Lead Me Not To Ovulation
The number one most emailed story on the science page of the New York Times (as I write this) is a piece called “The Threatening Scent of Fertile Women.”
The article, written by John Tierney, leads off with some research published last year in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology by Saul Miller and Jon Maner. They had a female confederate of “average attractiveness” – one wonders a little at the advertisement to find an appropriate research assistant – interact with male subjects. Subject and confederate “performed several cooperative tasks,” after which the men rated her on a 1 to 5 scale for attractiveness. The reserachers were interested in how attractive subjects found the confederate as a function of where she was in her ovulatory cycle. Did the 26 subjects who were single show a different pattern from the 12 subjects who were?
Taking the data from the single men first, they found the pattern one might have expected from previous work on cycle effects. Men rate her higher when she’s closer to peak fertility.
The men in relationships showed a different pattern. They rated her as less attractive when she was in the maximally fertile phase of her cycle. (See the picture, which I’m not sure I’m supposed to put here, so we’ll see if anyone sues me.) That seems pretty interesting. What’s going on?
The interpretation of the dip in ratings when she’s fertile is in the context of what they call “relationship maintenance.” As Miller and Maner put it, “Devaluing alternative relationship partners plays a key role in helping people maintain their relationship esteem.” I’m not really sure what “relationship esteem” is, but, more importantly (to me, anyway,) I’m also not quite sure I follow the explanation. Maner is quoted in Tierney’s piece as saying, “It seems the men were truly trying to ward off any temptation they felt toward the ovulating woman.”
That strikes me as odd because you believe the data, then the men exactly weren’t tempted by the woman when she was ovulating, at least compared to when she wasn’t. If temptation is a function of how attractive she seems, then they weren’t tempted by the ovulating women.
Also, the biological function that the authors have in mind – I think – has to do with reducing the cost of damaging or ending one’s long term relationship by doing something like having sex with the pony-tailed confederate. It seems to me that you can think about this decision-making system as a tradeoff; how much is the infidelity worth, in expected value, set against the expected value of the continued relationship I’m currently in. Is that right?
If so, then I don’t see why one would expect this pattern of data. According to their analysis, the men in relationships are most likely to run the risk of infidelity exactly when there is little chance of a fitness payoff from a short term encounter, when she’s not ovulating. If the adaptive problem is avoiding making a bad decision about a short term tryst, the risk to the long term relationship – and therefore the expected value of the cost – it seems to me, is constant across the cycle. Isn’t it? That is – and maybe I’m wrong about this – relationships are equally damaged by an indiscretion with a woman at any point in her cycle. If so, then the only part of the tradeoff that changes is the upside, the probably of conception. Men in relationships should show the same pattern as men out of them.
Now, I think what they have in mind is something like this. The men are “really” more attracted to the woman when she’s at peak fertility, so they’re “telling themselves” they don’t find her attractive. I don’t really know what it means in cases like this to say that they are “really” more attracted to her when she’s fertile. And when people say that subjects are “telling themselves” something, I don’t know what that means. What is doing the telling? What is listening?
Anyway, one of the sequences I like from the paper is this one: “At a broader theoretical level, these findings highlight the utility of examining people’s romantic lives through the lens of adaptationist thinking. Evolutionary psychology provides a framework for generating novel predictions about the psychological processes through which people enhance their reproductive success.” Given that Don Symons was trying to tell people that there was utility in applying adaptationist analyses to human mating psychology more than 30 years ago, I wonder how long it will be before we have to stop pleading our case in social journals that evolutionary psychology just might be useful in trying to understand human social behavior.
Anyway, the article appeared on the front page of the Science Times, and seems to be getting a lot of interest, which probably isn’t a bad thing.
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