HeatherN takes issue with an article from the BBC that claims pair-bonding is more important to women than to men.
According to a study conducted in the U.K., women call their spouses more often than any other person, whereas men only call their spouses more often for the first seven years of a relationship. This, along with other observations about men’s and women’s call history, has led researchers to conclude that women were the driving force behind romantic relationships. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I have a few problems with both the conclusions of the study and the article:
1. The article provides no references to the study itself. This is a problem with many “scientific” articles but that doesn’t excuse the practice. Often I’ll see articles that discuss what “a study found,” or that will quote a few sound bits from the researchers involved. What these sorts of articles never seem to have, however, is a reference to the publication of the research itself. I understand that an article might not have enough space to provide a detailed analysis of a researcher’s methodology or conclusions, but they should at least provide their readers with the means to look into the issue further. I mean, I can’t even tell whether the study referenced in this article has been published at all, and if it has whether it was in a peer reviewed journal or not. Sure, Professor Dunbar is from Oxford, but that doesn’t mean his study wasn’t problematic.
2. I’ve got one word: Heteronormativity. The article mentions that the researchers had access to the callers’ age and sex. That is not enough demographic information to draw cultural trends. How many of the men were biologically male, how many of the women were biologically female? Was there a visible difference between heterosexual versus homosexual relationships? How about between partners who were married versus partners who had been together without marriage? Did ethnicity or nationality have any measurable effect? These are all questions we don’t know because the only demographic information they had was age and biological sex. So it is unsurprising that they found explanations for behaviour in the callers’ ages and biological sex, as that’s the only demographic information they had.
3. A misuse of the term “modern humans.” At the very end of the article, Professor Dunbar is quoted as saying, “If you look at hunter-gatherers and you look at modern humans in modern post-industrial societies, we are much more matriarchal.” There are a few problems with that sentence, the first of which is implying that hunter-gatherer populations aren’t made up of modern humans. The term “modern human,” is used in the vernacular to describe Homo sapiens, and hunter-gatherer populations are made up of H. sapiens, just like post-industrial societies. The use of ‘modern humans’ in this article harkens back to a colonial view of the world, in which hunter-gatherer societies were viewed as savage and less human than industrial societies.
4. A problematic use of ethnographic comparisons. In the same quote I mentioned in #3, Dunbar makes a general comparison between hunter-gatherer populations and post-industrial populations; this is a very general use of ethnographic comparison. This is a particularly general and irresponsible use of ethnographic comparison because Dunbar isn’t just making direct comparisons between two cultures. He’s actually grouping a whole lot of disparate cultures together under the heading “hunter-gatherer” and a whole lot of other disparate cultures together under “post-industrial” and then making a direct comparison between them. Responsible archaeologists and anthropologists use ethnographic comparisons carefully and contextually. Two cultures may share their level of technology or their means of obtaining food, but that doesn’t mean they share anything else.
So now I don’t even know whether the conclusions offered in the BBC article are accurate. There are enough problems with the study itself and with the article that it throws doubt onto those conclusions. Are women actually the driving force behind relationships? I don’t have the answer, and this article doesn’t really answer it either.
About HeatherN
I often have a specific problem with this sort of critique:
“I mean, I can’t even tell whether the study referenced in this article has been published at all, and if it has whether it was in a peer reviewed journal or not. Sure, Professor Dunbar is from Oxford, but that doesn’t mean his study wasn’t problematic.”
My specific problem is that the vast majority of Gender Studies “scholarship” doesn’t use empirical methods at all. Most is based on the Critical or Post Modern schools of sociology, both of which explicitly eschew empirical methods (those schools are also the basis for virtually all Feminist scholarship, but you don’t have to take my word for it, just look it up).
It’s preposterous that a researcher who uses empirical evidence should have to jump an additional hurdle of scrutiny that the entire field of Gender Studies gets to ignore.
It’s preposterous that somebody is already trying to derail this conversation!
And yet…
I have seen in other studies that women talk more than men, when considering the raw number of words used per day per individual. Both sexes have comparable ranges of vocabulary but men tend to be less loquacious. That itself would lead to more call-time, without the unnecessary link to relationship control. I’m not sure I accept that because one partner talks more that it translates into ‘driving the relationship’.
Yeah, that’s true too. Or at least, if it is true that women talk more than men, that does provide a better explanation.
That’s a really good point, Trashuman. There are plenty of men who are very much invested in a relationship, just not huge talkers. It seems like a really odd measurement.
I read that article before seeing this review, and that article made no sense to me. (Although they do actually provide a link to where they found the study http://www.nature.com/srep/2012/120419/srep00370/full/srep00370.html.) I was too unimpressed with the BBC article to take interest in the link though. The BBC article is poorly written, and the author goes back and forth between talking about romantic pair bonds, best friends, and mother-daugter relationships in a way that muddles whatever dumb point they’re trying to make. Why do they think the idea that women pay extra attention to daughters who may be giving birth soon is new in western culture? Heteronormativity is definitely a problem in that article. It just doesn’t reflect what I see in real life. Most couples pursue each other at different times and in different ways. I almost never call my bf, but that doesn’t mean I’m not interested in him. One of my close friends almost never recieves calls from her bf, but he does all kind of other things for/with her. And the article doesn’t take into account any other technologies for or forms of communication either.
Well crud…somehow I missed the link to the original piece of research in the article. But then, I’d still suggest that means they didn’t make it prominent enough. Or maybe I’m just blind.
I also agree that the back and forth between mother-daughter, friends and romantic pairs and their conversations muddies the issue. And it is definitely too simple to say that talking on the phone means they’re driving the relationship. As you say, what about other technology….perhaps the man is e-mailing more.
A mainstream news article covering a scientific study is almost certain to get it wrong, leave out the data and methodology, distort the findings, and invent an unsupported conclusion to serve as the “hook.”
That said, there may be some validity to the viewpoint offered, mainly because I can’t think of any particular advantage to pair-bonding for men. Why would they actively pursue an option that offers no real payback?
That’s your point of view, Copyleft and it’s a very valid one, but it takes away from the experiences of the many men who enjoy, have been happy in, or have been broken emotionally by relationships. Some men, like you, just aren’t relationship people and that’s fine as long as you’re honest about it with the people you date. But there are plenty–including many homosexual men I know–who invest a lot in their relationships, even to the point where they base their lives around it (and even the ones who are successful in getting laid or getting some sort of action, honestly or not, on the side). Be careful not to generalize and marginalize the experiences of these men. I can’t say what the advantage is, but most of the men I know invest much more time, emotion, energy, and money in finding/keeping a girlfriend/boyfriend/spouse than they do in casual sex–even the ones who are very successful at obtaining it or live in a culture of easy access.
Why would they actively pursue an option that offers no real payback?
I often wonder the same about women
All excellent points.
Another serious flaw is the use of phone call frequency to come to any conclusions about psychological or relationship states.
For example, equating phone calls with emotional bonding. Is that really the main reason that spouses call each other, to maintain the strength of the intimate relationship? My wife calls me more than I call her largely because she tends to have a longer list of demands for household maintenance than I do. I have never called her to ask her to pick something up from the store, while this is a common reason for her to call me. Does that mean she needs more pair bonding than I do? Possibly, but this probably has more to do with a division of labor than with emotional needs.
In another example, equating phone frequency with depth of friendship. The people you call the most are the people you care about the most? Maybe, but not necessarily.
As someone who has always hated talking on the phone to anybody and who doesn’t own a cell phone, I think this study is laughably off base.
This almost sounds like a study bought and paid for by a cell phone manufacturer. She calls you because she needs you. Therefore, buy phone X with prepaid calling plan Y. Don’t be afraid to pay for all those minutes. After all, you can’t put a price on your relationship, can you?
Good points.
Besides, women could call more just because they’re anxious…
Number of calls say next to nothing to the quality or attitude of the relationship.
While I agree that, on average, women tend to bond more (it’s partly due to their biology, e.g. oxytocine), from what I read this study doesn’t demonstrate anything.