What are Social Psychologists Talking About (2013)?

Last year, I wrote a post with the same title as this one (except for the year) about the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. Unlike last time, I was fortunately able to attend this year’s meeting – it’s been far too long since I had a decent po’ boy –  which is in part why it’s been a bit longer than usual between posts. (The other excuse reason is that I damaged my right ankle, and it turned out that the only treatment it responded to was leveling up my High Elf Mage in Skyrim, which left less time for blogging.) Anyway, the meeting took place in New Orleans, Louisiana, consisting of two full days of talks for the main conference, preceded by one day of a large number of small pre-conferences, one of which I attended. (Aside: I seem to have given the wrong impression to some of my friends and colleagues in the social psychology community, so I just want to say that I found much to like in all of the sessions that I attended.)

In any case, like last year, I used a frequency count program to get some sense of the topics presented as the meeting. There are plenty of caveats to using this technique, and it’s obviously a very imperfect assay of the topics of conversation.

Still, there is value in even imperfect measurements, so let’s have a look. This is a pretty informal survey, consisting of me pretty much just looking down the list of words and cherry-picking the ones that caught my attention.

I’ll ignore the first set of words, the little ones such as of, the, and university. (Well, university isn’t a little word, but it’s only in there because the program lists people’s affiliations, which frequently have the word University in them.) The first content word is, unsurprisingly, social (1,814), with self (1,583), just like last year, running a close second. (Personality (1058) doesn’t fare as well as social despite its top billing in the Society’s name.) As was the case last year, the word self gets some help from the fact that it appears not only as a noun, as in “Morality for Self and Other” or “obsessed to the point of fetish with the concept of the self” but also in constructions such as self-esteem and self-regard.

Between 500 and 1,000 are a bunch more little words – for instance logical operators or, and, not – as well as more generic sorts of words such as research (735), results (652), and effects (603).
Around 600, the list seems to get interesting, giving some sense of the topics of interest.

Group (595) makes a strong showing, as do (does?) women (576), men (318), and individuals (507). Don’t tell Marty Seligman that negative (450) outshines positive (430), though only by a little. On the other hand, moral (449) does a ton better than immoral (17), so there’s that. I note in passing that moral did well last year (292), and was one of the leading content words, and interest in the topic seems to be going strong, even accelerating. In contrast – theories, anyone? – prejudice dropped from 288 to 232 from last year to this, possibly reflecting discrimination of some sort against this kind of research.

It seems that social psychologists are still interested in attitudes (395) (the singular version, attitude, tots up 107), society (384), relationships (377), and gender (373). With some trepidation I might add that they’re also interested in sex in various forms, including sexual (211), sexism (58), sexist (47), and, of course, just plain sex (140).

Health (342) and well (329) do well, indicating something, I suppose, as does identity (318).

My sense is that the range of 100 to 300 gives the best sense of what people are actually studying beyond the cornerstones such as groups, morality, relationships and prejudices.  For these, I think it’s best just to give a partial list of what seem to be some content words, first between 300 and 200.

288 affect
286 related
281 status
278 perceptions
275 threat
266 groups
257 motivation
256 goal
253 esteem
253 emotional
243 bias
232 prejudice
225 intergroup
223 emotion
214 cultural
211 sexual
211 partner
204 cognitive
203 emotions

There’s something very satisfying about the fact that the count for sexual = partner, and that cognitive is within one of emotoins. Now a list of some of the words mentioned between 200 and 100 times:

191 attachment
184 perception
178 race
176 conflict
175 satisfaction
171 racial
158 physical
158 judgments
157 romantic
156 white
155 regulation
154 interpersonal
149 anxiety
146 black
145 perspective
143 ingroup
142 stress
142 outgroup
140 sex
139 rejection
138 political
136 target
135 avoidance
133 values
133 risk
132 stereotypes
131 traits
130 stereotype
128 children
125 online
124 decision
120 prosocial
119 identification
119 discrimination
117 face
113 norms
110 affective
109 happiness
109 facial
107 attitude
105 religious
104 strategies
102 development

Last year, there was a discussion in the comments section of how many times words related to evolution appeared in the program, an issue of interest to those who wonder, as I do, the extent to which evolutionary psychology is being incorporated into social psychology. Evol* comes in at 47 – evolutionary (25), evolution (17), evolutionarily (5) – comparable to last year, still trailing well behind facebook, which comes in at 82.

22. January 2013 by kurzbanepblog
Categories: Blog | 2 comments

Finger Treads

I often avoid writing about stories that get picked up by the major news services because I like to find the cooler parts of the pillow, but a recent paper is about an idea that’s so fricking cool I thought I’d write about it despite the play it’s getting.

The phenomenon of interest is why fingers (and toes) get wrinkled when they have been in the water for a while. If your high school education was like mine – or if you go to sites such as wiki.answers to find such things out – then you might think that wrinkling is a side effect of the structure of the skin.

A problem with this byproduct explanation is that it predicts that wrinkling should occur even if the nerves in the fingers are severed insofar as the osmotic and structural properties of the finger don’t change if the nerves are damaged. But that’s not the case. Indeed, one suggested test for damage to the nervous system is to see if finger wrinkling in water occurs (Bull & Henry, 1977). This locates the explanation for finger wrinkling somewhere other than the skin’s structure.

The fact that this side-effect explanation runs into a problem doesn’t entail that wrinkling isn’t a side effect of something else, but in 2011, Mark Changizi and colleagues proposed that wrinkling was functional as opposed to a side effect, dubbing their idea the “rain tread” hypothesis. The general idea is illustrated with the engineering principles behind tire treads. (See Figure 2 of Changizi et al., 2011). If you watch NASCAR, then you have probably noticed that the tires they use are bald, with no treads at all. This is because a key functional property of these racing tires is that they have good traction. Bald tires maximize contact with the track, and so maximize traction. They don’t need to worry about handling under wet conditions because if the track is wet, they simply don’t race. Tires on non-racing cars reflect a tradeoff because unlike racers, normal people don’t have the luxury of taking off from work every time that it rains. The treads you see in normal everyday cars make the tires worse than they would be under dry conditions – less surface area in contact with the road – but if they were bald, driving in the rain would be a disaster. Tires with treads represent a tradeoff because they have to work in both wet and dry conditions.

Hands do, too. But, unlike tires, hands can change from bald to treaded. This is the idea behind the “rain tread” hypothesis. Changizi et al. proposed that finger wrinkling is designed to afford better grip under wet conditions. Like treads, wrinkles, they suggest, might be little drainage networks, getting water off the fingers under wet conditions to grip better. (For another recent story linking human engineering with engineering in the natural world, have a look at stories about a link between fireflies and LED lights. And if you read this blog but haven’t read Cat’s Paws and Catapults, you might consider it.)

If finger wrinkling is for grip, then it ought to be the case that wet fingers are better at gripping wet things than dry fingers are. A recent paper in Biology Letters by Kyriacos Kareklas, Daniel Nettle and Tom V. Smulders provides some preliminary data consistent with this idea. (The Guardian has a little video on the paper.)

Kyriacos et al. had twenty subjects perform a task in which the subjects had to move objects, mostly marbles, from one container to another in as little time as possible. Half the time they had to move the objects with normal fingers; the other half their fingers were wrinkled from being held under water for half an hour. (That is, the fingers, not the whole subject.) In one condition, the objects were dry; in the other condition, the objects were taken out of a container of water.

It took subjects a couple of minutes, on average, to do the task. For the dry case, there was no difference between moving the objects where they were wet and when they were dry. That is, there was no advantage or disadvantage to having wrinkled fingers for dry objects. Moving wet objects with wrinkled fingers gave a small but significant advantage of twelve per cent.

The lack of a difference in the dry conditions raises the question, why aren’t fingers always wrinkled? As the authors point out, grasping isn’t the only consideration. Perhaps there are disadvantages to having wrinkled fingers for purposes other than grasping, such as a loss of sensitivity.

Now, I should note that this work was only done with young adults in a Western setting, so we should be very cautious about generalizing. Perhaps in the highlands of New Guinea, finger treads reduce the ability to manipulate submerged objects, or perhaps the phenomenon doesn’t occur at all.

In any case, these data are consistent with the rain tread hypothesis, though of course more work needs to be done. Still, the rain tread hypothesis seems to require that there be some advantage of this sort, and these initial data are encouraging.

Citations

Bull C., & Henry J. A. (1977) Finger wrinkling: a test of autonomic function. British Medical Journal, 26 Feb: 551-2.

Changizi, M., Weber, R., Kotecha, R., & Palazzo, J. (2011). Are Wet-Induced Wrinkled Fingers Primate Rain Treads? Brain, Behavior and Evolution77(4), 286-290.

Kareklas, K., Nettle, D., and Tom V. Smulders, T. V. (2013). Water-induced finger wrinkles improve  handling of wet objects. Biology Letters.

10. January 2013 by kurzbanepblog
Categories: Blog | 7 comments

Irrational Cats

Hi, Felix here. As the saying goes, on the internet, no one knows you’re a dog, so, full disclosure: I’m a cat. (Rob suffered a stress fracture to his right ankle, and he’s had a devil of time getting anything done, so I’m substitute blogging for him. No need to send flowers or any of that sort of thing. If you’re feeling generous, please send sardines to me at Rob’s home address. He’ll know who they’re for.)

Ok, today’s topic: my species is irrational, but also fun to observe, which is not so different from your species, so don’t look so smug.

So, anyway, I was at a New Year’s Eve party – yes, we cats like to get jiggy with it too – and I noticed a new game this year. My good friend, Pickles, had managed to persuade his person to bring his iPad to the party, and many of the cats were thoroughly engrossed by it. A big favorite was the Ping-Pong ball app. You can see videos of this on YouTube. A ping-pong ball moves around the screen, often seemingly of its own accord. My friends and colleagues slapped at the ball the whole night.

Now, I just told a lie there. My friends didn’t really slap at the ball. They slapped at a picture of a ball. The iPad app had been programmed to respond to cat slaps roughly in the way that a real ball would respond, bouncing around in the virtual box. (For that matter, we cats will slap at real ping-pong balls, too.)

Now, I’m not a scientist, and the party had some smart people around, so I thought I’d ask them their opinions why cats do this. I mean, after all, it’s a bit odd, right? There’s no actual ball there to hit and, even if there were, it’s irrational: You’re not going to get any food out of the exercise… it’s just a waste of calories and time, right?

First I ran into one of my economist friends. He was persuasive:

From these observations, you can infer that cats have ping pong ball-hitting preferences. Not only that, but it’s possible to judge how strong these preferences are. Simply give cats a choice of apps to use, measure how often they choose the ping-pong ball app compared to other apps, and that gives you a sense of the strength of the preference. Now, cats don’t use money, but you can think of the “price” that a cat will pay to use the app as, roughly, how much it enjoys the things it declines to use in favor of the app. This is the cat’s opportunity cost of smacking ping pong balls, so can be thought of the price it will pay to do so. Now please excuse me while I lick my haunches.

That made a lot of sense to me: we cats hit ping-pong balls because we have ping pong ball-hitting preferences. And nice because it could be made formal with prices and everything. But then I ran into an anthropologist. She said,

In cat culture, ping-pong ball hitting is valued. As a consequence, because cats learn to acquire the hitting behavior. Have you seen the milk bowl?

Ah. Cat culture. Of course. That made sense to me, and I thought it one-upped the economist because he had no account of where his so-called preference came from. So that was satisfying. But then I ran into a developmental psychologist. He said.

Adult cats are better at hitting ping-pong balls than kittens are. So, we know it’s not innate. Um, I have to go… *cough*… hair ball…

While he was taking care of that, I ran into another psychologist. She said:

Well, some of your other friends are partly right. It is learned, and it is about culture. But the key is that hitting ping-pong balls defends a cat’s cultural worldview. Cats fear their own death (even though the first eight don’t count), so they have to find ways to deal with that fear. Hitting ping-pong balls is part of that worldview defense because doing this is part of what it means to be a cat. Um, do you know the way to the kitty litter?

I was getting confused, so I thought I would ask one more cat, whose name was Chuck.

Well, it’s important to bear in mind that explanations for cat behavior come in many forms. There’s a physiological explanation, going from the retina to the areas of the brain that drive movement… then there’s a developmental account… and these explanations are correct, but my guess is that what you’re after is something along these lines. Our feline ancestors lived in a world in which prey were distinguished from non-prey by certain movements that they made. Mice, for instance, because they have muscles, move in a way that is different from, say, a rock, which cannot abruptly change direction unless it hits a wall or other solid object. Put roughly, cats who, eh, smacked objects with these properties (and did appropriate things with them) enjoyed greater survival and reproduction… Cat brains today reliably develop with a kind of circuit along these lines, and any stimulus that emulates these properties of movement evokes the smacking response. Because of humans’ inventions of iPads, there’s now something of a mismatch, if you will. This causes cats to be as irrational as, say, humans, when they give money to an unknown stranger in a Dictator Game, or what have you. To start studying this phenomenon, what you’d want to do…

At this point, I wandered off to watch the ball drop, and I had had so much catnip that all I could think about was munching on the sardines I’d seen fall behind the comfy chair in the living room.

Rob should be back in a week or two. Happy new year to everyone. This year, my resolution is to finally catch that blasted red dot that always seems to get away.

03. January 2013 by kurzbanepblog
Categories: Blog | 2 comments

Coyne Flips and Groundhog Days

In 2011, Jerry Coyne wrote:

Like the stories of the Bible, there’s no evolutionary psychology hypothesis that can be disconfirmed by data.

Here we are at the end of 2012, and Jerry Coyne now seems to take a decidedly different view, writing that:

…those who dismiss evolutionary psychology on the grounds that it’s mere “storytelling” are not aware of how the field operates these days. And, if they are to be consistent, they must also dismiss any studies of the evolutionary basis of animal behavior.

In this more recent post, he discusses the 2010 American Psychologist article by Jaime Confer and colleagues, and specifically identifies a number of research areas that he labels “interesting and worthwhile,” including incest avoidance, innate fears, greater choosiness for mates among women relative to men, and so on. He says that the Confer et al. piece is “an evenhanded exposition of the state of modern evolutionary psychology, how it works, what kinds of standards it uses, responses to some common criticisms (e.g., “we don’t know the genes involved”), and, for the critics, examples of  evo-psych hypotheses that have been falsified.” One conclusion he draws is that:

If you can read the Confer et al. paper and still dismiss the entire field as worthless, or as a mere attempt to justify scientists’ social prejudices, then I’d suggest your opinions are based more on ideology than judicious scientific inquiry.

The distance between the 2011 quotation above and the 2012 post is striking, progressing from the claim that the field isn’t even science to the view that dismissing the field in this way stems from ignorance and ideology. Coyne has, indeed, been a critic of the field for some time, including a review of Thornhill and Palmer’s book in The New Republic, which elicited a spirited reply by John Tooby and Leda Cosmides despite their skepticism regarding the interventions prescribed in the book.

Now, it’s true that there has been some ambiguity in Coyne’s views, about which I’ve written from time to time – and he always adds a caveat or two to the effect that all is not hopeless when he’s criticizing the field (per the third part of the rules of this particular game) –  but because of this volte-face and the importance of the field’s having such a prominent new ally, it seems worthwhile to ask how this came about.

I don’t pretend that I have the answer, but I think that there are some clues. First, the immediate cause of Coyne’s post is, in his words, the “ kerfuffle on the intertubes about the value of evolutionary psychology,” by which he means Ed Clint’s post about Rebecca Watson’s presentation at Skepticon. Clint’s critique of Watson’s presentation was a lengthy and careful account of errors and misrepresentations in the talk, framed as a case of “science denialism.” A central point of his was that Watson was attacking the field while knowing nothing about it, and Clint provides extensive documentation to support this claim.

The post elicited a tremendous response from bloggers and the commenting class, including a number of defenses of Watson, which mostly took the form of claiming that Watson was not critiquing evolutionary psychology as a scientific field, but rather the popular press portrayal of it.

Some reactions, however, took seriously the idea that in Watson’s remarks, evolutionary psychology might not be “getting a fair shake.” In the past, people have, of course, argued that evolutionary psychology is “unfairly accused and unjustly condemned” by critics, who can be shown to be attacking positions not held by scholars in the discipline, with somewhat limited effects.

Clint’s post, however, seems to have been very successful, in part no doubt due to the care with which he documented errors, but also, I think, in his apt reframing of the criticism of evolutionary psychology within the context of good scientific skepticism. This is completely speculative, but my sense is that the way to see the shift here is in the context of the moral frame. In the past, the narrative arc was that if evolutionary psychology is morally bad – see my prior post on irritating explanations – then it was virtuous to join in bullying the discipline. Clint deftly flipped this around, moralizing the act of beating up on the field from a position of ignorance about it.

My read is that this reframing has made it more difficult (though still not impossible) to attack the field without showing that one has at least some minimal mastery of the material, which returns me to the present case of Coyne. Coyne’s remarks indicate that he took the time to study the Confer et al. paper, as well as some of the work in the primary literature to which he alludes. (I guess about some of the papers he might have in mind below, at the bottom of this post.) Again, it’s not possible to know how he went from “no evolutionary psychology hypothesis that can be disconfirmed” to “those who dismiss evolutionary psychology on the grounds that it’s mere “storytelling” are not aware of how the field operates,” but the fact that his post discusses some research programs in a bit of detail points to one possible answer. In any case, no matter what the reason for this change, I welcome it.

Now, I don’t mean to imply that I think that Clint’s post has or will transform all of evolutionary psychology’s critics into allies. Indeed, his post has stimulated some additional animated attacks on the field from quarters that will likely never shift their positions.

…plus que ça change

Still, the ambiance surrounding the reply to Clint’s post makes me feel more optimistic than I have in some time. As I mentioned in a prior post, I was recently invited to give a couple of talks in Belgium at a workshop celebrating the 20th anniversary of the publication of The Adapted Mind. I was asked to prepare some remarks for a debate with Johan Bolhuis, whose work I have discussed in the past. In preparing for that talk, I took some text from The Psychological Foundations of Culture chapter of TAM, and juxtaposed them with criticisms rougghly ten and twenty years after the publication of the chapter. For example, despite the clear articulation by Tooby and Cosmides of their position that natural selection produces byproducts and noise in their 1992 chapter, Gould, Rose, and Bolhuis and colleagues claim that evolutionary psychology assumes all traits are adaptations.

Remember the film, Groundhog Day, in which Bill Murray’s character relives the same day over and over again? Critiques of the sort by Bolhuis et al. have this feel to me, not only leveling attacks at fictitious positions, but doing so repeatedly over the last couple of decades. What is the explanation for Coyne’s shift set next to the lack of such a shift among other critics? During the debate at the workshop in Belgium, I, as well as some members of the audience, emphasized that evolutionary psychologists were interested in possible functions of psychological mechanisms, using these proposals in the service of generating predictions to test with behavioral experiments and other empirical work. Bolhuis expressed surprise that we were interested in function, asking why, then, we called ourselves evolutionary psychologists as opposed to something like “functional psychologists.”

If it seems strange to you that Bolhuis would be surprised that evolutionary psychologists are interested in the possible functions of evolved mechanisms given that he has written critiques of the field, I can only say that I share in this puzzlement. His lack of knowledge might help to explain why he and his colleagues continue to take aim at phantom positions; it might be that studying the literature would cause them to take a different stance, as, one could guess, it might have in Coyne’s case.

Now, I don’t mean to imply that everyone who takes the time to actually read the primary and secondary materials in evolutionary psychology will be persuaded. Some scholars resist the inference from function to form, whether it is made in the context of humans or non-humans. Jerry Fodor engaged the primary literature, and eventually came away rejecting not just evolutionary psychology, but the entire theory of evolution by natural selection. And then there is David Buller, who engaged many lines of research in evolutionary psychology, which have been addressed in various venues.

Still, this seems to be a moment for optimism. To the extent that critics of our field continue to engage the ideas and research in the field, as opposed to mistaken impressions of these ideas, Clint has stimulated an advance for all involved.

Coda

I’m not sure which work Coyne has in mind, but here are a few guesses of some publications in a few of the areas he mentions based on his description of which fields are interesting and worthwhile. I have biased this list toward papers in Evolution and Human Behavior because such papers speak to the issue that has arisen from time to time about how well we are “policing” ourselves as a discipline.

Incest Avoidance

Fessler, D. M., & Navarrete, C. D. (2004). Third-party attitudes toward sibling incest: Evidence for Westermarck’s hypotheses. Evolution and Human Behavior25(5), 277-294.

Lieberman, D. (2009). Rethinking the Taiwanese minor marriage data: evidence the mind uses multiple kinship cues to regulate inbreeding avoidance. Evolution and Human Behavior30(3), 153-160.

Lieberman, D., & Symons, D. (1998). Sibling incest avoidance: from Westermarck to Wolf. Quarterly Review of Biology, 463-466.

Lieberman, D., Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (2003). Does morality have a biological basis? An empirical test of the factors governing moral sentiments relating to incest. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences270(1517), 819-826.

Lieberman, D., Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (2007). The architecture of human kin detection. Nature445(7129), 727-731.

Fear of Spiders etc.

Gerdes, A., Uhl, G., & Alpers, G. W. (2009). Spiders are special: fear and disgust evoked by pictures of arthropods. Evolution and Human Behavior30(1), 66-73.

Nesse, R. M. (1994). Fear and fitness: An evolutionary analysis of anxiety disorders. Ethology and Sociobiology15(5), 247-261.

Öhman, A. (1986). Face the beast and fear the face: Animal and social fears as prototypes for evolutionary analyses of emotion. Psychophysiology23(2), 123-145.

MHC genes and mating

Herz, R. S., & Inzlicht, M. (2002). Sex differences in response to physical and social factors involved in human mate selection: The importance of smell for women. Evolution and Human Behavior23(5), 359-364.

Penn, D. J., & Potts, W. K. (1999). The evolution of mating preferences and major histocompatibility complex genes. The American Naturalist153(2), 145-164.

Roberts, S. C., Little, A. C., Gosling, L. M., Perrett, D. I., Carter, V., Jones, B. C., … & Petrie, M. (2005). MHC-heterozygosity and human facial attractiveness. Evolution and Human Behavior26(3), 213-226.

Sexual Dimorphism

Penton-Voak, I. S., Little, A. C., Jones, B. C., Burt, D. M., Tiddeman, B. P., & Perrett, D.I.(2003). Female condition influences preferences for sexual dimorphism in faces of male humans (Homo sapiens). Journal of Comparative Psychology117(3), 264.

Puts, D. A., Gaulin, S. J., & Verdolini, K. (2006). Dominance and the evolution of sexual dimorphism in human voice pitch. Evolution and Human Behavior27(4), 283-296.

Thornhill, R., & Gangestad, S. W. (2006). Facial sexual dimorphism, developmental stability, and susceptibility to disease in men and women. Evolution and Human Behavior27(2), 131-144

Parent-offspring conflict

Buunk, A. P., Park, J. H., & Dubbs, S. L. (2008). Parent-offspring conflict in mate preferences. Review of General Psychology12(1), 47.

Rohde, P. A., Atzwanger, K., Butovskaya, M., Lampert, A., Mysterud, I., Sanchez-Andres, A., & Sulloway, F. J. (2003). Perceived parental favoritism, closeness to kin, and the rebel of the family: The effects of birth order and sex. Evolution and Human Behavior24(4), 261-276.

 

20. December 2012 by kurzbanepblog
Categories: Blog | 7 comments

Irritating Explanations

Back when I was in college, some of my friends used to annoy each other with conversations that went like this:

Dan: Did you hear about the guy at MIT…?
Dave: Yeah.
Dan: The cause of death was just, uh, ruled suicide, right?
Dave: No. He died of deceleration trauma when he hit the ground.
Brian: Nope. Cause of death was concrete-induced disorganization of brains, leading to loss of control of autonomic nervous system.
Dan: You two are jerks. (Note: he might not have said, “jerks,” but something more colorful.)

In their defense, college is a morbid time for a lot of people, and suicide was a hot topic of conversation at Cornell, so, there’s that. But the point is that some explanations are annoying. In this case, depending on the details of what you take causality to be, these explanations have the interesting feature of being both annoying and true. That is, it is true that someone who falls from a great height died, in at least some sense, because they hit the sidewalk at a very high rate of speed. Just because it’s true doesn’t mean it’s not irritating.

Why are such (true) explanations annoying? Well, in this sort of case, I think it has something to do with conversational pragmatics. (See, e.g., Sperber and Wilson’s book, Relevance). So, yes, it might be true that hitting the ground caused the poor MIT student’s body parts to become disordered and therefore stop functioning as they are designed to function. Effects have an arbitrarily large number of causes, and one can attend to any subset of them. Proponents of counter-factual accounts of morality would say that the Big Bang caused the student’s death; if it hadn’t happened, he wouldn’t have died.

However, when the speaker is asking about the cause of death in this case, they are really interested in only one type of explanation, namely an explanation at the level of folk psychology, the language of beliefs and desires. This answer is something like, he believed he failed his organic chemistry midterm, and so he also believed his pre-med GPA was in trouble, so he believed that his life would no longer be a satisfying and fulfilling one, and as a consequence he desired his own death, or something like that. (Side note: My guess is that explanations at the level of folk psychology will turn out to be the least irritating sort of explanations for human social behavior. Are there data on this?)

I don’t think that all explanations that are irritating are irritating for this reason. I suspect that some are irritating for other reasons. People have asked me, for instance, why I have been doing work on “self-control,” which has nothing to do with the areas I historically have investigated. The reason is, I’m a little ashamed to admit, I find the glucose-as-willpower model irritating. In this case it’s not irritating because it’s obviously true, but rather because it’s so obviously not true. Again, that’s not the only reason that explanations might be irritating; I also find the explanation of tides irritating. In the case of tides, this isn’t because it’s true, but because I’m sure it’s right but I never feel like I really completely get it; I find that frustrating.

I’m not claiming that in any of these cases I’ve provided a good and complete explanation for what makes an explanation irritating. In the first case, pragmatics, at least one more step is needed; it might be irritating because the speakers are wasting your time, which is a cost, and irritation is a way to motivate appropriate action to stop subsequent gambits. (My memory is that this didn’t work. We all had to sort of grow out of it.)

But the broader point I want to make is just that some explanations elicit strong emotional responses, and this is the case even if the explanations are correct.

In the case of explaining the bits and behavior or biological creatures, this might pose a particular problem. As has been discussed at length in various places, there are many levels of explanations for an organism’s behavior that are of potential interest for various reasons. For instance:

Question: Why is your dog making that whining sound?
Irritating answer 1: When she pushes air through her mouth, it produces vibrations in the air blah blah blah…
Irritating answer 2: My ancestors allowed her ancestors to breed if and only if they signaled that they had some need to be addressed blah blah blah…
Not irritating answer: I forgot to feed her dinner.

The history of science is replete with people getting very irritated with explanations. In fact, it might be hard to think of a major scientific breakthrough that didn’t irritate substantial numbers of important people. Galileo’s ideas about the motion of the Earth around the sun seriously irritated the religious authorities. The furor surrounding Darwin’s ideas about natural selection irritated many of his contemporaries, and seems to continue to irritate people today. Wikipedia uses the term “displeased” to refer to Einstein’s take on the theory of quantum mechanics, and most are familiar with his testy remark that “God doesn’t play with dice.” Perhaps less well known but not less interesting is resistance to the idea of continental drift. Cherry Lewis wrote that “for fifty years dogma formed obstructions to continental drift, and only a few enlightened individuals recognized early on that it was the only way so many geological phenomena could be explained” (p. 157), and that leading geologists “were exasperated by these ideas” (p. 158).

In some ways, it seems odd that explanations are the sorts of things that would irritate, displease, or exasperate scientists. Scholars might think an explanation is wrong, but the emotional reaction seems to be more of a puzzle. More closely related to evolutionary psychology, in The Blank Slate, Steve Pinker suggests that biological explanations of human nature make people anxious, and suggests four reasons why this might be:

  • If people are innately different, oppression and discrimination would be justified.
  • If people are innately immoral, hopes to improve the human condition would be futile.
  • If people are the products of biology, free will would be a myth and we could no longer hold people responsible for their actions.
  • If people are products of biology, life would have no higher meaning and purpose.

In the book, Pinker shows that the logic of these conditionals don’t hold, and argues that denying biological explanations can have unpleasant consequences. For the present purpose, however, the point is that people seem to find certain sorts of explanations of human behavior especially irritating.

It seems to me that there is another twist to the tale of irritating explanations. How irritated people get seems to depend on how they have understood the explanation. Because different sorts of explanations are more or less vexing, it’s very possible, if one hasn’t studied the explanation in question carefully, that a casual reading of it might lead one to think the explanation on offer is of an especially aggravating sort, even when it’s the sort of explanation which, if properly understood, isn’t troubling at all. One can argue about whether one ought to get emotional about explanations in the first place; one might assume the enlightened position that they might be right or wrong, but in either case one should treat them dispassionately rather than emotionally. But, given that explanations can be so irritating, it’s important for this reason – as well as good practice more generally – to ensure that one understands an explanation before getting discomfited by it.

Oh, and, you know, just by the way. Edward Clint has some remarks about a recent talk by a somewhat irritated Rebecca Watson at a conference called Skepticon. Just thought I would mention that.

Note: One typo corrected after initial posting.

References

LewisC. (2000). The dating game — One man’s search for the age of the Earth:Cambridge,UK, Cambridge University Press

Pinker, S. (2002) The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.New York: Penguin.

Sperber, D. & Wilson, D. (1986). Relevance.Oxford: Blackwell.

Wilson, Deirdre, and Dan Sperber. “Relevance theory.” Handbook of pragmatics (2002).

 

 

17. December 2012 by kurzbanepblog
Categories: Blog | 3 comments

Announcement: Annual European Human Behavior and Evolution (EHBEA) conference

This year’s annual European Human Behavior and Evolution (EHBEA) conference will be held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, from Sunday, March 24th to Wednesday, March 27th, 2013. The conference is being hosted at VU University Amsterdam, and it is being organized by Mark van Vugt, Thomas Pollet, Josh Tybur, and Fleur Thomese.

The conference includes five distinguished plenary speakers, including:

Bram Buunk (University of Groningen and Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences)

Celia Heyes (All Souls College, University of Oxford)

Simon Gächter (Department of Economics, University of Nottingham & Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences Visiting professor, VU University Amsterdam)

Kristen Hawkes (Department of Anthropology, University of Utah)

Joe Henrich (Department of Psychology and Department of Economics, University of British Columbia)

The 2013 EHBEA New Investigator award winner (to be determined) will also give a plenary.

Abstracts for poster and paper presentations are due by December 31st,2012, and they can be submitted through the conference web site.

12. December 2012 by kurzbanepblog
Categories: Blog | Comments Off on Announcement: Annual European Human Behavior and Evolution (EHBEA) conference

Disgust and Morality, The Sequel

My prior post on the relationship elicited a set of comments giving readers’ own views of the relationship between morality and disgust. In this post, I thought I’d indicate my reactions, and then give my position, which can be found in somewhat greater detail in a paper I was fortunate to work on with Josh Tybur, Deb Lieberman, and Peter DeScioli, now available (pay wall) online from Psychological Review.

First, to recap, in the prior post I suggested that there are really two distinct questions about the relationship between disgust and morality, which can be briefly glossed as:

  • Why are disgusting things moralized?
  • Why are immoral things called “disgusting?”

One reader, Lee Kirkpatrick, suggested what I’ll call the Diagnostic argument. He proposed that a person who performs the disgusting acts in question “deserves to be condemned and punished not so much for committing the disgusting act per se, but because committing that act is (believed to be) diagnostic of other more nefarious activities.”

It seems to me that Lee is right that one can make some sort of probabilistic inferences about people who engage in various disgusting activities. Things that people find disgusting tend to be, simplifying, fitness errors: having sex with the wrong sorts of entities (e.g., chickens) or exposing oneself to harmful pathogens. So, I agree that an inference is licensed along the lines of: people who perform disgusting acts might deviate in some important respect from the species-typical design. In turn, people who deviate from the species-typical design are unpredictable and therefore more dangerous than the average bear. To me, this argument – the Diagnostic argument – explains why I might avoid such people, in terms of choosing them as friends or allies, and perhaps even in terms of physical proximity. That is, the Diagnostic argument affords, well, a diagnosis, but it doesn’t seem to me that the cure is moral censure, but rather avoidance. When acts are moralized, by and large, it means that people in the group impose costs of some sort on the individual committing the acts in question, and it’s less clear to me that I benefit from having costs imposed on such people, whether by me or by others. The Diagnostic argument is at its heart an informational argument: I have learned something about a person who commits disgusting acts. The right reaction to this new information, it seems to me, is keeping one’s distance, which is why I’m not a big fan of this explanation.

Lee’s response to my argument along these lines echoes Larry Fiddick’s take on this issue. Larry makes what I’ll call a Negative Externalities argument, suggesting that disgusting acts are moralized “because they can potentially harm you (or your kin).” One example he used is that if you eat a part of a SARS-infected cat, then I might get SARS from you, which of course means that I’m better off in a world in which no one eats SARS-infected cats. A rule that specifies punishing any cat-eating at all accomplishes this by disincetivizing the activity. That is, supporting the moralization of this behavior is simply following one’s self-interest. By supporting punishment for all cat-eating, I’m using morality to make myself better off by reducing probabilistic harm in the form of parasite transmission through SARS-infected-cat-eating.

I’m sympathetic to this argument in general, but my worry about this lies in the particulars. The SARS case and another example Larry uses, homosexuality, both strike me as uncommon or oblique pathways from disgusting acts to harm, and other moralized acts strike me as even more difficult to spin as having externalities, such as masturbation or feces-eating. So the Negative Externalities seems to require indirect and low probability routes from the acts of others to harm to me. Further, it seems to me that negative externalities are everywhere, including many that attach to  non-disgusting behaviors and, further, we moralize lots of things that have positive, rather than negative effects, such as, historically, the charging of interest and, still, the sale of kidneys and livers.

Still, I am sympathetic to this general line of argument. As Lee points out, I and my colleagues have proposed that opposition to recreational drug use might be explained in this way. But in such cases our argument is slightly different, having to do with strategic interactions as opposed to externalities. We assume that some moral regimes are better for some people than for others. So, for instance, if I am an individual for whom infidelity is a big potential cost – because I’m an investing monogamous mating strategist as opposed to a mating-effort specialist – then I benefit from regimes that penalize, and so disincentivize, infidelity. This can be thought of as using the punishment institutions in my local social group to inhibit the classes of behavior that probabilistically harm me. So, suppose that people believe that recreational drug use leads to increases in promiscuous sexuality. Because high-investment men are better off in a world in which there is less extra-pair sex, moral regimes that moralize sexuality – or acts that facilitate sexual behavior, such as recreational drug use – constitute a strategic win for such men. This, we have argued, explains why some people, but not everyone, moralizes this behavior.

So what do I think about the answer to the first question? I prefer an epidemiological sort of argument. Moral contents vary greatly across different places and times. This variation suggests that moral contents are socially transmitted, and, further, that moral contents change over time, likely as a result of support for or resistance to various moral contents and regimes in a given social group. (A modern example is homosexuality, which has become steadily de-moralized over time.) Because, as indicated above, different moral regimes help or hurt different people, there might be systems designed to evaluate whether a particular candidate moral rule is likely to help, hurt, or have no effect on one’s interests. From a strategic perspective, one might expect individuals to resist rules that make them worse off, but endorse rules that make them better off, or, importantly, were neutral with respect to their own interests.

One sort of moral rule that people might not be expected to put up much resistance to supporting is one that specifies behaviors that one doesn’t want to do anyway. Acts that elicit disgust are, generally, the sorts of things that most people don’t want to do – indeed, the emotion is designed to steer them away from such acts – giving rules about disgusting acts an epidemiological advantage. So, the proposal in the Tybur et al. paper is that disgust serves as an input to systems that judge the strategic impact of a given candidate rule. To the extent that an act elicits disgust – meaning that I don’t want to engage in the act in the first place – I ought to be (in the fitness sense) in favor of, or at least not opposed to, moralizing the act. This sort of account might help to explain why, for instance, it seems to take so long to de-moralize disgusting acts.

That’s my view on the first question. Just to finish up, in my prior post, Giner-Sorolla refers to an ‘in press’ paper in Psychological Bulletin which he says suggests that “‘disgust’ felt at non-bodily moral violation is a linguistic or metaphorical slippage from the use in English.” I haven’t read the paper in question, so I can’t say much about this, but this seems like a reasonable answer to the second of the two questions, above, why we use the language of disgust to refer to non-sexual, non-pathogen morally wrong behaviors, such as stealing from orphans. We make a related argument in the paper I mentioned at the top of this post.

10. December 2012 by kurzbanepblog
Categories: Blog | 1 comment

EEA = Invariances

I’ll be heading off to Belgium on Friday to attend a symposium organized by Johan Braeckman to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of The Adapted Mind, which Wikipedia says “is widely considered the foundational text of evolutionary psychology.” I was flattered to be asked to give a sort of “where are we now” talk at the workshop, so I’ve been thinking a little bit recently in preparation for my remarks about the trajectory of the discipline over the last twenty years.

It is with this in mind that here I consider briefly a post that was called to my attention last week that is otherwise an unremarkable and somewhat meandering instance of the common sorts of poorly founded complaints about evolutionary psychology. The post is by Greg Laden, entitled “Why do men hunt and women shop?”

In the portion of the post I’m interested in, Laden is discussing the argument surrounding the environment in which humans evolved, allowing that “humans are the result of evolution over two million years or so of the Pleistocene,” but later noting that the “Pleistocene is, among recent geological time periods, considered to be the most variable time period that the Earth has ever experienced.” What particularly caught my eye was a passage surrounding the concept of the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness (EEA) which, with apologies, I quote here at length. (Apologies more generally for the heavy quoting in this post. My point here is about the positions assumed in this discussion, so I felt it was important to draw on the original text to document these positions.) Here is Laden:

One might argue (and this is the usual argument) that it is really the social setting in which humans lived, not the habitat, that was consistent over two million years, thus the Pleistocene as a variable time period argument goes out the window. But I should point something out about that counterargument: It wasn’t ever made until people like me (mainly me, in fact) started arguing, mainly at conferences, that the Pleistocene varied too much to be thought of as a stable habitat in which certain behaviors would evolve and get “stuck.” You see, part of the Pleistocene argument is that it was a long time compared to the subsequent Holocene (two million vs. 10,000 year) so we are essentially Pleistocene creatures. But when it was pointed out to evolutionary psychologists that the Pleistocene varied tremendously compared to the Holocene, the “oh, it’s the social argument” was raised to salvage the idea.

First, I want to say that I don’t know precisely what time period he’s talking about when he says that he made the argument at conferences that the EEA concept had to include social features as well as the climatological. He might be referring to conferences in the 80’s, in which case his account of history is plausible. This seems unlikely to me insofar as evolutionary psychology as a field didn’t exist in the 80’s, so my sense is he’s got more recent history in mind. In addition, to be fair, I am confident that different scholars have used the term “EEA” in different ways, in print and at conferences, no doubt more or less precisely, and he might well have these other uses in mind. My sense is that he has Tooby and Cosmides at least partly in mind, given that he specifically (if somewhat inaccurately) discusses their cheater detection work in the post, but it’s plausible he is addressing some other account. Fair enough.

Still, if he is talking about the EEA concept around the era of The Adapted Mind, his account would seem to fall short of complete historical accuracy. I found this sociologically interesting because I have frequently encountered confusion about the precise claims about the human EEA, and, as I have noted before, I was also puzzled by the claim that the EEA concept has been updated from the original, without any documentation of the movement from the prior version to the present one.

There are two good sources of the claims regarding what Leda Cosmides and John Tooby meant by their EEA concept, the 1992 “Psychological Foundations of Culture” chapter in The Adapted Mind, and their paper “The Past Explains the Present” in 1990 in Ethology and Sociobiology (now Evolution and Human Behavior). Were they referring to a particular time and a place, a “habitat,” when they discussed the EEA concept, which was then in need of correction by Laden? In 1990, Tooby and Cosmides wrote (p. 387):

The concept of the EEA has been criticized under the misapprehension that it refers to a place, or to a typologically characterized habitat, and hence fails to reflect the variability of conditions organisms may have encountered.

From this it can be seen that even in 1990, they were taking pains to defend against the possibility that careless readers might take them to be saying that the EEA is to be thought of as a time and a place. Instead, they characterize it this way (pp. 386-387):

The “environment of evolutionary adaptedness” (EEA) is not a place or a habitat, or even a time period. Rather, it is a statistical composite of the adaptation-relevant properties of the ancestral environments encountered by members of ancestral populations, weighted by their frequency and fitness-consequences.

They go on to say:

There is no basis in the concept of the EEA for any claims of stasis, simplification, or uniform ancestral conditions in the usual sense. As a complex statistical composite of structurally described contingencies of selection, the idea of an EEA involves no oversimplication. Rather the error is to think that a literal place or a habitat, defined by ostension, is a description of the ancestral condition component of the definition of an adaptation. The concept of ancestral conditions or the EEA, as a statistical composite, is necessarily invoked whenever one is making an adaptationist claim, which means whenever one is making an adaptiveness claim, whether researchers are aware of it or not. As a composite, it is necessarily “ uniform” in the abstract sense, although that uniform description may involve the detailed characterization of any degree of environmental variability. (p. 387)

I suppose that a reader might still be left wondering what sort of statistical composites they had in mind. Did they have in mind properties of only the physical world, particularly those having to do with climate and weather? Any reader left so wondering could note the examples they chose to illustrate. For instance, they discussed the quintessential human social activity, communicating via natural language (p. 388):

The EEA for the human language faculty consists of the statistical composite of relevant environmental features starting from the incipient appearance of the language faculty until it reached its present structure

Later, discussing how adaptations provide evidence about ancestral selection pressures, they wrote (p. 390):

The presence of psychological mechanisms producing male sexual jealousy tells one that female infidelity was part of the human and ring dove EEAs.

From these examples – not to mention the explicit articulation of their view of the EEA concept – it can be seen that Tooby and Cosmides have in mind abstract invariances in the social sphere.  For what it’s worth, in their 1989 article on social exchange, they indeed focus on a social invariance of the EEA, writing that the “ecological and life-history factors characteristic of the human environment of evolutionary adaptedness fulfill the conditions necessary for the evolution of cooperation.” (p. 57)

In the 1992 PFC chapter, they reiterate their commitment to the notion of invariances across multiple domains and, again, in what ought to have defused potential misunderstandings, refer to social dimensions of the world, in this case mental states and emotions (p. 69):

…anything that is recurrently true (as a net statistical or structural matter) across large numbers of generations could potentially come to be exploited by an evolving adaptation to solve a problem or to improve performance. For this reason, a major part of adaptationist analysis involves sifting for these environmental or organismic regularities or invariances. For example, mental states, such as behavioral intentions and emotions, cannot be directly observed. But if there is a reliable correlation over evolutionary time between the movement of human facial muscles and emotional state or behavioral intentions, then specialized mechanisms can evolve that infer a person’s mental state from the movement of that person’s facial muscles

Finally, in case a reader were intimidated by the need to read these admittedly somewhat densely argued scholarly sources, Tooby and Cosmides reiterate their view of the EEA, including the use, again, of a social example (male provisioning) in their online, very accessible primer, dated 1997:

Although the hominid line is thought to have evolved on the African savannahs, the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, or EEA, is not a place or time. It is the statistical composite of selection pressures that caused the design of an adaptation. Thus the EEA for one adaptation may be different from that for another. Conditions of terrestrial illumination, which form (part of) the EEA for the vertebrate eye, remained relatively constant for hundreds of millions of years (until the invention of the incandescent bulb); in contrast, the EEA that selected for mechanisms that cause human males to provision their offspring — a situation that departs from the typical mammalian pattern — appears to be only about two million years old.

In sum, the point is that the EEA concept is, and has been since Tooby and Cosmides began writing about it, defined not as a time or place, not as a claim about the weather or climate, but as invariances, properties across scale, complexity, abstractness, and so forth, that influenced selection of some trait or traits. Somewhat whimsically perhaps, Tooby and Cosmides (1990) provided a sense of just how complex such invariances might be (p. 389):

These invariances can be described as sets of conditionals of any degree of complexity, from the very simple (e.g., the temperature was always greater than freezing) to a two-valued statistical construct (e.g., the temperature had a mean of 31.2 C. and standard deviation of 8.1), to any degree of conditional and structural complexity that is reflected in the adaptation (e.g., predation on kangaroo rats by shrikes is 17.6% more likely during a cloudless full moon than during a new moon during the first 60 days after the winter solstice if one exhibits adult male ranging patterns).

The first “E” in EEA, Environment does not, and has not since Tooby and Cosmides starting using the EEA concept, mean the same thing that “Environment” in “Environmental Science” means. It is emphatically not a claim about the weather. It is emphatically not a claim that there was no climatic variation during the last several million years. The EEA concept is a technical term, and, I concede, its meaning is relatively hard to master. From our imaginations and from such movies as Quest for Fire we can easily and concretely conjure up images of a sort of setting for our human evolutionary past, and this pleasingly concrete image might explain the temptation to construe the EEA that way, as a kind of a concrete stage for our ancestors to act on. This view is not, however, what the concept was intended to refer to. The concept is more abstract, more complex, and more useful than a simple movie set. And it has been since Tooby and Cosmides began using the construct.

Tooby and Cosmides have occasionally referred to the idea that new ideas go through three stages, from: 1) it’s not true; to, 2) it’s true but not important; to, 3) it’s true and important but we knew it all along. The late 80s and early nineties seem to have been the first stage. Twenty years after The Adapted Mind, it seems to me that we’re at a third stage with a twist: it’s true, important, we knew it all along… and now let us instruct you on the ideas you developed twenty years ago.

References

Cosmides, L. & Tooby, J. (1989). Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture, Part II. Case study: A computational theory of social exchange. Ethology & Sociobiology, 10, 51-97.

Tooby, J. & Cosmides, L. (1990). The past explains the present: Emotional adaptations and the structure of ancestral environments. Ethology and Sociobiology, 11, 375-424.

Tooby, J. & Cosmides, L. (1992). The psychological foundations of culture. In J. Barkow, L. Cosmides, & J. Tooby (Eds.), The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture.New York: Oxford University Press.

04. December 2012 by kurzbanepblog
Categories: Blog | 10 comments

Disgust & Morality

Paul Bloom and David Pizarro recently did a bloggingheads conversation about the link between disgust and morality. I watched most of it, and I thought it was interesting, likely worth a listen to people interested in either or both of these topics. As something of an aside, there’s an interesting moment (43:37) in which Pizarro talks about how evolutionary psychologists have been “fighting the good fight” in terms of “going way out of their way” when talking about political hot topics such as rape in emphasizing that discussing rape or studying is not the same as condoning it. Pizarro says that “we” – by which he means, I think, social psychologists – should try to emulate evolutionary psychologists in this respect.

So, that’s interesting, but not really closely related to the main question, which is why there is a strong relationship between morality and disgust. In fact, as Josh Tybur, Deb Lieberman, Peter DeScioli and I argue in a forthcoming paper, there are really two issues that might be teased apart, but it seems to me are often sort of mixed together.

The first issue is perhaps the more obvious one, which is that lots of disgusting things are moralized. That is, in various places and at various times, lots of acts that evoke the emotion of disgust are seen by a community as “wrong,” meaning that if someone is found to have committed the act, they are subject to punishment by whatever means the society in question uses.

Which acts evoke the emotion of disgust? Well, two important sorts of stimuli seem to do it. The first is cues to the presence of potentially harmful pathogens, such as dead and decaying plants and animals. Disgust seems to be well designed to take pathogen-related cues as input, motivating appropriate defense, typically keeping one’s distance. The second sort might be glossed as sexual activities with partners that represent fitness losses: Sex with one’s close genetic relatives, for instance, because of the well-known potential costs of inbreeding.

It is easy to imagine a world in which people find these sorts of things disgusting but not immoral. Indeed, Pizarro discusses this briefly, alluding to how he might find nose-picking disgusting, but not worthy of punishment. From this is seems clear that not all disgusting things are moralized. Yet, many disgusting acts are frequently moralized, though the examples that come to mind easiest are probably in the context of sexuality, such as incest and, the perennially favorite example, having sex with a chicken (see image, below).

Disgusting? Immoral? Both?

On the surface, moralizing disgusting acts seems somewhat puzzling for a few reasons, though how puzzling you find this might depend on your theory of the function of morality. First of all, if you think that morality has something to do with the prevention of people doing things that are good for them but bad for others, then it seems perverse to find disgusting acts immoral. After all, disgusting things are the sorts of acts that people by and large don’t want to do in the first place. If morality is for constraining others’ behavior, then why “constrain” people to avoid the very things we all tend to avoid anyway?

Second, and related to the question of why constrain people from doing things they don’t want to do, why constrain people from doing things that don’t hurt others? If, again, your theory of morality has something to do with bringing about benefits, then why are disgusting things, which by and large only hurt the actor (or an unfortunate chicken) moralized? (If you don’t like the chicken example, masturbation – which has not infrequently been moralized – also fits here because no one — and no other entity — is involved.) Third, a perennial question is why people want to prevent others from acts that might even help the moralizers, with homosexuality being the typical example. From the standpoint of a man competing for mates in a society, obligate homosexuality would seem to be a benefit, not a cost, insofar as it diminishes competition.

So, why disgusting acts are so often moralized seems to be mysterious. This is not to say that some haven’t offered possible explanations, most notably perhaps my University of Pennsylvania colleague Paul Rozin, and, more recently, Jon Haidt, who has written extensively on the subject, focusing attention in particular on the idea that morality binds people together in groups.

There is a second link between morality and disgust. Many acts that are not disgusting in either the pathogen sense or the sexual sense are labeled as “disgusting.” So, even though there is no disease or sex involved, one might say, “Fred’s stealing $100 from the Widows and Orphans fund was disgusting.” Such linguistic forays are made with enthusiastic frequency. As I was writing this, I Google-Newsed (?) “disgusting” and found the non-payment of wages to employees – a moral violation: in this case, a contract breach – thusly: “To treat staff this way in one of the wealthiest countries in the world, regardless of the circumstances surrounding their place of work, is disgusting.” I also found that Anthony Hopkins referred to “Oscar groveling” as disgusting, and this from a man who played a guy who ate other people’s faces. (I quite recommend Google-Newsing “disgusting” and looking at the acts so categorized. It feels slightly voyeuristic, but has redeeming scholarly virtue.)

So, two questions. Why are disgusting acts moralized, and why are (non-literally-grossing-out) morally wrong acts labeled “disgusting?”

I hope you enjoy the bloggingheads.

 

27. November 2012 by kurzbanepblog
Categories: Blog | 17 comments

Forging a New Link: Wren Mothers Teach Offspring Passwords

Returning to the question of deception, last week there was a substantial amount of media coverage of a really interesting recent paper in Current Biology looking at deception in superb fairy wrens (pictured), a species subject to brood parasitism by cuckoos. Using the language of my prior post, cuckoos break the Link between, on the one hand, an egg being in a mother bird’s nest and, on the other, the bird inside the egg being the offspring of that mother bird. This Link usually holds because under normal circumstances only eggs laid by the nesting mother bird are in the nest; cuckoos break this Link by laying their own eggs in another bird’s nest, “deceiving” the mother bird into treating them as her own.

Superb Fairy wrens

The costs of nurturing individuals who are not one’s own offspring are obviously very high, which selects for counter-strategies to defend against parasitism. I wrote about one such strategy previously, which had to do with the coloration and pattern of eggs. In the new , “Embryonic Learning of Vocal Passwords in Superb Fairy-Wrens Reveals Intruder Cuckoo Nestlings,” by Colombelli-Ne´grel et al., the authors investigate, as they say in their title, the idea that parents supply their nestlings with “passwords” during incubation.

The researchers continuously recorded 15 nests during the period that the wrens were nesting, finding what they labeled an “incubation call,” vocalizations that female birds produced while incubating their eggs, but stopped producing after the eggs hatched. Looking at the calls made by the chicks after they hatched, the research team found that while different chicks made different calls across nests, chicks imitated a key element of their particular mother’s incubation call, singing back to her the “password” she taught them while in the egg.

By itself, this analysis leaves open the possibility that the chick-mother call similarity and between-mother differences are due to genetic variation. However, a cross-fostering study adds additional evidence. They moved eggs from one wren mother to another, and found that fostered young’s calls were more similar to their foster mother than to their biological mother, as one would expect if the identifying element was being acquired during incubation. Finally, using playback experiments, the researchers found that when adults were presented with begging calls from individuals who were not their own, the adults fed nestlings less than they did when presented with calls from their own offspring.

Figure 3.

These  findings raise the question (note: avoided the obvious pun because that’s not what “begs the question” means. Or what it used to mean, anyway. Similarly, it turns out that “literally” now literally can mean “figuratively,” according to a note at Dictionary.com. Sigh.), why don’t the cuckoos simply learn the same vocalization?  The answer is illustrated in a nice figure in the paper. Recall that brood parasites tend to hatch earlier than the chicks from the host species, giving them, it has been argued, an advantage over the host species, allowing them to get a head start in their competition with host chicks. In this case, the cuckoos hatch 12 days after incubation while wrens hatch 15 days after incubation. By starting the incubation calls at day 10, mothers give the embryos five days to learn the calls, while the cuckoos have only two days which, the authors argue, might be insufficient time.

So, in essence, this system establishes a new Link, one between, on the one hand, a chick making a call with the crucial auditory element and, on the other, that chick being the mother’s actual offspring. One might expect that there might be selection on cuckoos to break this Link, whether through depositing eggs in the nest earlier, a better leaning mechanism, or some other counter-strategy.

Reference

Colombelli-Négrel D., Hauber M., Robertson J., Sulloway F., Hoi H., Griggio M. & Kleindorfer S. (2012). Embryonic Learning of Vocal Passwords in Superb Fairy-Wrens Reveals Intruder Cuckoo Nestlings. Current Biology, 22 (22) DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2012.09.025

19. November 2012 by kurzbanepblog
Categories: Blog | Comments Off on Forging a New Link: Wren Mothers Teach Offspring Passwords

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