Evolution & Human Behavior Invites Associate Editor Applications
The journal Evolution and Human Behavior is expanding its team of Associate Editors. Below I have pasted the announcement on this topic that appeared in the September issue of the journal:
To the readers of Evolution and Human Behavior,
Over the last 10 years, the rate of submissions to Evolution and Human Behavior has more than doubled. While this increase is a welcome development for the Journal, the Society, and the field, it has posed a set of challenges that we at the Journal have worked hard to overcome.
One way that we have tried to deal with the larger volume of submission is to change the editorial structure of the Journal. We are transitioning to a slightly more structured editorial model with one Editor-in-Chief and five Associate Editors, all of whom will make decisions on a fraction of the manuscripts submitted to the Journal. Our hope is that this structure will streamline the review process, and that the expanded set of action editors will clear the submission queue at the sort of brisk pace that has been the tradition of the Journal. On this note, we recognize that some authors have experienced substantial delays during the review process, though we are pleased to report that time to decision is much improved and continues to decline. We remind all concerned that reviewers ultimately govern the pace of the flow of manuscripts through the system. Prompt responses to invitations to review and punctual reviews allow the manuscripts to be handled efficiently.
With the end of Ruth Mace’s term in 2013 after ten years of service, we are looking to add two Associate Editors to the Journal to bring the editorial board to full strength. We are asking your help in filling these positions. If you are interested in becoming an Associate Editor, please let us know by sending an email to Robert Kurzban (kurzban@psych.upenn.edu) with a copy to the publisher, Virginia Prada Lopez (v.pradalopez@elsevier.com), indicating your interest.
In making additions to the editorial board, we are looking for people who are ready to make a substantial time commitment to the Journal. Associate Editors can expect to handle manuscripts at a rate of more than one per week, possibly greater if the present trend continues. Editors are also expected to attend the Publications Committee meeting at the annual Human Behavior and Evolution Society Conference. Compensation is currently in the form of payment of travel expenses to this conference and a modest per-article payment.
Our decision will of necessity be guided by many factors, including the key issue of trying to ensure that the editorial board covers the very broad range of research areas from which we receive submissions. We are very sensitive to issues of representation, and hope to work toward a board that represents our authors’ diversity in geographic location, research methods, academic disciplines, and so on.
As part of the changes at the Journal, we continue to try to meet the demands of a dynamic scientific landscape and respond to technological advances. Please consult the “Instructions to Authors” page each time you submit a new article, as we continue to adjust policies regarding manuscript length, data archiving, supplementary materials, and other important aspects of manuscript preparation and submission.
The Journal has enjoyed a period of success, due in no small part to the efforts of its previous editors, from Martin Daly and Margo Wilson to Daniel Fessler, Martie Haselton, and Steven Gaulin. We hope that you will join us in working to build on these successes and making the Journal as strong a scientific outlet as it can be.
Rob Kurzban
On behalf of the Editors of Evolution & Human Behavior
Defining Deception
At the event that I mentioned in a prior blog post, the workshop entitled, “Lying: The Making of the World” at Arizona State University, the assembled biologists, psychologists, philosophers and others discussed, perhaps less than one might have thought, how to define whatever it was they all assembled to discuss. How should terms the terms “lying” and “deception” be defined?
Defining “lying” seems, to me, harder than defining “deception” because lying needs some sort of account of intentions, which tends to make things, to my taste, unpleasantly untidy. So, I’m only going to talk about deception instead.
Here’s the way that I think about it. Start with this: the reason organisms respond to sensory information they get from the world is because of the lawful relationship between the information that they receive and the actual properties of the thing being perceived. That is, very roughly, things really are what they seem to be, at least enough of the time. To take one example, the reason that certain fish bite at small, wriggling objects is that, over the evolutionary history of the fish in question, things that were small and wriggled were, with some reasonably high probability, things that were beneficial to eat. This relationship is the key element I’ll focus on: the link between the percept and properties of the object. I’ll refer to it as The Link.
The Link need not have been perfect. Perhaps some small, wriggly things fish encountered were inedible, providing no benefits or even were toxic, imposing some cost. Connecting to my prior post about mice, as long as the expected value of eating entities that were “small and wriggly,” according to the information in the fish’s perceptual array was sufficiently high, then selection would favor continuing to eat things that that were “small and wriggly,” even if the actual outcome sometimes was a bad one.
Finding Nemo (delicious)
It goes without saying that if there were some detectable property of the wriggly things that distinguished the good from the bad, evolution could favor more discriminating systems, assuming the cost of the machinery to implement this additional discrimination was lower than the marginal expected value of the additional distinction. That is, if it would be possible but metabolically expensive to add machinery to distinguish small, wriggly prey items from small, wriggly toxic items that did little damage and only rarely were present, selection would have favored the less discriminating, less expensive apparatus.
The Link can be thought of as exploiting, if I may be somewhat Colbertian, truthiness. Because small wriggly things (usually) consist of, as a fact about the world, things that are digestible by the fish, eating them is advantageous for the fish. It’s easy to see that the value of The Link depends on truthiness. If, suddenly, small wriggly things were overwhelmingly harmful to the fish, rather than helpful to the fish, selection would, everything else equal, favor fish who abandoned relying on The Link.
When a given species’ perceptual system exploits a Link, there is potential for other species to manipulate that species’ behavior through systems that produce the stimulus the receiver has been selected to use, taking advantage of the evoked response. So, in the case of the anglerfish, selection can lead to a bit of tissue that produces the stimulus object their prey are designed to use to lure their victims. This bit of the fish’s phenotype breaks the Link, being small and wriggly without having the properties that fish use to feed.
Breaking the Link is how I think deception should be defined. To me, deception occurs when a trait breaks the relationship between stimulus and world that another organism’s phenotype has been designed to exploit. I think this will properly include all the cases that we want to include in the concept, exclude all the ones we want to hold aside, and of course avoid any intentional language. So, in the present case, it seems right that the angler fish’s morphology deceives its prey, violating the usual relationship other fish use to identify prey.
I note in passing that costs and benefits play no role in my proposal here. That is, I don’t insist that cases of deception impose costs on the deceived. Most might well do this, but I leave open the possibility that deception will benefit both deceiver and the deceived. One can imagine cases in which one organism is designed to deceive another organism in such a way that it takes advantage of the Link, but the deceived organism is nonetheless better off or at least no worse off.
So. That’s how I’d define deception. Counterexamples?
Halloween Horrors: Sandy Wreaks Havoc on East Coast! Hormones Influence Political Views!
So, the last few days have seen horror appropriate for the Halloween season. On the one hand, there is the killer weather walloping those of us living on the Eastern Seaboard, and then on the other hand there is frenzied apoplexy over the publication of a paper suggesting that hormonal changes might influence political views.
I don’t know anything about hurricanes, so I’ll just address the other blood-curdling event. The excitement began with a post that appeared on “the chart” at CNN by Elizabeth Landau reporting on a paper in press in Psychological Science entitled “The Fluctuating Female Vote: Politics, Religion, and the Ovulatory Cycle” by Kristina Durante, Ashley Arsena, and Vladas Griskevicius. The story (the text of which can be read here, among other places) was taken down off of CNN, apparently in response to a flurry of criticism in the comments section of the post and elsewhere; in place of the article, there is now a short entry that reads in part that “some elements of the story did not meet the editorial standards of CNN.” Subsequently, others have chimed in with their views, including various members of The Blogging Class.
A scan of the comments on the page on which the story was posted indicates that people are, in a word, miffed. User Suzanne, whose views do not seem atypical, captures, I think, the flavor of the comments, writing:
This is offensive in its claims. CNN, stop covering useless information that perpetuates discrimination. The idea that any woman is “more religious” while ovulating is ridiculous. Feminine views on religion and politics don’t change every few weeks. Our values do not drift due to hormone surges. Printing this crap ought to be beneath you, but apparently, by CNN standards, this is worth covering. Shame on you.
So, yeah, a bunch of people are pretty angry.
It’s not just the commenting class that seems vexed. Huffpost ran a headline that reads, in part: “CNN Reports Women Voters Apparently Incapable Of Cognition.” The usually even-keeled Retraction Watch, even though they typically report on retractions of scientific papers, posted about this retraction from CNN. They comment:
Here’s how Durante explains this: When women are ovulating, they “feel sexier,” and therefore lean more toward liberal attitudes on abortion and marriage equality. Married women have the same hormones firing, but tend to take the opposite viewpoint on these issues, she says.
And then later in the piece:
Why estrogen would make single women feel sexy but turns married women off goes unexplained in the article — probably because the notion is, on its face, complete poppycock.
Notice, of course, they don’t quote Durante as saying that estrogen turns married women off: the claim is that the hormonal changes alter their political views differently, not their libido differently. The notion that they dismiss as “poppycock” might well be, but it also misrepresents the claim. (Can we expect a retraction from Retraction Watch?)
Anyway, what about the actual paper? The authors report two studies, the first of which is focused more narrowly on religiosity. They surveyed 275 women, and estimated where each of them was in her cycle using the “reverse cycle day” (RCD) method; they also asked about their relationship status and religiosity. They found that there was a difference between single women and women in relationships such that single women closer to ovulation as assessed by the RCD method were less religious while women in relationships showed the reverse effect. This effect was replicated in the second study (see below; also please note that it was the interaction terms here that were significant, which is what I’m referring to here.)
The study that seems to have elicited the howls, and was the focus of the CNN piece, was the second one. The researchers had 502 women take an online internet survey, roughly half of whom were single, the other half mated. They again estimated where each woman was in her cycle using the RCD method, and asked a series of questions surrounding religious, political, and social attitudes, as well as which presidential candidate, Obama or Romney, the subject would vote for if the election were today. They divided political attitudes into two types, “social” (e.g., abortion, stem cells) and “fiscal” (e.g., tax policy, wealth transfers).
I mention this last point because in one of the key analyses, they got a three-way interaction. (F(1,299) = 8.15, p = .005.) (See the Figure, but note that I’ve only shown one panel of Figure 2 here.) For social, but not political issues, reporting that one was nearer the ovulatory phase of one’s cycle was associated with more liberal attitudes for single women; for mated women, women reporting they were nearer the ovulatory phase of their cycle expressed more conservative political views.
In the key analysis on voting (using a logit), they found a significant interaction such that single women were more likely to vote for Obama when they reported they were nearer ovulation as opposed to further from it (87% versus 73%); for mated women, it was the reverse (40% versus 23%).
The bulk of the objections to this work seems to stem from the CNN article, rather than the article itself. As can be seen in the hyperbole of the HuffPost headline I mentioned above, the trope seems to be that the suggestion is that women (but implicitly not men) are swayed by their hormones on important matters such as voting, and people find this objectionable and offensive. More about that in a moment.
But first, a trickle of criticism of the work itself has begun, such as a post by Scicurious, discussing the work. Scicurious is very concerned about the method of assessing ovulation. As she indicates, this was done with a proxy measure, the self-report RCD method. This means that this measurement has some error. That’s true. But it’s also true that every measurement has error. (Yes, even if one does an assay, those measurements will have error. Less, sure, but all measurements have error.) The researchers could have brought women into a lab to do this work, but in that case I’m guessing that they could have run far fewer subjects. There are always tradeoffs in study design, and here they chose a larger N over a better measurement. They are not the first researchers to do so, and won’t be the last. (One might argue that measurement error makes it harder to get the predicted effect – especially a three-way interaction – but, still, it’s true that the technique is an indirect assay of ovulation. This argument would be more persuasive if it could explain why measurement error would yield the systematic results observed, which I do not believe it can.)
Second, Scicurious worries about the extent to which the single/mated groups differ. Yes, the single women were, on average, for instance, four years younger than their counterparts in relationships and were, unsurprisingly, less likely to have children. True, they didn’t put these into the reported analyses, but, of course, if it turns out that, for example, the findings are driven by age, then it seems to me that this pattern too would require an explanation.
Finally, yes, it’s a cross-sectional design, and that carries with it all the advantages and disadvantages of cross-sectional designs. Getting the same women at two different points would have been just delightful. Every design choice carries tradeoffs, but pointing out that there are advantages to longitudinal design is not, to my way of thinking, fatal to the research.
In any case, like all studies, this one has limitations. To my eye, none of the criticisms point to an alternative explanation for the data. Is the argument that the data are due to chance, and it’s all spurious? Maybe, but then it seems a bit weird that they replicate the religiosity effect in the first study so nicely. If it’s all just noise, then why do they see the same results in two datasets? But, sure, any finding could be due to chance, and of course shortcomings ought to be borne in mind.
Anyway, my sense is that the reason people got so irate on CNN’s web site had little to do with the issues of measurement error using the reverse cycle day method or whether they should have used age as a covariate in the general linear model. My sense is that the objection has to do with the perception that this work is endorsing or perpetuating a stereotype in which women, but not men, are influenced by their hormones, limiting, or undermining, their rationality.
I reject such a view. First of all, because this is a study on voting behavior, there’s no right answer. The claim here isn’t that hormones are affecting rationality – getting the right answer – but rather preferences. (Not only that, but the claim is that these preference shifts are adaptively rational, but that’s somewhat beside the point.) Second, the study didn’t compare women and men’s behavior because the question at stake was about women. I studied the paper fairly carefully (though I haven’t seen the Supplemental Materials), and I didn’t see any claim that hormones don’t affect men’s behavior and decision making (which would, in the words of Retraction Watch, be poppycock). Hormonal changes affect both men’s and women’s behavior. (As support for the idea that there is a link between hormones and behavior, I offer as evidence pretty much every single issue of the journal Hormones and Behavior.)
The facile riposte to the worry that science perpetuates stereotypes is to say that we should face the truth, whatever it may be. In this case, the finding doesn’t seem to me to be all that unpleasant. So women’s attitudes change in systematic, textured ways as a function of their cycle. So? My sports team loyalty shifts in systematic ways as a function of which city I’m in and how much I’ve been drinking. (I turn into a Dolphins fan after a few nostalgia-inducing beers; I’m a hometown Eagles fan when I’m sober.) I don’t feel that inconsistency in attitudes, preferences or fandom is such a horrible thing. I might be biased on this particular issue, but such inconsistencies are part and parcel of the fact that the human design is complicated, and part of that complexity is that we all dance to the tune played by our hormones, and still more distally by the forces – weather, location, time – that conduct our hormonal orchestra.
Yes, the design here has some limitations and, yes, maybe some people would prefer it if we could all think of our ideologies as constant as the North Star. But I hardly think it brings shame on CNN to report that they might not be.
Mice Managing Mistakes
Last week I attended a conference called “Lying: The Making of the World” at Arizona State University. Speakers were drawn from across both the sciences and humanities, from biology to literature, and included people likely to be familiar to readers of this blog, including Robert Trivers, Martie Haselton, Bill von Hippel, and , cough, me. The subject of the presentations varied widely, from deceptive coloration in animals to a gripping account of the hoax in which an American man posed as a lesbian Syrian woman in his blog, including posting a report that the fictional woman had been kidnapped.
Leaf insect. Looking like a leaf.
I had a number of exchanges with people at the conference that left me with a feeling that I have had before. I seem to disagree about some issues with people with whom I’m usually in reasonably close agreement and, further, it seemed difficult to identify where views diverged. So, although these issues have been addressed in published work (see the references section at the end), I thought I’d try again here because I’m still not sure exactly where the disagreements lie.
The issue at stake is one surrounding decision making, and the problem of what many in the evolutionary community have come to call “error management.” The basic question is the nature of systems designed to make good (adaptive) decisions under uncertainty given diverse cost/benefit profiles. The initial paper by Haselton and Buss has stimulated a tremendous amount of work in this area, starting what has become a robust and productive research area.
Here, I will argue here that there are two distinct and distinguishable ways to solve the basic problem of managing errors. This is my main point, simply distinguishing these two methods. As an ancillary matter, I’ll suggest that one way of doing this has advantages and should, everything else equal (a potentially important caveat), be expected in actual evolved decision-making systems.
To get at these issues, I’ll use a simple example, a mouse seeing a piece of cheese, separated from her by a potentially dangerous trench. Should she risk the jump across the chasm to get the cheese or not? I frame the decision problem like any other: the potential benefit, B, is the value in the cheese, which depends on its size. The potential cost, C, is the damage from the fall if she doesn’t make it all the way across, which depends on, say, the depth of the trench. The probability of getting the cheese, p, depends on the size of the chasm, with the probability getting smaller as the trench gets larger.
The mouse – I’ll call her Minnie – only wants to try the jump when the expected value of jumping is positive. The focus on expected value quickly eliminates from consideration a decision rule in which Minnie jumps when the chance of making it across are better than .5. Minnie is emphatically not trying to maximize the difference between the number of times she makes it across (hits, one might say) minus the number of times that the fails to do so (misses). I hope it is clear that any reasonable decision rule she uses must take into account the probability of success as well as the relevant costs and benefits.
Yay, cheese!
I also wish to be clear that I am not claiming that Minnie can estimate these costs, benefits, and probabilities with certainty. Minnie can see the cheese, and estimate its size. She can see the trench, and estimate the width and depth of the pit. From these percepts she can estimate the magnitude of all the relevant parameters, but of course with error. Nonetheless, Minnie’s mind can compute, from the percept, her best estimate of the parameters. (I leave aside for this post whether Minnie can also compute the magnitude of error in her estimate. I just note in passing that in the limit, if we suppose that Minnie literally has no idea at all of the estimate of the probability that she will be able to get across the trench, she ought to assume that the probability is .5; if one has no idea how likely two mutually exclusive events are, then the assumption should be that they will occur with equal probability. In such a case, she should jump when B > C.) In any case, Minnie has some means to estimate, from what she sees or, perhaps, smells, the costs, benefits, and odds of success.
So, how should she make a decision on any given day that she encounters the cheese sitting across the trench? One possibility is as follows. She could first estimate the benefit of the cheese (from its size), the cost of the fall (from the depth), and the probability of success (from the width of the trench), giving her the best possible estimate that she can make of B, C, and p. The quantity she wants to know is whether the expected value of the benefit of trying to jump (p * B) is greater than the expected value of the cost of trying to jump ((1-p) * C)). Minnie’s mind could be designed to compute (p*B)-((1-p) * C) and jump when this quantity (the expected value of jumping) is greater than zero. She jumps, then, based on this expected value computation. It should be clear that as B gets large (large cheese), Minnie will correctly choose to jump even when p is small – i.e., wide trenches – if B is big enough relative to C. To connect to the theory at stake here, Minnie is managing her errors in such a case by avoiding potentially costly misses, choosing not to jump with there is a very big piece of cheese across the way, even if the trench is large. Holding aside any additional considerations, no decision rule can do better than this one because all it does is estimate the expected value of jumping from the information available.
Were Minnie to run through those computations, and then add a little bit to her perception of the chances of success when the cheese is especially big, she’s making a mistake. She has already accounted for the size of the cheese in her decision rule, jumping when the cheese is big even if the odds are low. Increasing her estimate of p – increasing her “confidence” or being “optimistic” – will cause her to make some negative expected value jumps. Over time, such designs will be punished by natural selection, and such Minnie Mice will lose, on average, to appropriately confident Minnies. I invite readers who disagree with any of the material to this point to comment.
This relates to a second way she could make her choice. She could compute B, C, and p, as before. However, she updates her confidence about making it across – her estimate of the chance of success – from p to p’, a number that exaggerates the chance of success when B is larger than C, and under-estimates the chance of success when C is larger than B, and takes this to be the chance of success. She then bases her decision to jump on this updated value, using the output, p’, as her decision rule. That is, she might, for instance, only jump with p’ is greater than .5. Note that she’s choosing to jump using the probability of success rather than, as in the prior case, the expected value of success. (A related method is to update p to p’, and again choose on the basis of the expected value. My analysis for this method would be the same as the one below.)
How does she do this? It should be clear that in this scenario Minnie wants to make exactly the same choices as the Minnie in the prior version. These decisions will, as we’ve seen, maximize expected value. So, she has to increase p’ – her belief about the chance of success – in such a way that it is greater than .5 (or whatever threshold is preferred) whenever the expected value of success is positive. She needs a transformation rule that modifies her estimate of success upward as the cheese gets larger and downward as the trench gets deeper. There are many ways to do this. One way would to be follow the same procedure as above, and if the expected value is positive, update the estimate of success to .6 (or some other value > .5). (There are other ways to compute p’ from p, B, C, and a given threshold value. This exercise is left to the reader.)
In sum, the two methods of deciding whether or not to jump are, first, to compute the expected value and choose based on the result of this computation or, second, to change one’s representation of the true probability of success to a false one, and choose using a decision rule that uses this false probability estimate, but still maximizes expected value.
Importantly, the value p’ is a false belief. It is an inaccurate representation of the probability of success. Minnie is wrong (but, to my way of thinking, in no interesting sense “self-deceived”) about how likely she is to succeed. Indeed, the second method above might strike some readers as perverse. The system has computed the expected value, and then thrown away a true estimate in favor of a false one. Disposing of the true belief in favor of the false one carries certain complications. For example, suppose a Minnie who uses this latter decision process is faced with a trench and sees a small piece of cheese on the other side. The benefit being small, she underestimates her chance of success, and correctly stays on her own side, (falsely) believing that she is unlikely to make it across. Now a cat comes along, and she must choose between crossing the trench and other escape options. She will underestimate how good an option jumping across is because of her false belief. Compare this to a Minnie who uses the first method. She has accurately estimated her chances, and will correctly choose the right escape route based on the correct chances of escape for each option.
To summarize, one way to manage errors is to compute expected value, maintaining the best possible estimates of what is true. A second way is to introduce false beliefs, and choose on the basis of one of these false computations.
I’m not saying that this second kind of system does not, or cannot, exist. There could be reasons that systems of the second type might have evolved. For example, suppose that Minnie often jumps in view of Mickey, Donald, and Goofy, and they value mice who are brave. If Minnie projects courage by making negative expected value jumps, and this translates into fitness advantages, then this benefit might offset the cost of the false belief. (Again note, however, that Minnie could simply add reputational advantages to the Benefit side of the computation, and use the first method.) I certainly take the point that there can be value in updating others’ beliefs, and that this could influence decision making.
But, everything else equal, the first system seems, to me, to be the one that we should expect to observe in organisms. False representations, such a p’, won’t be as useful in decision making as true representations, p. If multiple systems, for instance, consult this probability, then the error will introduce problems for those systems that consume this false representation. More generally, false representations are less useful than true representations for decision making purposes. Of course, false representations might be useful for other purposes, such as persuasion. I have tried to make my views on this matter as clear as I could, writing about this issue at some length in some recent published work of mine.
And, again, to reduce the chance of being misunderstood, I am not saying that all systems should function optimally or perfectly. I am saying that, ceteris paribus, the first of the two systems I discuss here should be expected.
It is for this reason that I am skeptical of arguments that suggest that people should be expected to be “overconfident” or overly “optimistic” in the service of solving the problem of managing errors. A better way to manage errors is to be correctly confident or appropriately optimistic, and choose in a way that reflects the expected value of the options available.
References
Haselton, M. G., & Buss, D. M. (2000). Error management theory: a new perspective on biases in cross-sex mind reading. Journal of personality and social psychology, 78(1), 81.
Haselton, M. G., & Nettle, D. (2006). The paranoid optimist: An integrative evolutionary model of cognitive biases. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 10(1), 47-66.
Kurzban, R. (2011). Why everyone (else) is a hypocrite: Evolution and the modular mind. Princeton University Press.
McKay, R. T., & Dennett, D. C. (2009). The evolution of misbelief. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 32(6), 493. (Please see also the comments on the target article.)
McKay, R., & Efferson, C. (2010). The subtleties of error management. Evolution and Human Behavior, 31(5), 309-319.
Pinker, S. (2011). Representations and decision rules in the theory of self-deception. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 34(1), 35-37.
Von Hippel, W., & Trivers, R. (2011). The evolution and psychology of self-deception. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 34(1), 1-56.
Job for an Evolutionary Psychologist?
Steven Pinker forwarded a job advertisement to me and a number of other people, and I thought there might be readers of this blog who would be interested to know about it; they specifically mention a PhD in evolutionary psychology as a qualification. So I’m posting the ad here:
Organization Summary
OEF is a nonprofit, nongovernmental organization with a vision of developing effective systems of global governance to achieve a world beyond war, leading to our tagline “Peace Through Governance.” Central to OEF’s mission is partnering closely with the business community. As an operating foundation, OEF focuses on both researching and developing ideas, and implementing those ideas in practical projects. On the research side, OEF has a mandate to develop expertise in global governance and its relationship to armed conflict, with the goal of contributing both to academic understanding and practical implementations designed to reduce conflict.
Primary Role
The primary role of the Research Associate in Evolution of Governance is to develop an active research agenda in the area of evolutionary theories of system change and/or evolutionary models of cooperation as they apply to the development of effective systems of governance. This overall area of research is intended to support our overall organizational research in governance by advancing research on the benefits of cooperative engagement over competition, developing game-theoretical models of the boundaries of the benefits of cooperation, and advancing our argument that cooperative groups are more likely to survive and persist in competitive environments. Specific research activities relevant to this area include developing mathematical models which predict specific conditions in which cooperative engagement is more likely, testing models against real-world examples of governance systems at multiple levels, and developing evolutionary theories of institutional development. The RA will also contribute to OEF projects consistent with his or her expertise, and may be responsible for the management of a dedicated research team.
Primary Responsibilities
- Develop a research agenda to build OEF’s expertise in the area of evolution, cooperation, and institutional change.
- Develop budgets and staffing plans consistent with the overall research agenda and hire and manage staff sufficient to execute the research agenda.
- Present the results of research to policy figures, academics, and other interested audiences in an accessible way that emphasizes practical lessons that can be drawn from the research and publish research in academic and professional outlets as well as OEF publications.
- Work with implementation projects and other departments at OEF to contribute expertise when relevant.
Required Education, Knowledge, Skills and Competences:
This role requires a significant level of research experience in areas related to evolution, biology, or game theory. Specific requirements include
- A PhD in Economics, Mathematics, Evolutionary Psychology, Evolutionary Biology, Political Science, or another relevant discipline.
- Demonstrated expertise and a significant body of published empirical research on topics related to the evolution of governance mission.
- Superb organization skills.
- Superb oral and written communication skills in English.
- Ability to multi-task and prioritize workload in a fast-paced environment
- Ability to maintain a flexible work schedule
- Commitment to OEF’s vision (www.oneearthfuture.org)
- A secondary language is a strong plus
Location:
This position is located at the OEF central office in Broomfield, CO.
To Apply:
Please send a cover letter detailing your experience and salary requirements, a CV, and at least one re- or pre-print of representative research to Kelly Backens at kbackens@oneearthfuture.org. Please reference the job title in the subject line of your email.
Individual Differences & Sexual Harassment
The first thing we have to do is decide if a good way to try to remedy the problem of sexual harassment is to study it, including looking for properties that correlate with being a victim or perpetrator of harassment. It seems to me that this is not an unreasonable line of research into this social problem. This is not to say that if one finds such correlates that this in any way excuses the behavior in question. Nor is it to say that if such a correlate is found, then potential victims have some sort of obligation to change their behavior in light of it. If, say, it were found that men or women wearing blue were more likely to be the victims of harassment, such a finding does not imply that it’s morally acceptable to harass someone who is wearing blue, or that it is potential victims’ responsibility to sport non-blue outfits.
So, with that disclaimer, since there are those who might read more into the paper I’ll be writing about here, on to the discussion itself. A paper in the most recent issue of Evolution and Human Behavior by Kennair and Bendixen (hereafter K&B), “Sociosexuality as predictor of sexual harassment and coercion in female and male high school students,” looks at one possible predictor of sexual harassment, sociosexuality (SOI), an individual difference measure that roughly corresponds to degree of interest in more casual, short-term sexual encounters. (Higher SOI scores correspond to greater interest.)
KB consider the relationship between SOI and harassment in light of two possible motives underlying sexual harassment. One possible motive is to dominate, to express power over the victim of harassment. They also propose an alternative motive, having to do with gathering information as opposed to the expression of power. They write:
We posit that behavior described as sexual harassment is primarily behavior that intends to investigate whether the initial perception of an unrestricted sociosexuality is correct, and whether “hooking up” or other short-term sexual relations are possible.
They suggest that these two possible motives lead to different predictions about the relationship between SOI and harassment. They argue that because sexual harassment is unwanted sexually oriented behavior, individuals with higher SOI will find fewer such behaviors offensive because high SOI individuals are potentially interested in the short term sexual activity implied or offered by such behaviors. So, K&B reason:
If the intention is to dominate or suppress, a perpetrator of sexual harassment ought to target individuals with restricted sociosexuality—as those individuals would be most upset by the behavior. We believe that the main intention is to solicit sex, and thus targeting individuals that advertise their unrestricted sociosexuality is the most effective strategy.
To investigate which, if either, of these two possible patterns of data hold, they were able to get 1,199 high school students to complete a web-based questionnaire which included measures of sociosexuality, both in terms of behavior (for instance, number of one night stands) and attitudes (e.g., views toward casual sex), as well as measures of instances of sexual harassment and coercion. They also obtained a number of potential mediating variables (e.g., exposure to pornography). (Bringing the study into the digital age, they included various forms of electronic harassment.)
Controlling for other variables, as the authors predicted, female subjects’ reports of being harassed was positively correlated with their self-reported measure of sociosexuality, with a greater relationship with the behavioral component. Measurements of sociosexuality accounted for a little over 10% of the variation in self-reported harassment. The same overall relationship held for male subjects, though the size of the effect was slightly smaller. Their dataset also allowed them to look at variables that predicted sexually harassing others; the effect was in the same direction. Higher sociosexuality scores predicted harassing others, in addition to being harassed.
K&B take these patterns of data to fit poorly with the idea that sexual harassment is motivated by the desire of males to dominate females. They also report some additional findings which they suggest pull in the same direction. For instance, they find non-trivial amounts of females sexually harassing males, as well as a fair amount of within-sex harassment. This makes sexual harassment, at least in this sample, seem to require an explanation that goes beyond men’s desire to dominate women.
By the same token, within-sex harassment sits uneasily with the proposal that harassment is aimed at detecting interest in casual sex, as the authors acknowledge. At least for heterosexuals, sexually harassing a member of the same sex wouldn’t seem to be plausibly taking their temperature regarding the possibility of a short term sexual liaison. And then there are the usual caveats. There are obviously methodological limitations to studying sexual harassment, and researchers must often rely on self-report data. On the positive side, although Norway is similar in many respects to commonly-studied populations – students in the West – the country has the virtue of being highly egalitarian.
My experience is that in some circles, for reasons that I don’t fully understand, suggesting that sexual harassment might be motivated by interest in sex is viewed with a certain amount of distaste. Certainly when I used to teach my class on human sexuality, I tread lightly on this topic, and still met with a certain amount of resistance to any explanation other than the idea that sexual harassment and sexual coercion are, in their words, “about male power.”
Another question this raises is that it seems to me that harassment is a slightly odd way to get information about interest in casual sex. The data regarding same-sex harassment points to this problem, and it also seems a somewhat risk way to go about things. Are there other ways that high school students might get at another students’ interest without engaging in the sort of behaviors that will potentially invite censure or punishment? Are there other reasons for engaging in such behaviors that go beyond asking about the possibility of a short-term sexual encounter? More work is needed to clarify the motives that underlie these behaviors, which persist even in the face of increasing awareness of it, and attempts to reduce its frequency.
Reference
Kennair, L. E. O., & Bendixen, M. (2012). Sociosexuality as predictor of sexual harassment and coercion in female and male high school students. Evolution & Human Behavior, 33, 479-490.
Elsevier Sponsored Articles Option for Evolution and Human Behavior
At present, people who want to read an article in Evolution and Human Behavior can get access to the article in a number of different ways. Many readers get access through their institution, though of course not all institutions subscribe to the journal, and not all readers are affiliated with one of these institutions. Members of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society (HBES) get the journal as part of their membership (which is $66/year for non-students). A third option is to pay for an individual subscription to the journal ($477 in the United States), or for individual articles, which I believe is about $30. (So those of you considering an individual subscription or purchasing an article should simply join HBES, which is a much better deal; membership in the Society also gets you a reduced rate to the annual conference, which will be held in beautiful Miami Beach, Florida this summer.)
From the perspective of authors of articles in the journal, some worry that the expense associated with purchasing the journal – either as an individual or as an institution – will reduce the readership of the article. Articles are normal goods, and as the price goes up, demand can be safely predicted to go down. Elsevier, it is worth noting, allows other avenues of dissemination – including posting a version of the paper on one’s web site. (See their Article Posting Policies for more).
Soon, authors who publish in Evolution and Human Behavior will have a new option. If an author wants her article to be available for free to everyone, she may pay a fee to Elsevier to make it a “sponsored article.” These articles, instead of being available only with a subscription or by payment, will then be available to be downloaded and viewed by anyone. The fee to make an article available for free has been set at $3,000.
The first reaction people have to the idea of sponsoring articles is that it seems as though Elsevier is now double-dipping, charging institutions and individuals for access to the entire journal – which of course includes such sponsored articles – and then deriving revenue again for the subset of articles that are sponsored.
Elsevier has a response to this, their double dipping policy, which reads in part:
- Elsevier’s policy is not to charge subscribers for open access content and when calculating subscription prices only to take into account content published under the subscription model.
- Elsevier amends its journal list prices to account for each and every sponsored open access article. Our subscription customers are not charged for open access articles – we do not double dip
My understanding of this policy is that when they set a price for a journal subscription, they reduce the price in proportion to the fraction of sponsored articles in the prior year’s volume of the journal. (To give some frame of reference, E&HB historically has published around 60 papers a year. This number will obviously rise as we move to the new rate of eight issues per year.)
One important note is that the option to sponsor an article comes only after acceptance; this prevents the decision – in either direction – from influencing editors.
How does Elsevier’s price compare with other options? Berkeley has compiled a list of prices. As can be seen from the table, Elsevier’s price is comparable to some of the other big names in academic publishing (e.g., Springer and Wiley charge $3,000 as well). Prices at Public Library of Science (PLOS) vary depending on the outlet, ranging from $1,350 for PLOS ONE to $2,900 for PLOS Biology. (Pricing also depends on the country of origin of the paper.) The rules and prices surrounding publication vary a great deal; journals such as the one that hosts this blog, Evolutionary Psychology, are open access with no fee at all.
Is the option to pay to sponsor an article in Evolution and Human Behavior a Good Thing or a Bad Thing? I’ve addressed the relationship between Elsevier and E&HB before, and it bears emphasizing that I am not an unbiased party. It seems to me that it’s hard to see the present situation as any worse than before. After all, authors are free simply to publish in the usual manner, and decline the offered option. In this sense, it seems to me that authors are at a minimum no worse off than they were previously.
On the other hand, I predict that authors (and perhaps reviewers and readers) of the journals might be a little irked by the new option. Despite the disclaimer about double dipping, Elsevier might be seen as trying to extract yet more revenue from the journal, in this case from authors as opposed to readers, which might strike some people as somewhat vexing, given that authors already feel as though they are providing the content that Elsevier sells for free. I would not be surprised if some authors wonder exactly how prices will be “amended” to “account for” sponsored articles.
Clearly, the publishing and pricing model surrounding academic publishing is in a state of flux. Groups such as the Human Behavior and Evolution Society are likely to face difficult decisions in a dynamic publishing environment in the near future, and I, for one, hope that experts on these issues are willing to share their knowledge and insights as these important changes take place.
Is Being a Baboon Bully Bad for Business?
Interest in animal personalities – that is, stable individual differences in patterns of behavior among non-human animals, as opposed to people with party-going dispositions – has been on the rise in recent years. A new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by two of my colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania – Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney – and Joan Silk (ASU) adds to this literature, investigating personalities among baboons.
If you scratch my armpit…
They had an enormous dataset, meticulous records of the behavior of 45 female baboons over the course of seven years, including frequency counts of behaviors such as biting or attacking another animal, touching another animal, grunting to higher or lower ranked animals (which are ways to signal that one’s intentions are benign), and so forth. In all but one of the seven years, they also had data from “weekly fecal samples,” allowing the researchers to assay hormones among the animals.
They took all these data and conducted a principal component analysis to look for regularities in behavior across the animals. They found that the data could be reasonably well characterized by three dimensions. One dimension they dubbed “Nice” – animals high on this dimension did a lot of benevolent grunting and weren’t alone very often. A second was “Loner,” which captured how much time the animal spent, well, alone. The third factor captured the degree to which the animal was aggressive, which Seyfarth et al. labeled “aloof,” but I think is better glossed as “Bullying,” if for no other reason than to motivate the alliteration in my title here. (Bullies also grunted a lot when they approached infant-holding higher ranking females.)
Their year-to-year analyses suggest that animals’ personalities were relatively consistent over time. For the animals for whom they had the most data, 27 of these 33 animals stayed in the same cluster for a majority of years for which they had observations. Further, personality could not be predicted well by its rank or by whether an animal had a lot of kin nearby. These results make the individual differences seem more like personalities as commonly understood, as opposed to strategic responses to these two important elements of baboon social life. It could have been, for instance, that having low rank and few kin turned a baboon into a loner; that’s not what the data suggested.
The next step was to relate personality to other measures. Being a loner, for instance, was correlated with levels of glucocorticoids. (Recall that they had hormone assays from the fecal samples.) Again, this relationship was not due to the fact that loners tended to be of low rank; their GC levels were lower than what one would have predicted based on rank as the sole predictor. This leaves open the possibility that being a loner caused a change in stress hormone levels (or, of course, the reverse).
Seyfarth et al also provide interesting evidence that baboons recognize other baboons personalities. For instance, baboons high on the dimension I’m calling “Bullying” were approached less often, a finding that, again, can’t be accounted for by differences in rank.
They summarize these patterns of results this way:
…borrowing terms from studies of human personality, the three personality dimensions showed: relative stability over time (test-retest reliability) ; discriminant validity because they were not redundant with dominance rank or the availability of kin; and predictive validity because they were correlated with one physiological measure and two measures of dyadic social bonds that were not used to construct the personality dimensions and are known to be associated with reproductive success.
How should these personality dimensions be conceptualized? I had a chance to talk to Robert Seyfarth, and he indicated to me that they’re currently looking at whether close kin are more likely to be located more closely to one another in the three dimensional personality space, which could potentially help to clarify questions of heritability. Indeed, Seyfarth et al signal some sort of conception along these lines, indicating that the personality variables are potentially under selection, writing that “selection would appear to act against females scoring high on Loner, because these individuals were under more stress than others and formed dyadic bonds that yielded low CSI scores and low partner stability” but that “In contrast, selection would appear to favor individuals scoring high on Aloof and Nice. (p. 5). By the same token, they also imply that individuals can choose to “adopt” different strategies, wondering “why any female would adopt the Loner strategy. Loners were not isolated and unfriendly solely because of their subordinate status or lack of kin. Although these demographic factors contributed to their scores on Loner, their behavior exacerbated them.”
As they say, “It remains for future research to determine which of these personality styles is more adaptive, or whether variation in personality styles is maintained by contrasting effects on fitness.” (p. 5). Having systematically described variation in this species, certainly an important next step is explaining this variation. Is being a Loner best thought of as a strategy that a baboon can choose? If variation in being a Loner is heritable – and leads to lower reproductive success, as implied by the correlates Seyfarth et al. found – then what is maintaining this variation?
That last question, by the way, was recently addressed in the context of human personality variation in a new paper by Verweij et al. in Evolution. Spoiler: it’s mutation-selection balance.
Seyfarth, R. M., Silk, J. B., Cheney, D. L. (2012). Variation in personality and fitness in wild female baboons. PNAS.
Can we stick a fork in the “glucose-as-willpower-fuel” model?
A new paper is now available by Martin Hagger and Nikos Chatzisarantis (hereafter H&C) entitled, “The Sweet Taste of Success: The Presence of Glucose in the Oral Cavity Moderates the Depletion of Self-Control Resources,” published online in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. The paper addresses the idea that the reason that people can’t exert “self-control” – resisting tempting cookies, persisting on solving unsolvable anagrams, and so forth – is that their brain has insufficient glucose left. One line of evidence (Gailliot et al., 2007) marshaled in favor of this account is that people’s performance on such tasks has been shown to improve after subjects drank a sugary beverage. The interpretation of this evidence, however, runs afoul of an important confound. People who consume a sugary beverage have not only had their supply of glucose increased; they have also experienced the reward associated with the sweet taste in their mouth from the sugary drink. Is it the glucose, or the rewarding sensation of sweetness?
To explore this possibility, Molden et al. they ran some experiments to try to distinguish between these two possibilities in a paper published earlier this year in Psychological Science, which I discussed back in February. Here’s how they motivated the work:
Carbohydrate mouth-rinses activate dopaminergic pathways in the striatum–a region of the brain associated with responses to reward (Kringelbach, 2004)–whereas artificially-sweetened non-carbohydrate mouth-rinses do not (Chambers et al., 2009). Thus, the sensing of carbohydrates in the mouth appears to signal the possibility of reward (i.e., the future availability of additional energy), which could motivate rather than fuel physical effort.
Molden et al demonstrated, first, that when glucose was measured more accurately than in prior work, performing a self-control task did not, in fact, reduce the levels of circulating glucose. This is bad for the part of the theory that says that self-control tasks differentially reduces peripheral glucose. Second, in two experiments, drawing on findings in the exercise literature that showed that rinsing with a sugar solution improved cycling performance, they showed that subjects who swished but didn’t drink the beverage showed the same improvement. These data imply that it’s the reward rather than the glucose that’s causing the gains in performance.
The new paper by H&C adds additional data using the same technique. They report five studies, all of which follow along roughly the same lines. In Studies 2 and 3, for instance, subjects first performed a task that is purported to sap “self-control resources,” and then performed a task that requires self-control, either solving anagrams (Study 2) or drinking an unpleasant beverage (Study 3). Subjects rinsed with (but did not swallow) either a glucose beverage or a placebo between the two sets of tasks. Subjects who rinsed with the glucose drink spent more time on the anagrams and drank more of the unpleasant beverage than those who swished with the placebo drink, reproducing the prior Molden et al results. They conclude in their general discussion (p. 10):
Our findings provide an alternative explanation that not only provides a suggested mechanism independent of glucose metabolism but also accounts for the increasing body of research that has shown significant improvements in self control as a result of oral glucose supplementation (e.g., DeWall et al., 2008; Dvorak & Simons, 2009; Gailliot et al., 2007; Masicampo & Baumeister, 2008). As ingestion of a glucose solution in previous supplementation studies means that it will be present in the oral cavity, albeit for a short period of time, it is also likely to lead to the sensing of the glucose in the oral cavity and facilitation of self-control performance through a central mechanism.
Adding these five experiments to the prior work by Molden et al. – not to mention other reasons to be skeptical of the idea in the first place (see below) – might contribute to what I think will be the decline and ultimate disappearance of this idea in the literature. Two additional points. First, the sample sizes in the five reported studies are small. In Studies 2 and 3, for instance, the sample sizes are 32 and 34 respectively, so the individual cell sizes in the two conditions must have been modest. In addition to the usual worries about small sample sizes, this made me think of Ulrich Schimmack’s recent paper in Psychological Methods, which also went after the Glucose-as-Resource work, but on statistical grounds, which concluded that “from a statistical point of view, Bem’s (2011) evidence for ESP is more credible than Gailliot et al.’s (2007) evidence for a role of blood-glucose in self-regulation” (p. 9). Anyway, I find it puzzling that these cell sizes aren’t larger.
Second, and this is more of a sociology of science note, even though H&C’s studies are conceptually the same as Molden et al.’s, the latter paper is, surprisingly, not reviewed or even cited. This is a puzzling omission, given how close the two sets of studies are, and especially given how important credit for priority is to the first author, Hagger. Close followers of the blog might recall that when I discussed the Molden et al. work, Hagger posted the following comment, claiming priority and advising me that “It would be worthwhile citing this in order to ensure that your literature review is as comprehensive as possible.” Here is the comment in full:
I wonder if you are familiar, Dr. Kurzban, with our review published in Health Psychology Review [Hagger, M. S., Wood, C., Stiff, C., & Chatzisarantis, N. L. D. (2009). The strength model of self-regulation failure and health-related behavior. Health Psychology Review, 3(2), 208-238. doi: 10.1080/17437190903414387] that supercedes the one you published in Evolutionary Psychology that suggests this possibility. In the review, we state explicitly: “While Galliot et al.’s (2007a, 2009) series of studies provides consistent evidence for glucose supply as a mechanism for self-control resource use and depletion, there may also be a central mechanism controlling self-control resource depletion. As a consequence, supplementation with a carbohydrate mouth rinse may moderate the ego-depletion effect.” We elaborate on this further citing the same exercise physiology research that you did. It would be worthwhile citing this in order to ensure that your literature review is as comprehensive as possible and that you are not ignorant of the fact that other researchers may have also had this idea and, in fact, published it before you. Of course, people arriving at ideas in parallel to (or slightly in front of) others should never be a hinderance to publication, it happens all the time, and it is important academics are open minded about parallel submissions of similar work submitted to journals and give them fair opportunity to be published.
My point here isn’t about the issue of parallel submissions, and it seems to me that many journals, for better or worse, prefer to publish only the first instance of a new idea – which is why scientists get so irked when they are scooped – but it seems to me that it’s unfortunate that H&C didn’t ensure that their literature review was as comprehensive as possible. The record should, in my view, reflect the close connection between these two sets of studies.
So, to return to the question in the title, should this new evidence, taken together with prior data, put a punctuation mark on the glucose-as-willpower-fuel model? In my view, it certainly should, and its demise is overdue. The new data should be understood in the context of other difficulties the model faces. First, the math makes no sense. The number of calories burned by a self control task compared to a similar but slightly different task could have been guessed to have been trivially small from what is already known about brain metabolism. Second, the glucose-as-willpower model is the wrong sort of explanation, similar, as I’ve argued before, to locating the cause of a slow computer application to a low battery. The right explanation for effects in this literature is, ultimately, going to have to be a computational explanation.
H&C adroitly recall Baumeister et al.’s (1998) remark that it is “implausible that ego depletion would have no physiological aspect or correlates at all” (p. 1263). If the glucose-as-willpower model is wrong, then advocates of the more general willpower-as-a-resource model should be worried that there is no good candidate for the “physiological aspect” of the resource.
Is it time to stick a fork in the willpower-as-resource model as well? I think so. Still, there is an interesting phenomenon to be explained; why do the tasks in this literature evoke the unpleasant phenomenology of “effort.” For those attending the Society for Personality and Social Psychology conference in January in New Orleans, I’ll present an alternative interpretation of mental fatigue in the evolutionary psychology preconference.
References
Gailliot, M. T., Baumeister, R. F., DeWall, C. N., Maner, J. K., Plant, E. A., Tice, D. M., Schmeichel, B. J. (2007). Self-control relies on glucose as a limited energy source: Willpower is more than a metaphor. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(2), 325-336.
Hagger, M. & Chatzisarantis, N. (in press) The Sweet Taste of Success: The Presence of Glucose in the Oral Cavity Moderates the Depletion of Self-Control Resources. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
Schimmack, U. (2012). The Ironic Effect of Significant Results on the Credibility of Multiple-Study Articles. Psychological Methods. Advance online publication. doi: 10.1037/a0029487
Just So Stories Are (Bad) Explanations. Functions Are Much Better Explanations
A number of people have asked me about my reaction to Anthony Gottlieb’s September 17th piece in the New Yorker reviewing (unfavorably) David Barash’s recent book, Homo Mysterious: Evolutionary Puzzles of Human Nature.
I decided against writing a point by point rebuttal of Gottlieb’s remarks, first because I haven’t read Barash’s book, and second because the arguments Gottlieb advances have been addressed (repeatedly) before, here in the pages of this blog as well as elsewhere. (Barash has also written a reply.)
Instead I wanted to consider just one passage in the piece, Gottlieb’s favored explanation why human females don’t show the sort of swellings female chimpanzees show during the fertile phase of their cycle.
The simplest theory is that these swellings dwindled to nothing after our ancestors began to walk upright, because the costs of advertising ovulation in this way came to outweigh any benefits. Swellings could have made it harder to walk for several days each month, could have required more energy and a greater intake of water, and would be of less use as a signal when you were no longer clambering up trees with your bottom in males’ faces
This explanation for concealed ovulation – or, perhaps as Gottlieb would have it, the explanation for a lack of advertisement of ovulation – should be seen in juxtaposition with the theme of the article, entitled It ain’t necessarily so, with the tagline running beneath it: “How much do evolutionary stories reveal about the mind?” Gottlieb, following in the Gouldian tradition, is worried about evolutionary Just So storytelling.
The irony is that Gottlieb’s explanation is itself a Just So story: an explanation for a (lack of a) trait based on a theory of the relevant costs and benefits of a proposed function, in this case, efficient bipedal locomotion. As he himself might say, it ain’t necessarily so.
That is, of course, just fine. There’s nothing wrong with offering an explanation that might be wrong. Just because they’re false doesn’t make the stories any less explanations. Just So stories, in the sense of Kipling’s tales, happen to be very bad explanations, in no small part because they are inconsistent with what is known about the causal process that gives rise to traits like elephant trunks and camel humps. (The fact that they are bad explanations for the bits of animals can be forgiven. When Kipling was writing, Darwin’s ideas were quite new, and not universally accepted. Also, he was writing for children, so…) Kipling’s stories are especially bad scientific explanations because in addition to being in conflict with many known facts, they rarely if ever give rise to predictions that one might try to show to be false.
Not that it really matters, but how does Gottlieb’s idea about why human females don’t show genital swelling as chimpanzees fare as a scientific explanation? I haven’t carefully followed the literature on concealed ovulation, but it does seem to me that there’s something a bit funny about the comparative data. Orangs similarly don’t have genital swelling; do they spend more time walking upright than chimps do? (This isn’t a rhetorical question. My sense is that the answer is no, but I really don’t know the answer to the question.) That wouldn’t necessarily cement the issue, of course, but it hints at one way to go after the proposal. (It also occurred to me – and again, I’m not an expert in this area – that changes in color wouldn’t pose the mechanical problem Gottlieb is alluding to. So if, as Gottlieb seems to believe, there would be benefits to signaling, it is odd that there isn’t some sort of signal, a sort of vaginal blushing, that posed no impediment to walking?)
But whether Gottlieb is right or not is more or less beside the point. The point is – with all due respect to the importance of keeping these discussions on the highest possible plane – the deep hypocrisy that surrounds charges of storytelling. These charges often come from people –lay and scholarly alike – who themselves advance explanations that are no less susceptible to the charge. In the back and forth on this topic, for instance, I recall one proposal about how to distinguish stories from hypotheses, and in that case, the author’s own proposal failed the proposed test. Gottlieb’s explanation is no less, and perhaps no more, of a story than any other account.
I think, but am not sure, that the intuition underlying the “story” charge is the issue of evidence. In my interactions, the story charge is often followed by the claim that behavior doesn’t fossilize, and that we can’t know about history. This misunderstands the nature of claims in evolutionary psychology and the nature of what evidence is relevant to such claims. The argument about how evidence of design speaks to claims of function has been made in many places by many people, and I won’t repeat it here, but it seems possible that this one confusion lies at the heart of much of the endless discussion of this issue.
Another possibility is that there’s a more basic problem: that people find it hard, for whatever reason, to understand what an explanation is. (I thought David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity was a nice recent treatment of the notion of explanation.) In my interactions with psychologists, I frequently find that people propose a word (“learning,” “culture,” and “salience” are favorites) as a potential explanation for a given phenomenon, even though most have come across the logical pitfalls of the “nominal fallacy.” I’m not suggesting that this confusion is limited to either journalists or psychologists. I actually think that there is something genuinely difficult about mastering the nature of explanation, and this difficulty is particularly visible in cases in which people like Gottlieb want to attack a book or a field for some entirely other reason.
That last point is important. One research area I have been thinking about recently is the literature on the willpower-as-resource model of self-control. This model is much more of a Just-So story than the proposals surrounding concealed ovulation, being unfalsifiable, and yet the response of the media (and scholarly community) has been adulation and praise rather than pointing out – let alone ranting about – how the model can’t be shown to be false (with one exception from Steve Pinker in the New York Times, who buried the charge of unfalsifiability in the penultimate paragraph amid an otherwise glowing book review).
For Gottlieb, and I think many like him, his own explanations are hypotheses (but not stories) while David Barash’s explanations are stories (but not hypotheses). In truth, they are both. The goal should not to expel stories from science, but rather to identify the stories that are also good explanations.