Evolutionary psychology: women become more racist when they are ovulating

[Kuya]

Oh, evolutionary psychology, you so crazy!

4. Women become more racist when they're ovulating. At least white American ovulating women do when it comes to thinking about black American men. Those are the jaw-dropping, politically incorrect findings of Michigan State University's Carlos Navarrete and colleagues. White, undergraduate females were evaluated for race bias using several variants of an implicit association test, which asks participants to perform a word-matching task that indicates the relative accessibility of certain stereotypes. The women who happened to be ovulating scored especially high when it came to fear of black (as opposed to white) men, a fact that the authors interpret as reflecting an evolved disposition to avoid so-called "out-group males," who "may not have been subject to the same social controls as in-group members and would have constituted a threat in antagonistic situations." In this case, skin color serves as a convenient marker of group identity. (The authors concede that people of different skin colors came into contact with one another only in recent times, evolutionarily speaking, but propose that any physical trait that serves to demarcate an out-group member would be processed by ovulating females as a sort of "hazard heuristic.") Stereotypes about the particular out-group being prone to violence may also play a role, so, at least in American society, cultural transmission works alongside evolutionary biology in promoting racism. It remains unclear if the same race bias occurs in ovulating women from other races: Do black women show heightened fear of white men?

But that's just the attention grabbing part of it, the real crime is that evolutionary psychology is very often junk science. Junk science because they seem to believe that plausibility is enough, scientifically, to constitute a form of proof. They tend to nitpick research, as if a single experiment supporting what you want is enough to actually constitute something even approaching plausibility.

They completely take something that they should actually be proving, that evolution is the mechanism by which specific human behaviour exists, and take it for granted.

In closing, evolutionary psychology sucks.

http://www.slate.com/id/2281138/pagenum/all/

[Kuya]

I think PZ Myers says it better than i ever could:

*entire post not quoted:

There are days when I simply cannot bear the entire field of evolutionary psychology: it's so deeply tainted with bad research and a lack of rigor. And that makes me uncomfortable, because the fundamental premise, that our behaviors are a product of our history, is self-evidently true. It's just that researchers in this field couple an acceptance of that premise to a deep assumption of adaptive teleology, the very thing that they should be evaluating, and produce some of the most awesomely trivial drivel.

I've just finished reading an article titled "Darwin's Rape Whistle: Have women evolved to protect themselves from sexual assault?", and it's everything I despise about evolutionary psychology. It's nothing but sloppy thinking and poor science propped up by a conviction that plausibility is sufficient support for certainty.

The story is that women have evolved specific adaptive responses to the threat of rape. In support of this conclusion, the author cites various studies that claim to show that ovulating women show stronger handgrip strength (the better to fight off men who want to assault their eggs with sperm), that ovulating women are more suspicious of men, that ovulating women are more likely to avoid risky behaviors, and that ovulating white women become more fearful of black men. I'm unimpressed. All of the studies involve small numbers, typically of college students at American universities (and even more narrowly, of psychologystudents), and all involve responses to highly subjective stimuli. When you examine the literature cited in these papers, you discover that different investigators get different results — the handgrip study even admits up front that there are conflicting results, with other papers finding no differences in performance across the menstrual cycle. None test anything to do with inheritance, none try (or even can) look at the genetic basis of the behaviors they are studying. Yet somehow evolutionary psychologists conclude that "women may have been selected during human evolution to behave in ways that reduce the likelihood of conception as a consequence of rape."

Got that? They have studies that show that a piston displaces fluids more effectively in proportion to the depth of movement, and that college students report that when they suspect their partner of infidelity, they screw harder. They don't have any evidence that this behavior actually affects the fertilization rate of one partner's sperm over another, they don't have any indication of morphological differences in human populations that make some individuals better semen-scoopers, they don't have any evidence that this behavior has had a differential effect in human history. It's all a teetering pyramid of stacked "couldas" and guesses that it woulda had an influence on evolution, if there were any variation and heritable factors involved in this function.

Whenever I see this kind of tripe from evolutionary psychologists, I reflexively reach for a counter-example, and recommend that everyone read one excellent book: The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution, by Elisabeth Lloyd. It's a wonderful example of solid, rigorous, scientific thinking about an evolutionary phenomenon. Lloyd analyzes a score of adaptive just-so stories about the female orgasm, carefully scrutinizing the evidence for each, and discovers that the substance is wanting. Too often investigators start with the assumption that a feature absolutely must have been selected for, or it wouldn't be there, and then contrive elaborate rationalizations for processes that could have favored its preservation in our ancestry…and the aura of plausibility is then sufficient to conclude that it must be so, even in the absence of any supporting evidence, and sometimes even in the face of contradictory evidence.

I should reread it now — if nothing else, to wash that nasty tincture of evolutionary psychology out of my brain.

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2...on_of_rape.php

[Demosthenes11]

it's terrible science. It's like saying "cancer is when you are really tired"

[Correction]

it's terrible science. It's like saying "cancer is when you are really black or hispanic, or just poor"

ftfy

[Kuya]

Yes, the field is supposed to prove that evolution explains certain human behaviours, but they rarely do this. They just assume it does, and come up with a billion reasons with little research behind them to back up their assumption. I'm pretty sure this process could be called begging the question.

[Demosthenes11]

there is a much better explanation for shit like this. I watched a tv show once that tried to claim women are more likely to cheat when they are ovulating. It's a red herring. They aren't more racist because they are on their period per se, they just have an increase or decrease in x hormone or y blood flow is different, which may alter their personality. They don't become more racist, they just become more bitchy

[Kuya]

Well, there certainly can be alternative explanations, and even alternative explanations with more research backing it up, but the point isn't necessarily the alternative explanations (although good science requires that you mention the alternatives), but the research backing up the explanations and how said research is actually carried out, and finally, whether this research genuinely allows you a certain level of certainty.

Another problem, which relates more to what you said, demos111111, is how well an experiment or an explanation explains a mechanism. It's not just the research, but also how good the explanation itself is, and how many holes or lack therefore it leaves.

[gaira]

http://unrealitymag.com/wp-content/u...66_1-soao2.jpg

[Siatdiat]

Who takes psychology seriously still anyway? Didn't neuroscience finally kill off psychology for the segment of the population that isn't retarded? In 50 years, psychologuy will be like astrology.

[Kuya]

Evolutionary psychology is one field inside the umbrella of psychology.

[BerenTebogo]

P.Z. Meyers says everything better than everyone else.

[bechyni]

Evolutionary psychology: when trolls get degrees

[Kuya]

Evolutionary psychology: when trolls get degrees

YES

[Shiroikage]

Who takes psychology seriously still anyway? Didn't neuroscience finally kill off psychology for the segment of the population that isn't retarded? In 50 years, psychologuy will be like astrology.

Yes, because this completely makes sense and is a well-founded opinion.

[Jb1210a]

Ridiculous. Conclusions made from likely a small sample size with women that likely aren't your average woman, with behaviors that may or may not be concluded as normal behavior. For the professor and this university to claim it as a finding is amateur and sloppy. Even the average American with no knowledge of scientific research can poke holes in this study.

[Siatdiat]

Yes, because this completely makes sense and is a well-founded opinion.

Oh, I'm sorry. I forgot that psychology is a field that isn't based on observations and not able to be proven in anyway.

God talked to me today btw.

To be fair 50 years is way off, doctors make too much off of doing absolutely nothing for people. So maybe like 200-300 years it will be like astrology.

P.S. Look into how long astrology was taught in respectable universitys. You might be surprised.

[Amastacia]

Who takes psychology seriously still anyway? Didn't neuroscience finally kill off psychology for the segment of the population that isn't retarded? In 50 years, psychologuy will be like astrology.

Depends on what you're taking seriously. There are certain areas under the umbrella of psychology that have been supported by solid science and provide useful data (e.g. learning theory). Those areas are, or will be, validated by neuroscience, but given how complex the human brain is, how much there is to study, there's no reason good science can't be done by scientists who might well not be well-suited to neuroscience, but still want to find out more about how the brain works.

The biggest problem with psychology is not that it's inherently pseudoscience, but that there is a lot of chaff to sort from a much smaller amount of wheat.

The second biggest problem with psychology is that it tends to discover what the brain does, but not necessarily how or why (those tend to be the indicators of bad science). That being said, knowing the what is important. It may not help with the development of treatments for disorders/diseases of the brain, but it certainly can help explain and improve how humans interact.

[Takedown3]

pretty funny that my wife is severely anti racsim to the point where i can't even call her a nigger but the funny thing here is that she is on her rag right this moment and yesterday we heard a radio ad to give lukemia patients blood and she said lukemia patients don't deserve our blood due to being a waste of societies resources overall.

i know its not racism but it's even more callus then calling some one a nignog even though it's a pretty true statement. well IMO at least. was way more funny hearing her say it then what i can express here, i wish i had my own camera crew following me at all times.

[aurik]

It's always useful to remember that about 1 in 20 "significant" experimental results are just coincidental.

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/significant.png

That said, this experiment should be independently repeated to see if these results are consistent.

[ronin sparthos]

Next they'll be saying whites have superior brain mass and that evidence shows that we all descend from two white people who got evicted from paradise for eating off the landlords apple tree.