Are All Men Really Pervs?

Eek! A Male! Treating all men as potential predators doesn't make our kids safer. 
By Lenore Skenazy

"Last week, the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, Timothy Murray, noticed smoke coming out of a minivan in his hometown of Worcester. He raced over and pulled out two small children, moments before the van's tire exploded into flames. At which point, according to the AP account, the kids' grandmother, who had been driving, nearly punched our hero in the face.

Why?

Mr. Murray said she told him she thought he might be a kidnapper...."

Read the rest of this piece......

And if you're new to these parts but are iterested in reading more on this topic, please check out the following posts:

Book Review: Self-Made Man

Gender Differences in Sex Drive

Gender: A Question of Diagnosis?

Defining Manhood

Better Than Thou

Boys Don't Cry

The "Real" Female Fear

Why Do We Rape, Kill and Sleep Around?

Why Do We Rape, Kill and Sleep Around?
The fault, dear Darwin, lies not in our ancestors, but in ourselves.
By Sharon Begley | NEWSWEEK

Published Jun 20, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Jun 29, 2009

Among scientists at the university of New Mexico that spring, rape was in the air. One of the professors, biologist Randy Thornhill, had just coauthored A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion, which argued that rape is (in the vernacular of evolutionary biology) an adaptation, a trait encoded by genes that confers an advantage on anyone who possesses them. Back in the late Pleistocene epoch 100,000 years ago, the 2000 book contended, men who carried rape genes had a reproductive and evolutionary edge over men who did not: they sired children not only with willing mates, but also with unwilling ones, allowing them to leave more offspring (also carrying rape genes) who were similarly more likely to survive and reproduce, unto the nth generation. That would be us. And that is why we carry rape genes today. The family trees of prehistoric men lacking rape genes petered out.

The argument was well within the bounds of evolutionary psychology. Founded in the late 1980s in the ashes of sociobiology, this field asserts that behaviors that conferred a fitness advantage during the era when modern humans were evolving are the result of hundreds of genetically based cognitive "modules" preprogrammed in the brain. Since they are genetic, these modules and the behaviors they encode are heritable—passed down to future generations—and, together, constitute a universal human nature that describes how people think, feel and act, from the nightclubs of Manhattan to the farms of the Amish, from the huts of New Guinea aborigines to the madrassas of Karachi. Evolutionary psychologists do not have a time machine, of course. So to figure out which traits were adaptive during the Stone Age, and therefore bequeathed to us like a questionable family heirloom, they make logical guesses. Men who were promiscuous back then were more evolutionarily fit, the researchers reasoned, since men who spread their seed widely left more descendants. By similar logic, evolutionary psychologists argued, women who were monogamous were fitter; by being choosy about their mates and picking only those with good genes, they could have healthier children. Men attracted to young, curvaceous babes were fitter because such women were the most fertile; mating with dumpy, barren hags is not a good way to grow a big family tree. Women attracted to high-status, wealthy males were fitter; such men could best provide for the kids, who, spared starvation, would grow up to have many children of their own. Men who neglected or even murdered their stepchildren (and killed their unfaithful wives) were fitter because they did not waste their resources on nonrelatives. And so on, to the fitness-enhancing value of rape. We in the 21st century, asserts evo psych, are operating with Stone Age minds.

Over the years these arguments have attracted legions of critics who thought the science was weak and the message (what philosopher David Buller of Northern Illinois University called "a get-out-of-jail-free card" for heinous behavior) pernicious. But the reaction to the rape book was of a whole different order. Biologist Joan Roughgarden of Stanford University called it "the latest 'evolution made me do it' excuse for criminal behavior from evolutionary psychologists." Feminists, sex-crime prosecutors and social scientists denounced it at rallies, on television and in the press.

Among those sucked into the rape debate that spring was anthropologist Kim Hill, then Thornhill's colleague at UNM and now at Arizona State University. For decades Hill has studied the Ache, hunter-gatherer tribesmen in Paraguay. "I saw Thornhill all the time," Hill told me at a barbecue at an ASU conference in April. "He kept saying that he thought rape was a special cognitive adaptation, but the arguments for that just seemed like more sloppy thinking by evolutionary psychology." But how to test the claim that rape increased a man's fitness? From its inception, evolutionary psychology had warned that behaviors that were evolutionarily advantageous 100,000 years ago (a sweet tooth, say) might be bad for survival today (causing obesity and thence infertility), so there was no point in measuring whether that trait makes people more evolutionarily fit today. Even if it doesn't, evolutionary psychologists argue, the trait might have been adaptive long ago and therefore still be our genetic legacy. An unfortunate one, perhaps, but still our legacy. Short of a time machine, the hypothesis was impossible to disprove. Game, set and match to evo psych.

Or so it seemed. But Hill had something almost as good as a time machine. He had the Ache, who live much as humans did 100,000 years ago. He and two colleagues therefore calculated how rape would affect the evolutionary prospects of a 25-year-old Ache. (They didn't observe any rapes, but did a what-if calculation based on measurements of, for instance, the odds that a woman is able to conceive on any given day.) The scientists were generous to the rape-as-adaptation claim, assuming that rapists target only women of reproductive age, for instance, even though in reality girls younger than 10 and women over 60 are often victims. Then they calculated rape's fitness costs and benefits. Rape costs a man fitness points if the victim's husband or other relatives kill him, for instance. He loses fitness points, too, if the mother refuses to raise a child of rape, and if being a known rapist (in a small hunter-gatherer tribe, rape and rapists are public knowledge) makes others less likely to help him find food. Rape increases a man's evolutionary fitness based on the chance that a rape victim is fertile (15 percent), that she will conceive (a 7 percent chance), that she will not miscarry (90 percent) and that she will not let the baby die even though it is the child of rape (90 percent). Hill then ran the numbers on the reproductive costs and benefits of rape. It wasn't even close: the cost exceeds the benefit by a factor of 10. "That makes the likelihood that rape is an evolved adaptation extremely low," says Hill. "It just wouldn't have made sense for men in the Pleistocene to use rape as a reproductive strategy, so the argument that it's preprogrammed into us doesn't hold up."

These have not been easy days for evolutionary psychology. For years the loudest critics have been social scientists, feminists and liberals offended by the argument that humans are preprogrammed to rape, to kill unfaithful girlfriends and the like. (This was a reprise of the bitter sociobiology debates of the 1970s and 1980s. When Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson proposed that there exists a biologically based human nature, and that it included such traits as militarism and male domination of women, left-wing activists—including eminent biologists in his own department—assailed it as an attempt "to provide a genetic justification of the status quo and of existing privileges for certain groups according to class, race, or sex" analogous to the scientific justification for Nazi eugenics.) When Thornhill appeared on the Today show to talk about his rape book, for instance, he was paired with a sex-crimes prosecutor, leaving the impression that do-gooders might not like his thesis but offering no hint of how scientifically unsound it is.

That is changing. Evo psych took its first big hit in 2005, when NIU's Buller exposed flaw after fatal flaw in key studies underlying its claims, as he laid out in his book Adapting Minds. Anthropological studies such as Hill's on the Ache, shooting down the programmed-to-rape idea, have been accumulating. And brain scientists have pointed out that there is no evidence our gray matter is organized the way evo psych claims, with hundreds of specialized, preprogrammed modules. Neuroscientist Roger Bingham of the University of California, San Diego, who describes himself as a once devout "member of the Church of Evolutionary Psychology" (in 1996 he created and hosted a multimillion-dollar PBS series praising the field), has come out foursquare against it, accusing some of its adherents of an "evangelical" fervor. Says evolutionary biologist Massimo Pigliucci of Stony Brook University, "Evolutionary stories of human behavior make for a good narrative, but not good science."

Like other critics, he has no doubt that evolution shaped the human brain. How could it be otherwise, when evolution has shaped every other human organ? But evo psych's claims that human behavior is constrained by mental modules that calcified in the Stone Age make sense "only if the environmental challenges remain static enough to sculpt an instinct over evolutionary time," Pigliucci points out. If the environment, including the social environment, is instead dynamic rather than static—which all evidence suggests—then the only kind of mind that makes humans evolutionarily fit is one that is flexible and responsive, able to figure out a way to make trade-offs, survive, thrive and reproduce in whatever social and physical environment it finds itself in. In some environments it might indeed be adaptive for women to seek sugar daddies. In some, it might be adaptive for stepfathers to kill their stepchildren. In some, it might be adaptive for men to be promiscuous. But not in all. And if that's the case, then there is no universal human nature as evo psych defines it.

That is what a new wave of studies has been discovering, slaying assertions about universals right and left. One evo-psych claim that captured the public's imagination—and a 1996 cover story in NEWSWEEK—is that men have a mental module that causes them to prefer women with a waist-to-hip ratio of 0.7 (a 36-25-36 figure, for instance). Reprising the rape debate, social scientists and policymakers who worried that this would send impressionable young women scurrying for a measuring tape and a how-to book on bulimia could only sputter about how pernicious this message was, but not that it was scientifically wrong. To the contrary, proponents of this idea had gobs of data in their favor. Using their favorite guinea pigs—American college students—they found that men, shown pictures of different female body types, picked Ms. 36-25-36 as their sexual ideal. The studies, however, failed to rule out the possibility that the preference was not innate—human nature—but, rather, the product of exposure to mass culture and the messages it sends about what's beautiful. Such basic flaws, notes Bingham, "led to complaints that many of these experiments seemed a little less than rigorous to be underpinning an entire new field."

Later studies, which got almost no attention, indeed found that in isolated populations in Peru and Tanzania, men consider hourglass women sickly looking. They prefer 0.9s—heavier women. And last December, anthropologist Elizabeth Cashdan of the University of Utah reported in the journal Current Anthropology that men now prefer this non-hourglass shape in countries where women tend to be economically independent (Britain and Denmark) and in some non-Western societies where women bear the responsibility for finding food. Only in countries where women are economically dependent on men (such as Japan, Greece and Portugal) do men have a strong preference for Barbie. (The United States is in the middle.) Cashdan puts it this way: which body type men prefer "should depend on the degree to which they want their mates to be strong, tough, economically successful and politically competitive."

Depend on? The very phrase is anathema to the dogma of a universal human nature. But it is the essence of an emerging, competing field. Called behavioral ecology, it starts from the premise that social and environmental forces select for various behaviors that optimize people's fitness in a given environment. Different environment, different behaviors—and different human "natures." That's why men prefer Ms. 36-25-36 in some cultures (where women are, to exaggerate only a bit, decorative objects) but not others (where women bring home salaries or food they've gathered in the jungle).

And it's why the evo psych tenet that men have an inherited mental module that causes them to prefer young, beautiful women while women have one that causes them to prefer older, wealthy men also falls apart. As 21st-century Western women achieve professional success and gain financial independence, their mate preference changes, scientists led by Fhionna Moore at Scotland's University of St Andrews reported in 2006 in the journal Evolutionand Human Behaviour. The more financially independent a woman is, the more likely she is to choose a partner based on looks than bank balance—kind of like (some) men. (Yes, growing sexual equality in the economic realm means that women, too, are free to choose partners based on how hot they are, as the cougar phenomenon suggests.) Although that finding undercuts evo psych, it supports the "it depends" school of behavioral ecology, which holds that natural selection chose general intelligence and flexibility, not mental modules preprogrammed with preferences and behaviors. "Evolutionary psychology ridicules the notion that the brain could have evolved to be an all-purpose fitness-maximizing mechanism," says Hill. "But that's exactly what we keep finding."

One of the uglier claims of evo psych is that men have a mental module to neglect and even kill their stepchildren. Such behavior was adaptive back when humans were evolving, goes the popular version of this argument, because men who invested in stepchildren wasted resources they could expend on their biological children. Such kindly stepfathers would, over time, leave fewer of their own descendants, causing "support your stepchildren" genes to die out. Men with genes that sculpted the "abandon stepchildren" mental module were evolutionarily fitter, so their descendants—us—also have that preprogrammed module. The key evidence for this claim comes from studies showing that stepchildren under the age of 5 are 40 times more likely to be abused than biological children.

Those studies have come under fire, however, for a long list of reasons. For instance, many child-welfare records do not indicate who the abuser was; at least some abused stepchildren are victims of their mother, not the stepfather, the National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect reported in 2005. That suggests that records inflate the number of instances of abuse by stepfathers. Also, authorities are suspicious of stepfathers; if a child living in a stepfamily dies of maltreatment, they are nine times more likely to record it as such than if the death occurs in a home with only biological parents, found a 2002 study led by Buller examining the records of every child who died in Colorado from 1990 to 1998. That suggests that child-abuse data undercount instances of abuse by biological fathers. Finally, a 2008 study in Sweden found that many men who kill stepchildren are (surprise) mentally ill. It's safe to assume that single mothers do not exactly get their pick of the field when it comes to remarrying. If the men they wed are therefore more likely to be junkies, drunks and psychotic, then any additional risk to stepchildren reflects that fact, and not a universal mental module that tells men to abuse their new mate's existing kids. Martin Daly and Margo Wilson of Canada's McMaster University, whose work led to the idea that men have a mental module for neglecting stepchildren, now disavow the claim that such abuse was ever adaptive. But, says Daly, "attempts to deny that [being a stepfather] is a risk factor for maltreatment are simply preposterous and occasionally, as in the writings of David Buller, dishonest."

If the data on child abuse by stepfathers seem inconsistent, that's exactly the point. In some circumstances, it may indeed be adaptive to get rid of the other guy's children. In other circumstances, it is more adaptive to love and support them. Again, it depends. New research in places as different as American cities and the villages of African hunter-gatherers shows that it's common for men to care and provide for their stepchildren. What seems to characterize these situations, says Hill, is marital instability: men and women pair off, have children, then break up. In such a setting, the flexible human mind finds ways "to attract or maintain mating access to the mother," Hill explains. Or, more crudely, be nice to a woman's kids and she'll sleep with you, which maximizes a man's fitness. Kill her kids and she's likely to take it badly, cutting you off and leaving your sperm unable to fulfill their Darwinian mission. And in societies that rely on relatives to help raise kids, "it doesn't make sense to destroy a 10-year-old stepkid since he could be a helper," Hill points out. "The fitness cost of raising a stepchild until he is old enough to help is much, much less than evolutionary biologists have claimed. Biology is more complicated than these simplistic scenarios saying that killing stepchildren is an adaptation that enhances a man's fitness."

Even the notion that being a brave warrior helps a man get the girls and leave many offspring has been toppled. Until missionaries moved in in 1958, the Waorani tribe of the Ecuadoran Amazon had the highest rates of homicide known to science: 39 percent of women and 54 percent of men were killed by other Waorani, often in blood feuds that lasted generations. "The conventional wisdom had been that the more raids a man participated in, the more wives he would have and the more descendants he would leave," says anthropologist Stephen Beckerman of Pennsylvania State University. But after painstakingly constructing family histories and the raiding and killing records of 95 warriors, he and his colleagues reported last month in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they turned that belief on its head. "The badass guys make terrible husband material," says Beckerman. "Women don't prefer them as husbands and they become the targets of counterraids, which tend to kill their wives and children, too." As a result, the über-warriors leave fewer descendants—the currency of evolutionary fitness—than less aggressive men. Tough-guy behavior may have conferred fitness in some environments, but not in others. It depends. "The message for the evolutionary-psychology guys," says Beckerman, "is that there was no single environment in which humans evolved" and therefore no single human nature.

I can't end the list of evo-psych claims that fall apart under scientific scrutiny without mentioning jealousy. Evo psych argues that jealousy, too, is an adaptation with a mental module all its own, designed to detect and thwart threats to reproductive success. But men's and women's jealousy modules supposedly differ. A man's is designed to detect sexual infidelity: a woman who allows another man to impregnate her takes her womb out of service for at least nine months, depriving her mate of reproductive opportunities. A woman's jealousy module is tuned to emotional infidelity, but she doesn't much care if her mate is unfaithful; a man, being a promiscuous cad, will probably stick with wife No. 1 and their kids even if he is sexually unfaithful, but may well abandon them if he actually falls in love with another woman.
Let's not speculate on the motives that (mostly male) evolutionary psychologists might have in asserting that their wives are programmed to not really care if they sleep around, and turn instead to the evidence. In questionnaires, more men than women say they'd be upset more by sexual infidelity than emotional infidelity, by a margin of more than 2-to-1, David Buss of the University of Texas found in an early study of American college students. But men are evenly split on which kind of infidelity upsets them more: half find it more upsetting to think of their mate falling in love with someone else; half find it more upsetting to think of her sleeping with someone else. Not very strong evidence for the claim that men, as a species, care more about sexual infidelity. And in some countries, notably Germany and the Netherlands, the percentage of men who say they find sexual infidelity more upsetting than the emotional kind is only 28 percent and 23 percent. Which suggests that, once again, it depends: in cultures with a relaxed view of female sexuality, men do not get all that upset if a woman has a brief, meaningless fling. It does not portend that she will leave him. It is much more likely that both men and women are wired to detect behavior that threatens their bond, but what that behavior is depends on culture. In a society where an illicit affair portends the end of a relationship, men should indeed be wired to care about that. In a society where that's no big deal, they shouldn't—and, it seems, don't. New data on what triggers jealousy in women also undercut the simplistic evo-psych story. Asked which upsets them more—imagining their partner having acrobatic sex with another woman or falling in love with her—only 13 percent of U.S. women, 12 percent of Dutch women and 8 percent of German women chose door No. 2. So much for the handy "she's wired to not really care if I sleep around" excuse.

Critics of evo psych do not doubt that men and women are wired to become jealous. A radar for infidelity would indeed be adaptive. But the evidence points toward something gender-neutral. Men and women have both evolved the ability to distinguish between behavior that portends abandonment and behavior that does not, and to get upset only at the former. Which behavior is which depends on the society.

Evolutionary psychology is not going quietly. It has had the field to itself, especially in the media, for almost two decades. In large part that was because early critics, led by the late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, attacked it with arguments that went over the heads of everyone but about 19 experts in evolutionary theory. It isn't about to give up that hegemony. Thornhill is adamant that rape is an adaptation, despite Hill's results from his Ache study. "If a particular trait or behavior is organized to do something," as he believes rape is, "then it is an adaptation and so was selected for by evolution," he told me. And in the new book Spent, evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller of the University of New Mexico reasserts the party line, arguing that "males have much more to gain from many acts of intercourse with multiple partners than do females," and there is a "universal sex difference in human mate choice criteria, with men favoring younger, fertile women, and women favoring older, higher-status, richer men."

On that point, the evidence instead suggests that both sexes prefer mates around their own age, adjusted for the fact that men mature later than women. If the male mind were adapted to prefer the most fertile women, then AARP-eligible men should marry 23-year-olds, which—Anna Nicole Smith and J. Howard Marshall notwithstanding—they do not, instead preferring women well past their peak fertility. And, interestingly, when Miller focuses on the science rather than tries to sell books, he allows that "human mate choice is much more than men just liking youth and beauty, and women liking status and wealth," as he told me by e-mail.

Yet evo psych remains hugely popular in the media and on college campuses, for obvious reasons. It addresses "these very sexy topics," says Hill. "It's all about sex and violence," and has what he calls "an obsession with Pleistocene just-so stories." And few people—few scientists—know about the empirical data and theoretical arguments that undercut it. "Most scientists are too busy to read studies outside their own narrow field," he says.
Far from ceding anything, evolutionary psychologists have moved the battle from science, where they are on shaky ground, to ideology, where bluster and name-calling can be quite successful. UNM's Miller, for instance, complains that critics "have convinced a substantial portion of the educated public that evolutionary psychology is a pernicious right-wing conspiracy," and complains that believing in evolutionary psychology is seen "as an indicator of conservatism, disagreeableness and selfishness." That, sadly, is how much too much of the debate has gone. "Critics have been told that they're just Marxists motivated by a hatred of evolutionary psychology," says Buller. "That's one reason I'm not following the field anymore: the way science is being conducted is more like a political campaign."

Where, then, does the fall of evolutionary psychology leave the idea of human nature? Behavioral ecology replaces it with "it depends"—that is, the core of human nature is variability and flexibility, the capacity to mold behavior to the social and physical demands of the environment. As Buller says, human variation is not noise in the system; it is the system. To be sure, traits such as symbolic language, culture, tool use, emotions and emotional expression do indeed seem to be human universals. It's the behaviors that capture the public imagination—promiscuous men and monogamous women, stepchild-killing men and the like—that turn out not to be. And for a final nail in the coffin, geneticists have discovered that human genes evolve much more quickly than anyone imagined when evolutionary psychology was invented, when everyone assumed that "modern" humans had DNA almost identical to that of people 50,000 years ago. Some genes seem to be only 10,000 years old, and some may be even younger.

That has caught the attention of even the most ardent proponents of evo psych, because when the environment is changing rapidly—as when agriculture was invented or city-states arose—is also when natural selection produces the most dramatic changes in a gene pool. Yet most of the field's leaders, admits UNM's Miller, "have not kept up with the last decade's astounding progress in human evolutionary genetics." The discovery of genes as young as agriculture and city-states, rather than as old as cavemen, means "we have to rethink to foundational assumptions" of evo psych, says Miller, starting with the claim that there are human universals and that they are the result of a Stone Age brain. Evolution indeed sculpted the human brain. But it worked in malleable plastic, not stone, bequeathing us flexible minds that can take stock of the world and adapt to it.

With Jeneen Interlandi
Find this article at http://www.newsweek.com/id/202789
© 2009

Thank you to Dr. Ron Levant, The Man of masculinity studies, for bringing this article to my attention.

Supersense

I recently finished reading the book Supersense: Why We Believe The Unbelievable by Bruce M. Hood. At the time, I had no idea how relevant the information in this book would be to a lot of the discussions going on in the blogosphere surrounding religion, science, and this whole "New Atheist" thing.

First, the author bio: Bruce Hood is the chair of the Cognitive Development Center in the Experimental Psychology Department at the University of Bristol. He was a research fellow at Cambridge, a visiting scientist at MIT, and a professor at Harvard.

The man, quite frankly, is brilliant. And entertaining, which is a rare combination in my opinion.

I hope to blow your minds with some of the information from this book, or at the very least get an interesting discussion going.

Here is the basic thesis of the book: Humans are pre-programmed to believe in the supernatural, whether that takes the form of religion, superstitions, or other beliefs that, if true, would violate the known laws of science.

A good number of you who read this blog consider yourselves to be Atheists, as I consider myself. We also consider ourselves to have scientific minds, to be so-called skeptics, etc. In other words, we feel that we only look at facts and evidence when it comes to existence on this planet.

But for 99.9% of us, that simply isn't the case, as you'll soon see.

First, let's talk about science and the layperson. Hood uses Noam Chomsky's language example "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" to demonstrate that even though the sentence perfectly follows the rules of grammar, it does not make any sense to us because of what we know about the words used. Hood says:

"So any new idea has to fit within existing frameworks of knowledge. This is why some ideas can be so difficult to grasp. Science, for example, is full of ideas that seem bizarre simply because we are not used to them. It's not that people are being stupid when it comes to science. Rather, many scientific ideas are just too difficult for many of us to get our heads around. On the other hand, folk beliefs about the supernatural seem quite possible. That's why it is easier to imagine a ghost than a light wave made up of photons. We have seen neither, but ghosts seem plausible, whereas the structure of light is not something we can easily consider." (p.8)

Notice that he says "imagine" rather than "believe in." His point is simply that for the average person, we can place the idea of a ghost into a framework, but the idea that light is made up of particles just doesn't make any intuitive sense. Think about this in terms of evolution. Yes, the Christian debate is more complex than this, but at the very heart of it is this idea that it is easier to imagine a divine being creating life on earth than it is to imagine man emerging from primordial soup only to gradually become the homo sapien we are familiar with today.

Hood's next major point is that as adults, we think that when we learn something new we abandon any previously held misconceptions. But this isn't entirely true:

"Consider an example from the world of objects. Imagine two cannonballs of exactly the same size. One is made of light wood and the other one is solid iron that is one hundred times heavier. If you were to drop them both at the same time from the leaning Tower of Pis, what would happen? Children think that heavier objects must fall much faster than lighter ones. Heavier objects do land before lighter ones, but only just, and that's because of air resistance....As a child, I did not believe this until a physics teacher demonstrated that a feather and a coin fall at exactly the same speed in a vacuum. Most college students make the same mistake. The amazing thing is not that adult students get it wrong, but rather that these are students who have been taught Newton's Laws of Object Motion and should know better. They should know the correct answer. Somehow the scientific knowledge they have so painstakingly learned loses out to their natural intuition about weight and falling objects." (p. 19)

I got that one wrong. Why? Because if I imagined a feather and a coin both falling off the table, I could not imagine a scenario in which the coin didn't land first. I don't experience life in a vacuum. So even though I KNOW what the correct answer is, the fact that it intuitively seems less plausible overpowers my learned knowledge.

Now here's where Hood starts to blow my mind:

Would you wear a sweater that belonged to a serial killer?

Would you rather own an original work of art or one that is an exact replica created by an expert forger?

Have you ever felt the desire to have an admired person autograph something?

Could you drink out of a glass after it has been touched by a sterilized cockroach?

Would you slurp your favorite soup after it has been stirred by a brand-new fly swatter?

Why does spitting on your own food make it disgusting despite the fact that you need saliva for digestion?

Some triggers for disgust have to be learned, as we know from cultural variations. But many of them seem to be hard-wired. And while the value of things such as art and signed items are culturally determined, nearly all of us tend to subscribe to some measure of preference for originals, old items, and things that someone of importance to us has touched or been in the presence of.

For now, let's concentrate on disgust:

"For me, the really interesting aspect of disgust and the associated contamination fears is that they all show the hallmarks of supernatural thinking. This is because they trigger psychological essentialism, vitalistic reasoning, and sympathetic magic. For example, sympathetic magic states that an essence can be transferred on contact and that it continues to to exert an influence after that contact has ceased. This is known as the "once in contact, always in contact" principle.....There's an old saying that a drop of oil can spoil a barrel of honey, but a drop of honey can't ruin a barrel of oil. This is the negative bias that humans hold when it comes to contamination. We intuitively feel that the integrity of something good can be more easily by contact with something bad rather than the other way around.

However, it's difficult to be reasonable about contamination once it's occurred. It's as if the contamination has energy that can spread. For example, imagine that your favorite dessert is cherry pie and that you have the option of choosing between a very large slice and a much smaller piece. Unfortunately, your waiter accidentally touches the crust of the large slice with his dirty thumb. The same thumb that you just saw him pick his nose with. Which slice would you choose? Given the choice, most of us would opt for the smaller slice, even though we could cut off the crust where the waiter touched it and still end up with more pie. As far as we are concerned, the whole slice has been ruined -- as well as our appetite." (p. 162)

I think most of us feel this way, despite the fact that it is not rational, reasonable, or logical. Now let's look at what Hood has to say about valued objects:

"We all treasure sentimental objects from within our lifetime that do not necessarily have any intrinsic worth other than their connection with a family member or a loved one. These objects are essentially irreplaceable. For example, engagement or wedding rings are typical sentimental items that are unique. If lost or stolen, most people would not regard an identical replacement as a satisfactory substitute, because these objects are imbued with an essential quality. Psychologically, we treat them as if there were some invisible property in them that makes them what they are.

But what if it were possible to make identical copies? Imagine that a machine existed that could duplicate matter down to the subatomic level, such that no scientific instrument could measure or tell the difference between the original object and the duplicate - like a photocopier for objects. If the object was one of sentimental value, would you willingly accept the second object as a suitable replacement? For most people, the answer is a simple no.

Identical replacements are not acceptable because psychologically we believe that individual objects cannot be replicated exactly even by a hypothetical perfect copying machine. This attitude is based on the assumption that originality is somehow encoded in the physical structure of matter. We intuitively sense that certain objects are unique because of their intangible essence. However, such a notion is supernatural." (p. 205-206)

Can any of you truly say that you would accept duplicate copies of objects that have sentimental value for you, without a moment's hesitation or any lingering doubt? And we're not even talking about living things - simply inanimate objects. I think all of us, Atheists or no, have certain things in our lives that we can't help but hold supernatural beliefs about. There are certain things and certain scenarios about which even the most rational, logical mind cannot escape supernatural tendencies.

One more example from Hood:

"Imagine that you are a hospital administrator and you have $1 million that can be used for performing a life-saving liver transplant operation on a child or to reduce the hospital's debt. What would you do? For most people, this would be a no-brainer -- of course one must save the child.

The economic psychologist Philip Tetlock has shown that people are appalled when they hear that an administrator would make the decision to benefit the hospital, even though more children would gain in the long term from such astute financial planning. What's more, they are also outraged if the hospital administrator decides to save the child but takes a long time to arrive at that decision. Some things are sacred. You should not have to think about them. You can't put a price on them. Likewise, if the choice has to be made between saving one of two children, this decision must take a long time. The choice should not be made quickly.

We intuitively feel that some things are right and some things are just plain wrong. Some decisions should be instantaneous while others must be agonized over. Decisions can haunt us even when there really should be no indecision. Every choice has a price tag if we care to consider relative worth. There are no free lunches, and so while we may be outraged and indignant about some choices and decisions, the reality is that all things can be reduced to a cost-benefit analysis.

However, a cost-benefit analysis is material, analytic, scientific, cold, and rational. This is not how humans behave, and when we hear that people think and reason like this, we are indignant...Likewise, when we hear that people could wear a killer's cardigan, live in a house of murder, collect Nazi memorabilia, we are disgusted. We feel it physically. Though a cost-benefit analysis may reveal our reaction to be out of balance with the actual costs, we still intuitively feel a moral outrage and violation of society's values." (p. 251)

So what's the point of all this? Well first of all, you should read the book. Second, we all subscribe to supernatural beliefs in one way or another. Some of us are more susceptible to them than others, but it is nearly impossible to function as a social being without having some of those beliefs, otherwise there would be no group cohesion.

It is very interesting to examine the way the mind works, especially in this particular subject. If we believe that a hat or a scarf that once belonged to a long-lost relative is special and priceless, unique and irreplaceable, imbued with some invisible quality or essence that makes it what it is, is it really such a huge leap to go from that belief to subscribing to alternative medicine or something as pervasive as religion?

Atheists are not completely exempt from supernatural beliefs. We just have fewer of them. And many aspects of science are so complex and counterintuitive that they run contrary to our existng frameworks. What seems to you, as an expert, as indisputable fact may seem just as far-fetched and supernatural to a layperson as belief in the effectiveness of prayer is to an Atheist. And this, in my opinion, is what allows scientists to also be theists.

I don't know what the fuck a "New Atheist" is, nor do I really care to. In my opinion, the entire notion is ludicrous and pointless. You either are an Atheist or you're not. To make further subdivisions from there is to turn it into either a religion or a political movement, neither of which it should be. But I digress.

If we can further understand the mind's tendency to believe in supernatural things and to revert back to childish notions of how the world works, we may be able to, if nothing else, teach science more effectively and without this need for debate. Do I believe that creationism should be taught in public schools or that evolution should not be taught in Christian schools? Absolutely not. But what this line of research is showing us is that maybe believers are born, not made, and that it is at least somewhat irrelevant what we try to teach people.

If you have even the slightest interest in these topics, I highly recommend this book.

In the meantime, discuss.

Animal Research and the Social Psych Perspective

I almost didn't get this post out. I got distracted by a request for a movie I can't remember the title of, and completely lost my train of thought between the post over at Dr. Isis and here. But thanks to SciCurious, I finally remembered WTF I was going to say!! YIPPEE!!!

Okay, first, the repost of the comment I made over at Dr. Isis:

I love cats just as much as Dr. J does. I also have cats. I also have a really hard time imagining anyone doing anything mean to animals that are cute. I hate animal abusers and I would punch each and every one of them in the face if I could. I feel the same way about child abusers.

I, myself, personally could never do research involving animals. I couldn't handle it.

BUT:

Animal research is necessary. "Cute" animal research is necessary. I trust the scientific community to treat the animals humanely and subject them to as little pain and suffering as possible. Scientists are humans too, and the types of people who get off on hurting animals don't get PhDs or MDs.

I don't want to see it. I don't even want to read about it. It's kinda like when you're scared of needles and you're about to have blood drawn - you know it has to happen even though you don't like it, so you look away but with the full awareness of what's going on.

Now, a sample reference for what I'm about to launch into:

This is so much easier than APA format. 

Okay. All settled in with your background info? Great. Off we go. 

In psychology, we have found with a fair amount of consistency that when people feel disgust, they become more extreme in their worldviews. Homophobia, anti-abortion sentiments, etc., are all subject to this phenomenon. When people feel disgust, they also feel a greater propensity toward violence that serves to reaffirm their worldview - shooting doctors who perform abortions, hate crimes, blowing up the cars of animal researchers, etc. 

I said above that I don't want to see, hear, think, or read about what may or may not be happening to animals who serve as subjects in research. I, personally, could never engage in that kind of research because I couldn't handle it. 

I hate it. It makes me sad. But it doesn't disgust me. I hypothesize that the difference between the people who just can't stand the thought of animals suffering in any way and the people who attack human beings for the sake of so-called animal "rights" is that the extremists feel disgusted at the thought, and the rest of us just feel sad. 

Also, as I said in my comment, I choose to "look away" from animal research but maintain the knowledge of what is going on. I don't think the extremists are capable of just looking away. In fact, I hypothesize that the kind of disgust that engages embodied moral judgment renders a person unable to look away. 

Willful acts of cruelty against animals are unforgivable, just as willful acts of cruelty against children, the disabled, the elderly, and other vulnerable populations are. All of these are protected by IRBs in their ethics review - they are considered to afford "special" protections because of their vulnerability. 

I think the extremists are forgetting not only the protections that animals are subject to in scientific research, but they are also forgetting that there are no willful acts of cruelty going on. But scientists have been painted as these puppy-bashing, cat-torturing, animal-hating sociopaths in the minds of these people. They have forgotten that you are human beings with hearts, that while yes, you do have a greater tolerance for animals in pain than the average person (you HAVE to), you are not doing it because you LIKE it. 

The extremists have dehumanized you in an effort to reaffirm their worldview. If we were to look at abortion, you would also see that the extremists have reduced women to bodies - to wombs, to temporary housing facilities for baby humans. When disgust is activated as embodied moral judgment, a journey down a slippery slope begins. You believe something is wrong, you are disgusted by it, you feel angry about it, you find a place to direct that anger, you dehumanize what you perceive to be the source, you feel a propensity toward violence, you commit the violence, you justify and feel justified in that violence. 

I wonder if the things these people imagine to be going on inside your labs is a million times worse than what is actually happening. I believe it must be the case. I wonder if there is a way to reduce the disgust by showing them the reality. 

Because I think that's the solution to the problem. The disgust needs to be reduced or eliminated and scientists need to be humanized again in their eyes. Unfortunately, you can't trust these people to come into your labs to actually see what's going on. 

Anyway, back to my main point. Disgust activates in different people for different reasons. I think in the case of Dr. J, she finds herself specifically disgusted by the thought of cats being subject to experiments. If you read through her words, you can almost watch the transition happening:

"sick minded" = signals disgust

"evil" = signals moral judgment

"mo fo bastards" = signals anger

"low life scum" followed by specifics of who qualifies = directing anger

people who abuse animals are "as bad as pedophiles" = beginning to dehumanize

"if I thought anyone strapped one of my cats down and did to them some of the things that apparently go on, I would have no hesitation in what I would do them - it would be extreme but proportional." = propensity toward violence

In order to address this problem and make everyone happy, we first need to figure out how to break the cycle. 

Chippers, Smokers, & The Tipping Point

Last night I finished reading The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. I am not going to do a full review of the book, but I will say this - very interesting read, hard to put down, a fascinating look at the social psychological aspects of epidemics and trends. I loved it.

Unfortunately, I have already returned the book to the library so my discussion of the content is going to be without specific names, references, and page numbers. I apologize in advance for the inconvenience - I just didn't think about it. 

Smoking, and teen smoking in particular, is the main topic of the last chapter of the book. The main question posed by Gladwell (and many, many others) is this: Why, in the face of years and years of anti-smoking campaigns, higher-priced cigarettes, falling adult smoking rates, and tons of new health information about the negative effects of smoking has the teen smoking rate been increasing in ridiculous amounts?

***Disclaimer - this book was published in 2000, and I feel like teen smoking has declined since then (I could be wrong), but I still think this is a very interesting discussion.***

In an informal survey with a large but unrepresentative sample, Gladwell found a common theme among the responses given when people were asked about their first experience with smoking. He sums it up in a single word: sophistication. The respondents had come into contact with a person they saw as grown-up, mature, rebellious, independent - the very characteristics that most teenagers strive to exhibit. This person was a smoker. In some cases it was a parent. But it also could have been an exchange student, an older or admired peer, a person they had a crush on, etc. It doesn't really matter who. 

And Gladwell makes a very striking statement in response to this:

"It's not that smoking is cool. It's that smokers are cool."

The psychologist Hans Eysenck discovered what he calls "the smoker's personality type." Smokers tend to be very social, always in need of someone to talk to, rebellious, risk-taking, sensation-seeking, have a lot of friends, more honest with and about themselves, and in general care very little about what other people think of them. 

Think about those descriptors and then compare it in your mind with the average teen. Those are the characteristics they WANT to have if they don't have them already. In modeling themselves after an influential person in their life who has that personality, taking up smoking is a byproduct - much like choosing to dress like that person. 

I can personally attest to the truth behind this idea. The people in my life who were most like the kind of person I wanted to be as a teen - in short, badasses - were always smokers. My outgoing, outspoken, devil-may-care sarcastic mom, the girls at school that nobody fucked with, etc. The first time I smoked a cigarette I stole one from my mom's pack - it was a Misty Ultra-Light 100 menthol. Yuck. But I smoked it by myself to see what it was like. There was no peer pressure. I knew it was really bad for me (in fact, it turns out that most smokers overestimate the harm it causes, not underestimate), but none of that mattered. I got an awesome head rush even though it tasted gross. I liked the feel of smoking. I felt more grown up and definitely cooler, even though there was no one around to validate that feeling. 

Evidence suggests that whether or not you experience a head rush the first time you try a cigarette can predict whether or not you will take up the habit. A similar line of evidence suggests that there is a genetic predisposition for your body's ability to handle and process nicotine - if your body is good at it, you'll get a head rush. If it isn't, you'll just think it's gross. 

This is fascinating if you think about it, because it suggests that family lines of smokers has much more to do with genetics than with social modeling - without the genetics model, it is puzzling to realize that children of non-smokers are just as likely to smoke as children of parents who smoke and vice versa. My sister and I grew up in the same environment full of smokers - parents, grandparents, cousins, everyone. I became a smoker at age 12. My sister doesn't smoke and never has. She finds it disgusting. 

Now when a teen starts smoking, they are never regular, hardcore smokers. They are what has been termed "chippers" - people who smoke fewer than 5 cigarettes a day on average of about 4 days per week. There are a lot of adults in the world who never go beyond being a chipper. They often label themselves social smokers and are not by any means nicotine addicts. This brings about a new question: why do some people remain chippers and others move into the realm of addiction?

The foremost researcher on smoking (whose name I can't remember, dammit), estimates that the "tipping point" of nicotine addiction is a daily intake of (I think, could get the numbers wrong but it's irrelevant for the point) 5-6mg, which I think equals about 10 cigarettes per day. If you never cross that threshold, you will never become addicted to nicotine. You will remain a chipper. 

A couple of scientists (again, sorry) took this information and wrote an article suggesting that the tobacco companies be forced to lower the amount of nicotine in cigarettes to make it nearly impossible to intake the threshold amount in a given day, thereby reducing the likelihood that a person would become addicted. Gladwell thinks this is a good idea. 

I think it's a good idea, sort of. The reason I have reservations about this is because the existing smokers would be screwed. The actual health problem of smoking has nothing at all to do with nicotine (the patch doesn't give you cancer). It is about the shit that you are taking into your lungs in order to GET that nicotine. If cigarettes suddenly didn't contain enough nicotine to sustain your addiction, you'd just smoke more and more and more to try to get that "hit" you need. We'd be putting even more shit into our lungs to get the same amount of the drug. And you can't come up with a "hardened smoker" brand of cigarettes, because then teens will just want those instead. But I digress. 

We have talked about the social factors that get teens to try smoking, the genetic factors that likely separate the continuing smokers from the experimenters, and the tipping point of developing a nicotine addiction. But what might separate the chippers from the chain-smokers? Why do chippers never feel the need to smoke more than 5 cigarettes per day?

The answer, research suggests, is mental illness. There is a significant correlation between smoking and depression. Alcoholics smoke at a rate something like 13 times the national rate. 90% of schizophrenics smoke. Nicotine is believed to act on dopamine and norepinephrine in the pre-frontal cortex, associated with pleasure. When the antidepressant bupropion (wellbutrin) was being tested, there were tons of reports coming in from patients saying "I no longer feel the need to smoke," or "I just don't like the taste of cigarettes anymore."

I can say from personal experience that wellbutrin does, in fact, have this effect. It's very logical - cigarettes are gross. They don't taste good. Just like how almost no one would drink if alchohol didn't provide desirable effects, if suddenly your cigarettes aren't doing anything for you, you're not going to want to smoke them anymore. It is believed that wellbutrin mimics the neurotransmitter effects of nicotine, that the increase in dopamine relieves the desire to smoke and the increase in norepinephrine reduces the withdrawal symptoms. 

It is probably a safe hypothesis to suggest that maybe those of us who become true smokers have a deficit in dopamine and norepinephrine in our brains that may or may not also result in depression. The chippers, on the other hand, probably have closer-to-normal levels and therefore simply enjoy the occasional increase. (This is just me talking now, this wasn't in the book.) When you combine this with the genetic component dealing with nicotine tolerance and processing as well as the social aspects, you can get a pretty clear picture of how a smoker becomes addicted and why others don't even smoke at all. 

I find all of this incredibly fascinating, particularly because nicotine doesn't have a conscious "high" associated with it, unlike all other drugs. I don't feel "good" when I smoke - I feel normal. When I am otherwise occupied with activities I find pleasurable, I don't feel the need to smoke. Yes, there is definitely a classically conditioned habit addiction in this for me as well - driving, for example, invokes a need to smoke. I used to believe that there was also an oral fixation thing going on, because I can distract myself from wanting to smoke by eating, which made sense given the typical weight gain that people experience when they quit. But now I'm thinking of it differently - eating is also a pleasurable activity, which is why there are food addictions. So maybe the reason eating tends to be a natural substitute is the neurotransmitter effects. Because if it was just an oral fixation, then drinking beverages and chewing gum would also work, but they don't. 

In a couple of weeks I will be seeing my doctor about quitting smoking and asking for an rx for wellbutrin because it has worked for me before. Now that I have a much better understanding about what is going on, I think I have a much better chance of successfully quitting. This topic and the new information that came along with it has given me a lot to think about. Expect me to post on this subject again sometime in the future. 

Combat Psychology

The timing of this post happens to coincide with a weekend during which I am spending a lot of time on a major military base. This, to some extent, has made this issue very personal for me. 

Many of you may be familiar with the recent trial of Steven Dale Green, a 24 year-old Iraq veteran who was convicted in a civilian trial of raping and murdering a 14 year-old Iraqi girl and her family in 2005. The death penalty has been taken off the table because the jury could not unanimously agree on the sentence. He is therefore going to be sentenced to life in prison in September. 

The story is mainly being highlighted for its exemplification of the effects of combat stress on our young men and women. The Army is being criticized for not discharging him when he expressed homocidal thoughts and for putting his unit through in inordinate amount of strife without supervision. The story is also conjuring up mostly-forgotten  images of the horrors of Abu Ghraib. 

Which brings me to the purpose of writing this post. I am a major advocate of blurring the lines that exist between the branches of psychology. In the case of combat psychology, the primary blend that needs to occur is between social and clinical psychology. To my knowledge, the military does not recruit or train social psychologists for the purpose of caring for the troops. They do, however, actively and aggressively recruit clinical psychologists with attractive signing bonuses and salaries and fantastic internships, even when the psychologist remains a civilian employee of the military. I think this is great. 

But the problem is that clinical psychology largely focuses on issues that arise within a soldier after the fact. Clinical psychologists are great for diagnosing and treating post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental illness issues that may affect soldiers. But they only have a minimal working knowledge of the types of circumstances that create these conditions and the mechanisms that underly them in terms of social climate. 

It is my belief that we cannot improve conditions for our military personnel until social psychology becomes a valuable core component of our service branches. As many of you know, Phil Zimbardo is one of my heroes. Many people find this odd given the egregious ethical breaches of his most famous research. But he discovered something incredibly important about human nature - there are social circumstances that can easily and quickly cause a normally "good" person to act in "evil" ways. The Stanford Prison Experiment is the backbone and essence of social psychology - person x situation. 

The Green case perfectly illustrates the person x situation equation. Not every soldier will commit the atrocities that this young man did. In fact, most soldiers won't. But some of the things he experienced in Iraq created a fissure in his moral core, and arguably PTSD. We cannot examine one of these components without the other. If somehow social psychologists could consistently consult with the military regarding the social conditions under which soldiers like Green operate, we could likely prevent many heinous war crimes. The clinical psychologist who treated Green and was aware of his confessed homocidal urges is quoted as saying "I had no reason to believe that he would act on them." Perhaps if she had consulted with a social psychologist, that person would have said "Given the social history of this soldier in combat and given what we know what about possible effects of this type of social history, it is my strongest recommendation that he be discharged before it escalates." 

I have mixed feelings about Green's story. I'm glad that he was sentenced to life rather than given the death penalty. It is difficult to discover where who he was initially begins and when it becomes who we created. Though I would never discount societal factors that influence murderous behavior, the military is a particularly complex case. The entire purpose of their training is murder, just framed in a different way. The military culture is a culture of violence. Without the violence, it's just the boy scouts with better uniforms and fancier patches. 

We cannot continue to ask our young men and women to sacrifice so much on our behalf without in turn giving them the best we have to offer. It is my belief that the combined resources of social and clinical psychology is something we should offer to them. Let's not continue the cycle of creating and punishing criminals.

I Need This

I have spent the last 14 years of my life pursuing knowledge of psychology and the social sciences in general. It is my passion, and goddammit, I'm good at it. 

For the past few months, in the face of what seemed like a million rejection letters and an impossible uphill climb, I have wavered in my pursuit of this passion. I have thought about giving up and just staying in my boring-ass job for the rest of my life, where I would be free to just enjoy "life" in whatever way I wished. 

But just as a life without my husband is not one I want for myself, a life without psychology is also not one I want for myself. I love reading books and articles in my field, but quite frankly I'm sick of not being the one writing them. 

I have been actively seeking out paid research jobs for a couple of months now. I have not had any success. As mentioned in a previous post, I just applied for a fucking amazing job at SFRSHS West. To be frank, this particular opportunity would change my entire life. I don't think I'll get it in a million years, especially considering how widely advertised it is and the level of prestige associated with this particular university. But if I did, it really and truly would change my LIFE. 

I've spent a lot of time picking apart my CV, my qualifications, my experience, trying to figure out which part of the package I'm missing. It might be my GRE quant score. It might be the fact that I have not spent any time caring for dying children in Africa. It might be that I finished my undergrad too quickly. It might simply be a matter of never being in the right place at the right time. 

I have tried with each job application to convey my level of enthusiasm for and dedication to my field while still maintaining professionalism. As much as I would love to write "I'm fucking PERFECT for this job, can't you see that???" I have managed to restrain myself. 

But I need this. I need to be in research. I need to get that leg up somehow. It can't be as simple as a math GRE score, unless the system really and truly is that fucked up. I refuse to be shut out of the ranks of the top scholars in my field. If SFRSHS East gets sick of seeing my name on job applications, so be it. But at least they'll KNOW my name. 

All I need from you, Academia, is a chance. Let the stars align perfectly or whatever needs to happen - I don't care - but just give me that chance. I'm doing what I can here, but if you could just cut me a little bit of slack that would be fantastic. I feel like I'm just waiting to be discovered, waiting to get in front of just the right person. It seems to me that academia is a lot like the entertainment industry - it's not just about having talent, it's about stumbling across that golden opportunity at just the right time. 

Actually, Academic Universe, if you could somehow arrange it so that Phil Zimbardo's car breaks down on my street and he needs to use my phone, that would be Awesome. 

But in the meantime I'll keep applying for every RA job that comes up. I'll keep studying the social psych literature and looking for opportunities to network. I'll keep plugging away. 

Because I need this. 

Going Out as a Married Woman

Friday night my sister had a birthday thing at a bar that I've only been to once before. It's in a college town and this particular place is always loaded with coeds looking to get laid. It's the kind of place that makes me feel really old. 

So I brought friends along, who happen to be a married couple. I dressed up kind of cute, but nothing sexy unless you counted my shoes, which were mostly hidden by my jeans anyway. My engagement ring and wedding band were sparklingly obvious on my left hand. Apparently, that doesn't matter. 

We had been there for maybe an hour when some guy comes up to me and says "Hey, could I have a drag of your cigarette?" I gave him a weird look - I mean, who DOES that?? Then I politely said "No, I'd rather not."

He offered to buy me a drink in exchange for the drag, so I said sure and let him have a drag. This came only moments after a conversation I had in which I said "If someone asks me if they can bum a cigarette, I'm going to make them give me a dollar for it. These fuckin things are too expensive to just give away to strangers."

Anyway, so then he says "Do you remember my name?" I said no, and wondered if we had met before. Maybe he went to my high school or something, I have no idea. He says "It's Nick, I talked to you like 2 hours ago." Um, no you didn't, because I wasn't HERE 2 hours ago. He's obviously wasted and my response must have made him realize that, so he wandered off. 

He comes back an hour or so later and asks for another drag. I said "Where the fuck's my drink?" He said he'd go get it right away, asked again what was I drinking. I told him. He has a hand on my fucking lower back and I'm just waiting for him to try something so I can deck him. He took my cigarette, took a drag off of it and handed it back. He asks what kind of shot I want. I replied, "I'm driving, kid. No shots for me." So he asks what I want instead. I show him the bottle I'm holding.....

The fucker GRABS the bottle from my hand and fucking CHUGS like half of it! Had I not been completely stunned I would've broken the fucking thing over his head!

He puts it down on the table and walks away again. I was seriously shocked. All I could think was "He's not even fucking CUTE!!!" My friends look at me expectantly, waiting to see what I'm going to do. I wiped the mouth of the bottle with my shirt (there was still half a bottle left), made a disgusted face, and drank it, saying "Well, I'm probably gonna get swine flu now....."

They were like EWWWWW I can't believe you did that! I know, it was fucking gross. But I missed the chance to break it over his head, so I figured I might as well drink it. 

He comes back a third time when I'm in the middle of a conversation. I was preparing to punch him in the face as soon as I was done listening to the person I was talking to. Before I could, the husband of the friend I was talking to apparently was like "Where the fuck is her drink? You don't get to speak to her again until you come back with a brand new bottle in your hand for her." I guess he used many more choice words than that, but I only got the brief recap. He left me alone for the rest of the night. 

As I was settling out my tab at last call, I noticed him sitting next to me at the bar talking to two girls. I hear one of them say "You look like the kid from American Pie, you know, the one who liked to stick his dick in food products! Why don't you go home and find yourself some mashed potatoes?" I laughed my ass off. I am never that clever in the moment. 

Another guy came up to me at some point in the night and started a conversation. He had been at the door talking to the bouncer when I came in and had told me to smile. He starts talking about how he's from more than a few towns away and was only up there because his friend is one of the bouncers. He shows me a picture of his 4 year-old son, starts talking to my friends as well. I convinced him to go up on the mike and wish my sister a happy birthday from me. It was pretty funny. 

Anyway, so he notices the rings on my finger and asks if I'm married. I say yes, then he asks my friends if they're also married (which they are). Then he starts lecturing us about how we should have kids because they're the greatest things in the world and blah blah blah. I never really got the sense that he was hitting on me, but if he was hoping to start something he sure as hell had a much better game going than the asshole with the cigarettes. My friend's opinion was that he was hoping to hit on me until he found out I was married, but after that point it just became conversation. 

When I was single, guys never ever approached me at bars, clubs, anywhere in public really. I mean, I met my husband by showing up at his house with some friends one night. But once I got engaged it was like all bets were off. Guys started crawling out of the woodwork. At first it puzzled me. 

My friends and I talked about it after we got back from the bar that night. Husband Friend said "I think it's an attitude thing. Girls who go out to bars looking to get hit on carry themselves completely differently than the girls who are married or engaged."

True, because I don't give a fuck. I have a wonderful husband, I'm head over heels in love, and I couldn't give a flying fuck less what anyone in that bar thought of me. I made an effort to look nice, but I certainly wasn't trying to flaunt anything. But it's still amazing to me how that works. 

And most single women, the ones who really want to meet someone, also don't seem to get how it works. But maybe it's impossible to have the "I'm married" air when you're not married. But it's interesting how so many young women believe that guys only want sex and not a relationship, when the girls who go to bars dressed like sluts are largely ignored by most of the guys there. I notice this now that I'm married - when I was younger and single I also saw a completely different scene. I saw these girls talking to the hottest guys in the place and assumed that the guys came up to them. Now from a detached perspective, I see that it's the girls going up to the guys - and the men walk away as soon as they have a chance. 

There are so many girls out there who believe that they must sell their sex on an open market in order to find a guy. But most guys aren't buying. 

My husband dated a girl while we were separated who is about 4 sizes smaller than I am, who actually has a chest to speak of, and who shares tons of little things in common with him. Like his tv shows that I consider to be incredibly stupid. Heroes, for example. She's not what I would call beautiful, but she's not unattractive either. She is, however, what I would consider a "club slut." One of those girls who tries too hard, who thinks that sleeping with someone quickly increases the chance of keeping him around. 

He ended it with her "because she couldn't carry on a conversation." She was devastated when he told her that he was getting back with me, and responded by saying "Does that mean I can't come home with you tonight?" Yeah, he told me this. I asked. 

Sure, on some level I hate her. But mostly I feel sorry for her. You won't find love by pushing your tits up and strutting your shit in a bar. By caking on the makeup and wearing shoes you can't walk in. Women have created this world for themselves in which they believe they need to be every man's fantasy in order to find a boyfriend or a husband. But men want a woman who is REAL. They're not as stupid as many girls think they are - they know Playboys are airbrushed, that Victoria's Secret models have sacrificed brain cells for big boobs. The real male fantasy of the 80's was Cindy Crawford - the brilliant woman who also happened to be beautiful. Men like Angelina Jolie because they believe they can perceive her personality - a sexy, smart, no-nonsense kind of gal with a rebellious streak. It's no coincidence that she landed Brad Pitt, a man who literally could have any woman in the world. I guarantee she didn't meet him at an LA club while wearing a leather corset and stilettos. 

Today's men, I believe, want a woman who can hold her own. She can get and keep her shit together and doesn't really give a fuck what anyone thinks. The kind of woman who can walk into a bar, club, restaurant, wherever, by herself and be perfectly confident of that fact. I think that's what us married women give off that attracts men so much. It is obvious that we have a life and thoughts and opinions beyond wherever we happen to be in that moment. 

The funny thing is, even when a group of married women go out together as a group, all dolled up and ready to party - they are STILL the first group to get hit on. It never fails! There is something about the fact that they aren't looking around, scoping guys and adjusting their cleavage constantly that makes them attractive. 

I don't mean to imply that self-confidence comes from being married. But there is some underlying anxiety that seems to dissipate when one gets engaged and ties the knot. I often have the thought that "I was chosen and I also chose." And I do think that this is freeing and your body language, manner of speaking, and the way you carry yourself are all affected by that sense of freedom. 

I wonder how much more successful these young women would be at meeting and dating someone if they could stop trying to force themselves into a mold of what they falsely believe men want. It reminds me of that hip-hop adage: "We want a lady in the street and a freak in the bed." 

I don't know. Thoughts on this?

Q&A #2 - Mrs CH's Questions

In my recent post asking for questions from readers, MrsCH offered up the following (my answers are beneath each quoted question):

1. One of my office mates just left to start a new job. The week before he left, he put up stuff around the office, gave everyone in the group a hat with the group's logo, and even gave us a framed copy of his letter of offer. What do you think possesses someone to leave things behind, while others don't?

I'm not sure that anyone has actually studied this, and seeing as my journal access is nonexistent right now, I can't answer you using any scientific basis. Disclaimer in place, I would venture to guess that it has to do with the level of connection a person feels to his/her place of work. He may have felt as though he was closing a chapter in his life that was very important to him, and didn't want to forget it or be forgotten. The people who did not leave things behind or make a big deal of their departure may have had more of the "Good riddance!" mentality. 

2. I bought a book recently called Women Don't Ask, and it's about how women are not as good at negotiating as men. What do you think about this?

This has been scientifically investigated, and there is some merit to this. Women consistently undervalue themselves. If a woman is asked to give her desired salary for a new job, for example, their $$ amounts are often significantly lower than a man would give for the exact same job. Women are also less likely to flat-out ask for a raise. 

Jost, J. T. (1997). An experimental replication of the depressed entitlement effect among women. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 21, 387-393.

Major, B. (1994). From social inequality to personal entitlement: The role of social comparisons, legitimacy appraisals, and group membership. In M. P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology, Vol. 26 (pp. 293-355). New York: Academic Press. 

Steil, J. M., McGann, V. L.,  & Kahn, A. S. (2001). Entitlement. In J. Worell (Ed.), Encyclopedia of women and gender (pp.403-410). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

3. I'm reading a book right now called The Female Brain, and it describes what our hormones do to our thoughts/actions throughout our lives. Do you think our thoughts/actions are governed more by our biochemistry or by our environment?

The Female Brain is bullshit. If you look up the referenced articles in the back of the book and read them, you'll find that none of them actually support any of her claims. It was a very ballsy move on her part to do that - assuming none of her readers would actually look up her sources.

The only part of her book that I found interesting was the idea that hormone exposure in utero might determine levels of masculinity and femininity. However, rather than consider that in terms of gender, I was made to wonder if it might have implications for sexual orientation. But there is no way to ethically test that. And even then, it would assume a link between sex hormones specifically and sexual orientation, which I'm not sure that's even remotely valid. 

But beyond that book, you're referring to the nature/nurture debate, which is moot at this point. It is always a combination of both influences, and it is ethically impossible for us to scientifically sort out the level of influence of each. For example, I would love to take an infant and raise it in a lab under controlled conditions to find out to what extent nature plays a role in determining gender. But no IRB on the face of the earth would let me do that. But it's the only way to really know the answer to that question. 

I have long been vocal against the idea that hormones dictate behavior, but I had no hard and fast evidence. Ambivalent Academic referred me to a scienceblog and the subsequent journal article it referenced dealing with this very issue. Find it Here. There is much more work to be done in this area, but this is a fantastic start. 

4. What is the deal with people one-upping each other when they talk about negative things in their lives?

I have no evidence-based answer for you here. But using speculation only, I would say that it might have to do with misguided attempts at expressing empathy. As in, "I know how you must be feeling, because I went through X, Y, and Z." In most cultures, a high value is placed on experience. People we believe to have more experience are sought out for guidance. It's logical. So maybe in our desire to help someone, to position ourselves as a guide and a mentor, we feel we have to demonstrate that we have more experience than they do with these negative events and emotions. But in truth, I have no idea. 

5. Why are women their own worst enemies? I find this to be the case especially in the blog world when sexism comes up - why do women have a hard time agreeing to disagree?

I think I need you to be more specific with this question. Otherwise I risk assuming what your question is about when I could be totally wrong. And the idea of women versus women is a very broad subject with tons of applications to different circumstances. 

Very interesting questions, Mrs. CH. I've really enjoyed answering them, and I hope that if you have more that you'll share them! :)

Q&A #1 - Hostile Environments for Women

Oh, Toaster Sunshine. You have brought up one of the most complex issues in gender research. 

On my previous post, I asked readers to tell me what they wanted to learn about with regard to human social behavior. Toaster asked the following:

"2) Men are socialized to think of women in terms of conquest and possession (e.g., "chasing tail", "she's my girl", etc.). Traditionally male-dominated workplaces, such as scientific research, are usually perceived as hostile by women due to the men still working in them. Could this be due to men not being able to dissociate their professional endeavors from the women-as-conquest mentality? At the same time, men have bluntly coded normative body langauges that reinforce group inclusiveness through communication forms homogeneity. Women have their own forms. Men don't always understand these. Could additional hostility in professional settings also be due to men not understanding women's body language or language subtexts and therefore prescribing stereotypical labels (e.g., "office floozy", "administrative bitch", etc.)?"

This question/issue deals with the very heart of what has come to be known as Objectification Theory. Objectification Theory was first proposed by Barbara Frederickson:

"Objectification Theory posits that girls and women are typically acculturated to internalize an observer's perspective as a primary view of their physical selves. This perspective on self can lead to habitual body monitoring, which, in turn, can increase women's opportunities for shame and anxiety, reduce opportunities for peak motivational states, and diminish awareness of internal bodily states.....Although sexual objectification is but one form of gender oppression, it is one that factors into - and perhaps enables - a host of other oppressions women face, ranging from employment discrimination and sexual violence to the trivialization of women's work and accomplishments."

(Frederickson, B. L. & Roberts, T. (1997). Objectification theory: Toward understanding women's lived experiences and mental health risks. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 21, 173-206.)

The first thing I want to say here is that until recently, objectification research focused on the effects it has on women. We have since learned that men are affected by it as well. No one can clearly demonstrate that the effects are as strong or less strong than they are on women. So what I am going to do here is give you the answer that MOST researchers would give to this question. Then I'm going to give you my own answer, based on personal experience and the social psychological framework from which I, personally, operate. 

Generally, it is believed that men have a tendency to immediately evaluate women's attractiveness upon encountering them. Most of the time, this evaluation is sexual in nature. "Would you do her" is a question that men seem to pose to themselves and sometimes to their peers whenever they see a woman. Women know this. It is often referred to as "the male gaze" and has been discussed on many occasions here in the blogosphere, most recently at Comrade PhysioProf and the connected ScienceBlog pages. (See my post on Norah Vincent's book "Self-Made Man" for an example of this.)

The basic idea of how objectification creates a sense of hostility in a woman's work environment is this: a woman feels as though she is under constant scrutiny for something over which she has little to no control. She is an object rather than a person. Her appearance matters more than her accomplishments and contributions. 

I have a lot of problems with this. First, there is the problem of experiencing objectification as a woman considered attractive compared to one who is not. Second, there are many women out there who experience the male gaze and feel objectified in the workplace frequently, but would not describe their environment as hostile. Thirdly, it has been demonstrated that women objectify other women to almost the same extent, but how this impacts the workplace has not been explored to my knowledge. Fourthly, as I mentioned previously, we now know that objectification impacts men, but we do not have enough research looking at workplace interactions to throw discrimination of women under the umbrella of objectification. In other words, if both men and women experience it but only women are affected by it, there must be something else going on. 

Toaster brings up several other issues as well - differences in communication, in-group processes, and male cognitive dissonance. That's a lot of complexity for such a seemingly simple phenomenon. 

My own take on this issue stems from personal experience and from research I have done on women in science and their perceptions of workplace hostility and stigma consciousness. 

Women in male-dominated fields tend to feel pressure to conform to certain male characteristics - a way of communicating, a way of dressing, etc. In order to succeed, one might feel as though she needs to minimize obvious characteristics of difference. In other words, she doesn't want to stand out. Standing out leads to stereotype threat. Stereotype threat is when a person's performance is affected by their awareness of being in a position where they might be seen as conforming to a stereotype. Often, the performance deficit leads to BEING the stereotype that threatens them. It turns out that stereotype threat also has a physiological component (see Murphy, Steele, & Gross. (2007). Signaling Threat. Psychological Science, 18(10).)

The most well-known experiments dealing with stereotype threat in women have to do with math performance. If you prime women with information that females have lesser math ability than men, they will perform worse on mathematical tests than women who are given positive or neutral priming. Women under stereotype threat also show heightened physiological signs of stress. 

(I'm losing steam here, because I think my brain might explode from trying to organize my thoughts and translate them into coherent sentences. Bear with me.)

I believe that much of perceived workplace hostility can be boiled down to stereotype threat. It does not require an active component on the part of the men in the case of women's stress. It only requires an awareness of having the status of "other." Being outnumbered, in other words, can be enough to trigger stereotype threat and the resulting physiological effects. 

Being afraid to cry at work, dress in feminine clothing, communicate openly, etc., can be triggered or mitigated by the gender makeup of the group. If you are a woman in a large group of men, you are going to feel more on-edge and perceive a higher level of potential hostility than in a group that is more gender balanced. 

I do not mean to say that the hostility does not actually exist. It had to, at some point, to create the phenomenon of stereotype threat in the first place. But researchers can induce stereotype threat in imagined scenarios. It doesn't have to be real to have an effect!

Okay, I have to stop now. LOL. I know that there are things missing from this post, but if I keep going I will be writing this blog all day. So I will leave it to you folks to point out the gaps in the comments so that I can at least focus on the parts you find interesting and important, rather than what I consider to be interesting and important.