comfort levels, men are predicted to attribute to women lower comfort levels with all sexual hook-up behaviors, and women are predicted to attribute to men higher comfort levels with all sexual hook-up behaviors.”

Their take: Men evolved to want sex more than women, and everybody knows it. An alternative take: Men and women have internalized the gendered messages society sends, not just for themselves, but for each other.

“Third… for men, the comfort levels they attribute to other men (for all sexual behaviors) are predicted to be higher than the comfort levels they feel themselves.. For women, however, the comfort levels they attribute to other women can discriminate between two competing evolutionary hypotheses. On one hand, women could be predicted to attribute to other women comfort levels that are quite similar to, or lower than, the comfort levels they, themselves, feel. … On the other hand, engaging in uncommitted sex may be one form of female-female competition. If this is so, we would predict that women attribute to other women comfort levels that are higher than they, themselves, feel.”

Their take: Men evolved to over-estimate other males’ comfort levels with sex, so that they felt more pressure to reproduce. Women evolved to be more choosy, so they under-estimate other females’ comfort levels with sex. Unless they evolved to compete, too.

An alternative take: Faced with a sex-soaked culture, men worry that they fail to live up to a stereotype. Women, who are inundated with half-naked pictures of other women whenever they turn on the t.v. or flip open a magazine, also worry that they’re not sexual enough, but at the same time have to deal with traditional values which say a woman who has sex outside of marriage is a slut or a whore.

(You’ll notice that where society’s messages are most mixed, the question of how women are thought to feel about sex, is where the authors feel the need to hedge their bets, and make two contradictory evolutionary predictions. No matter the result, an evolutionary reason for women’s sexual attitudes will be “proved”!)

Unsurprisingly, their predictions are all confirmed. (It turns out women think other women are more comfortable with sex.) But what have they really shown? Nothing about evolution. They’ve taken common stereotypes about male and female sexual behavior and shown that most people buy into them. They prove nothing about how that behavior came about.

Beyond that, in their conclusions they make a startling digression:

These three factors — men’s higher comfort, men’s overestimation of women’s comfort, and women’s overestimation of other women’s comfort — may dovetail and inadvertently result in sexual assault…It appears that women are behaving in accordance with their false beliefs in spite of their own discomfort with particular sexual behaviors, and are facing negative psychological and emotional consequences as a result.

Let’s give the authors the benefit of the doubt that they’re not intending to blame the victims here. That they’re not familiar with research showing that on campus sexual assault is most commonly perpetrated by repeat offenders, not shy boys with good intentions. That they believe that his particular phenomenon should be combated by encouraging men to get the enthusiastic consent of their partners, and not just by telling women that they weren’t saying “no” clearly enough. Whatever the authors’ beliefs and intentions, this is a flat-out dangerous statement, full of hidden assumptions and confounding biases, all couched in the jargon of scientific objectivity.

It seems that when researchers move beyond reporting results to making political points and policy recommendations, they’re bound to mess up. So why not just stick to the science? Why does it matter if their results can be easily misinterpreted? Who cares if many people take “evolved” behavior to mean “inevitable”? Maybe that’s the best solution.

Even if researchers could bring themselves to do that, it wouldn’t be enough. Science doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Psychologists’ theories and intuitions come from the society around them, not from pure reason and objective evaluation. It’s important both to pick apart our own motivations and to predict the likely results of our actions. Anything else is not only bad science - it’s bad for all of us.