Incest and Humor
Two articles with an evolutionary background recently appeared online ahead of print in the journal, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, and so I thought I’d sort of run through them briefly.
One, by Deb Lieberman and colleagues, is a reply to some work by Chris Fraley and Michael Marks surrounding the question of incest avoidance. Fraley and Marks (F&M) were responding to Lieberman and colleagues’ previous suggestions surrounding the Westermark Hypothesis. The suggestion is, roughly, that humans have an evolved system that takes co-residence as input, and generates sexual aversion as an output. Because people you grow up with, they argue, were likely to have been close relatives, this reduces the chance of incest, along with its genetic consequences.
Fraley and Marks reported three experiments designed to investigate this idea, especially in comparison to their preferred alternative, which has its roots in Freud’s notion of the Oedipus Complex. They suggest that because people like things that are familiar, maybe Freud was right, and people do, in fact, want to have sex with their opposite-sex parent. (They didn’t take a position on whether or not people also wanted to kill their same-sex parent. Given that same sex parents might be around as frequently as opposite sex parents, one might expect not.) F&M write: “One of the classic findings in social psychology is that proximity is the single best predictor of liking and attraction (e.g., Berscheid & Walster, 1974). Moreover, research on the mere exposure effect has demonstrated that people tend to like objects more if they are familiar…” (p. 1204).
Lieberman et al review the three studies F&M report in support of the familiarity idea. In their first experiment, F&M expose subjects, subliminally, to an image of their opposite-sex parent. They find that after this exposure, a target is evaluated as more attractive, and conclude: “The finding that people found others more sexually attractive after being primed with their opposite-sex parent is more consistent with the evolutionary psychodynamic model of incest avoidance than with the neo-Westermarckian model.” Lieberman et al counter that this could be a contrast effect. You prime a subject with a parent, and, in comparison, yeah, the next person you see does seem like a more appealing alternative.
In the second study, F&M morph the subject’s face with a stranger’s face, and subjects found these faces more attractive relative to controls. Lieberman et al point out that this is narcissism, not Oedipal, and that F&M got the wrong mythological character. Ok, no, not really. They suggest that this isn’t a test of kin aversion, since the stimuli aren’t, in fact, kin.
In the third study, subjects again rated faces, and the independent variable was the instructions that subjects received. Some subjects got the following instruction: “We are interested in studying incest. We want to know how attractive people find faces that are designed to resemble genetic relatives such as parents, brothers, and sisters” (pp. 1207-1208). It turns out that when you tell people that you’re studying incest, people tend to say the pictures you show them, nope, aren’t all that attractive. Lieberman et al argue that rating these faces as unattractive can be understood as impression management, a certain reluctance to say that people who are supposed to look like your close genetic relatives are hot.
One could argue that this all leaves an initial question that various scholars have wondered about for some time unanswered. Why are there rules against incest? Generally, we expect rules to come about to prevent people from doing things that they might actually want to do, like stealing. Why do societies mint taboos to stop people from doing things they’re not inclined to do in the first place?
The second paper in PSPB is by Wilbur and Campbell, and they were interested in the fact that people – men and women – are looking for a romantic partner with a good sense of humor. To make a long story short (and so not entirely accurate), when women say that they want a guy with a good sense of humor, what they mean is that they want someone who’s funny. When men say they want someone with a good sense of humor, they mean that want someone who laughs at their jokes. The authors report three studies, the second of which looks at ads from an online dating site, and they show that, in essence, men are advertising that they’re funny, and women are advertising that they’re interested in someone who’s funny. (I’m sort of summarizing here.) They interpret their results in terms of sexual selection, especially Geoffrey Miller’s ideas about signaling.
So, two papers in PSPB with an evolutionary framing, and, before signing off, speaking of what’s funny… A revival of Oh! Calcutta! ran for 5,959 performances, making it the 6th longest running on Broadway (according to Wikipedia). So it’s not like a reference to this is dredging from the very bottom of the barrel. The title is a bit of word play. If you say the sentence, “Oh, what a nice butt you have” in French, it sounds a bit like Oh! Calcutta!, just like “un petit d’un petit” sounds a bit like “Humpty Dumpty.”
So, you know, all I’m saying is that a reference to Oh! Calcutta! isn’t all that obscure.
Comments (3)