Evolutionary psychologists, everyone’s favorite peddlers of pseudoscience to justify all manner of -isms, have long theorized that people tend to find traits more attractive when they signal fertility. Therefore, men are attracted to young, thin, large-breasted women, and women are attracted to tall, deep-voiced men. Science!
Turns out… it’s just not so. In fact, men with higher voices have higher sperm count, a key measurement of fertility. The correlation is not huge, as you can see in the scatterplot in the linked post, so don’t go about assuming Alan Rickman is infertile. Nevertheless, it is definitely real.
Of course, this really isn’t news to anyone. People have long had various objections to the evolutionary psychology theories of attraction, most notably:
- People are not all attracted to the same thing;
- Many aspects of the Western beauty ideal, such as (cis) women being too thin to menstruate, are actually counterproductive to the whole making babies thing;
- Evolutionary just-so stories are, while often interesting, rarely falsifiable and thus not exactly science;
- The “people are attracted to fertile and healthy people” theory does not explain the apparent attractiveness of obese women in Mauritania, women with tuberculosis in Victorian England, and women with bound feet in medieval China, to pick just a few utterly irrational cultural beauty standards;
- Queer people exist.
However, this is, interestingly, one of the few times an evolutionary psychology hypothesis about male attractiveness has been disproven with science. Apparently it is just as socially constructed as female beauty is! Imagine that.
On the other hand, studies have shown that men with deep voices tend to be rated more attractive than men with high voices. My pet theory? Men tend to have deeper voices than women, and modern Western culture tends to find pushing sexual dimorphism to its extremes attractive. It’s similar to the phenomenon of women, generally less hairy than men, removing all their body hair in order to appear more attractive. Or of women with large breasts. Or men with big muscles. Really, that whole “sexual dimorphism is hot, hot, HOT” thing is all over the place in conventional beauty ideals. (Yes, androgynes are generally considered “strikingly attractive,” especially in alternative subcultures. Please note the word “alternative,” and also the connotation of “striking” as being both unusual and surprising.)
Further evidence for the “deep voices are good because MANLY” theory is that, in a result surprising to no one who is a connoisseur of Dom Voices, deeper voices tend to be rated as being more dominant. Dominance (that is, power) is pretty much the definition of masculinity in Western culture, from sexuality to work to violence.
With all of this, am I saying that attraction is entirely socially constructed? Of course not! What any individual person finds attractive is some combination of early experience, random psychological quirks, social conditioning, and (yes) biology. Nevertheless, when a trait is clearly evolutionarily unhelpful, and also clearly a part of a culture’s beauty ideal, I think the “social construction” theory has suddenly become extremely plausible.
I think that I have gone entirely too long talking about deep-voiced men without linking to an Alan Rickman video.
About ozyfrantz
@QuantumInc
Yes, just because floods and wildfires are natural doesn’t mean we want them.
So BlackHumour
How much of this bashing on evopsych is based on your own research of the field in question and not you reading somebody elses rehash of evopsych?
@BlackHumor :
For example: Anthropologists know that concepts like “marriage” and “religion” may be present across cultures in a very BROAD sense but the exact form they take might be something closer to “long relationships” or “beliefs in supernatural phenomenon”.
But evo-psych people will go ahead and just assume that because all cultures have “marriage” and “religion”, all cultures have a kind of marriage or religion that is easily recognizable to Westerners.
Exactly. Evo-psych people are Western-centric and believe that all other cultures are like traditional Western culture – it’s the reason why evo-psych is used to defend reactionaries idea.
@Xauri’EL -
Having read a substantial number of evolutionary psychology papers, I wish what you said was true.
As bad as evolutionary psychology is, feminist sociological theory is worse.
“Garbage in, garbage out”. I wrote about this before. Search if you so desire.
But evo-psych people will go ahead and just assume that because all cultures have “marriage” and “religion”, all cultures have a kind of marriage or religion that is easily recognizable to Westerners.
The thing is, all cultures don’t have marriage and religion. We’ve been made to think they do because anthropologists shoehorn all sexual activity into the concept of “marriage” whether it’s something we would recognize as marriage or not. The Mosuo have actually said, “Sese (the word that anthropologists have translated as “walking marriage”) is not marriage.”
I have my issues with evo-psych, those being mainly with the psych portion. Sociology, though, is just a piñata for those in the hard sciences, because of the undue influence social movements have exerted on researchers’ interpretations of observed data. Qualitative research is difficult (but far from impossible) to make rigorous, and so we should not hesitate to question the results of studies, regardless of how well they agree with our personal ethos. Unfounded assumptions may drive interpretation of qualitative data, and specific methodologies (for example, the use of only female interviewers in the CDC NISVS) can have an impact on the observed data which is difficult to suss out. It is an unfortunate tendency, however, for those debating policy to misuse observational studies for the purpose of advancing a specific agenda. This shouldn’t be taken as an assertion that all sociological research is useless, but rather that shouting down rational criticism of studies (to protect the orthodoxies they affirm) is wholly unproductive.
No doubt they exist somewhere (and true, I haven’t been going massively out of my way to locate them), but of a great many blogosphere criticisms of what “evolutionary psychologists” are supposedly telling us that I’ve read, I’ve yet to see any that actually cited a research publication, referred to a claim made within that publication, and then pointed out its flaws. The usual targets seem to be a combination of research as filtered through bad journalism “Scientists PROVE men are like THIS and women are like THIS!” and what tend to sound an awful lot like strawmen “This trait varies between cultures! Take that, evo psych – you claim everything is purely genetic!”.
OMG! An actual post on my blog! Or: I aten’t dead, but I have been (sic.)
There is a great book that debunks the narrative that evo-psych uses to explain human attraction. http://www.sexatdawn.com/
@Vicky
Sex at Dawn is…just more evo psych. Interesting, but it runs into the same sorts of problems with looking at evolution and human behavior.
@Daelyte: Wow, really bad analogy.
@Jebedee – I don’t know about the proportion of non-cited “TAKE THIS evo psych!” detailed criticisms of specific papers, but I have certainly run across the latter more than once in the Blogosphere.
Still, if you don’t think there are legitimate criticisms of evo psych as a field coming from within the literature, you might also be interested in: Lloyd & Feldman (2002), “Evolutionary Psychology: a View From Evolutionary Biology,” Psychological Inquiry 13(2), which criticizes some of the most popular researchers in evolutionary psychology (such as Toobey) for having a weird and oversimplified view of evolutionary dynamics and drastically favoring “inclusive fitness” models over other evolution models, and criticize the assumptions of heredity and modularity common in evo psych (that is actually a thing the blogosphere rarely touches on in its discussions of evo psych, but really should: evolutionary psychology has some WEIRD ideas about brain/cognitive modules).
Lickliter & Honeycutt, (2003), “Developmental Dynamics: Toward a Biologically Plausible Evolutionary Psychology”, Psychological Bulletin 129(6), where they make the case that while many of the claims related to genetics made within the field of evolutionary psychology are consistent with the old-school sociobiology view of genetics, the are pretty inconsistent with the modern view of developmental genetics (though there criticisms of evo psych are pretty solid, it is important to also note that Lickliter and Honeycutt’s view of epigenetic inheritance is still somewhat controversial itself–it’s clear that it happens, but we’re still not sure just how often it happens or how much influence it has in relation to genetic inheritance. Still, there commentary about developmental biology is fantastic, and their developmental dynamics perspective has gained a lot of traction over the past few years, especially as computational biology and bioinformatics grow).
And finally Bolhuis et al., (2011) “Darwin in Mind: New Opportunities for Evolutionary Psychology” PLoS Biology 9(7), which takes a similar approach to Lickliter, but with a more updated view on genetics and a bigger focus on how the range of evo psych core assumptions (not just the ones related to genetics) are inconsistent with the modern literature of the fields they are attempting to draw from. They present this not just as a criticism of evolutionary psychology, but also as a cheerful opportunity for evo psych to better itself, suggesting that “A modern EP would embrace a broader, more open, and multidisciplinary theoretical framework, drawing on, rather than being isolated from, the full repertoire of knowledge and tools available in adjacent disciplines. Such a field would embrace the challenge of exploring empirically, for instance, to what extent human cognition is domain-general or domain specific, under what circumstances human behaviour is adaptive, how best to explain variation in human behaviour and cognition. The evidence from adjacent disciplines suggests that, if EP can reconsider its basic tenets, it will flourish as a scientific discipline.”
If anyone still thinks the only place evo psych gets criticized is the feminist blogosphere attacking strawmen, those three papers are just the tip of the iceberg.
@TheLaplaceDemon – thanks for the references. No, I’m not particularly surprised there are informed criticisms of evo psych from within biology; I don’t personally have a strong opinion as to its validity as a technique in general (( expect there’s both good and bad work being done). It just tends to set off my BS alarm to see “debunkings” of unreferenced claims that sound a lot more sweeping and unnuanced than the kind of thing actual scientists tend to say. E.g. I doubt there’s any evo psych people out there who don’t think that “attraction is complicated”.
@Jebedee
Fair enough
I think it just gets me a bit twitchy because there is definitely a perception I’ve encountered (in my family, in people I know, from people like Simon Baron-Cohen, and on the internet) that people who are critical of evolutionary psychology are just PC ideologues who don’t like science that contradicts their beliefs – and while I’m sure those people are out there too, the problems people have with evo psych are often very legitimate criticisms both of individual studies and of the foundational assumptions of the field. So I tend to overreact a bit, including to fairly reasonable points like yours. Apologies for the overkill.
@Laplace Demon; I didn’t mean to imply that they weren’t evo-psych. I just find their theory more plausible than the “Men are from Mars, women are from Venus” type of thing that you usually hear. If you have objections to the ideas or methodology put forth in Sex at Dawn, I’d be interested in hearing them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traumatic_insemination
This post got me thinking. What if attraction things all correlate inversely with fertility? Like human womens wanted extra time to get to know a guy before they were pregnant with his childrens. I think the wiki article suggests that insects want sexual freedom too. ^___^