Via Samhita at Feministing, we learn that there’s a new study out finding that women can tell just by looking at a guy’s face whether he’s good husband material or if he’s just a roll in the hay.
According to a new study carried out at the Universities of Chicago and California, women can tell, just by looking at a man’s face, whether he is good with children – and therefore a good long-term catch, or just very masculine, and better for a short-term relationship.
Don’t you love it? Being good with kids is not a masculine trait. Ergo, all you fathers are pussies. Or something.
Dr Dario Maestripieri, one of the research team, said “Our results show that women are surprisingly accurate in judging a man’s masculinity and his interest in infants by looking at his face. Our results also show that women value masculinity as a desirable trait for short-term relationships and interest in infants as a desirable trait for more stable long-term relationships. I don’t think that evolution has given women a second sense in this area but has made them very good at using every piece of information at their disposal when making decisions about mating and relationships.”
I see. It’s really interest in *infants* that’s the key — meaning that if a man is interested in babies, it means he’s feminized. What a great way to get out of changing diapers. “I’d change the kid’s diapers, but it would make my nutsack shrivel up and fall off.”
I was shocked, shocked! to learn that the study gauged the reactions of only 29 women, who were shown photos of men who’d earlier had their testosterone levels measured and who’d been shown photos of kids and adults. 29. Jeez, you’re at TWO large universities — can’t you get more Psych 101 students who *have* to participate than that?
Even the writer of the article reporting the study expressed some skepticism that the methods were not the most reliable, that the study reduced the complex to the simple, and that the impressions may not accurately reflect characteristics that actually correlate to long-term relationship success. Hell, I had the same thought long before I reached the paragraph where the writer says it:
Bear in mind that the women and men did not meet for this study. The women just looked at photos of each man. The human is an extremely sophisticated animal. In order to extrapolate from this study whether women usually end up marrying men who look like child-loving men would be risky. A human is also attracted by pheromones, the other person’s conversation, sense of humour, certain talents, compatibility, money, etc. What makes one human fall in love another, and then go on to have a long-term relationship with that person, is the culmination of many variables. A man who is not interested in children, may change completely when he holds his first newborn in his arms.
My conclusion? Whoever’s handing out grant money loves to have their prejudices and biases about what men are good for and what’s “naturally” women’s work reinforced, especially when those prejudices and biases can be presented with a veneer of SCIENCE!
I await the inevitable defenders of Ev Psych.
Since I’m not planning on being a parent, I guess that means I’m doomed to a series of short-term relationships.
I suppose I could deal with that. ;)
Right up there with “long-term relationship prospect” = “interested in babies” is the “woman” = “interested in babies” which I suppose leads to “masculine” = “not interested in babies.” They can wiggle about the “evolutionary fitness” (meaning reproduction, of course) but the very instant anyone applies any of this to a particular concrete person or decision, blooie! Useless, gone, nonpredictive, untestable armwaving.
Which of course is why at least half of evo-psych studies as actually practiced is just-so stories to reinforce whatever conclusions the studier, mentor, publisher, and/or audience has already reached.
By the way, the reproductive goodiness of any man’s (and many women’s) interest in taking care of babies or children is relevant, if at all, only in a nuclear-family patriarchal capitalist kinda societal arrangement. For better results, assuming the assumptions brought to that experiment were true, the best thing would be to use the guys as sperm donors, not let them own most of the goodies (keep them busy in the arena, e.g.) and make multi-woman households to rotate childcare along whatever schedules y’all see fit. Duh.
As a 6’3″, burly, bearded stay-at-home dad, I feel the need to point out that the study didn’t claim that “masculine” and “good with children” were mutually exclusive. The study treated the two variables as independent of each other, and the linked article doesn’t say anything about how strongly correlated the two were.
In other words, the women in the study picked high-testosterone men (who may or may not have liked kids) as fling candidates, and men who liked kids (who may or may not have been high-testosterone) as long-term relationship material.
All your other criticisms of the study make sense to me, though.
I have long suspected that the true purpose of these studies is to produce only vaguely suggestive results that invariably lead to the far more vital conclusion that more studies are needed.
OK, so my husband of nearly 25 years recently confessed to me that when we first met he fantasized about impregnating me. I have been told I have a sweet face (mother material?) but a bitchy disposition.
I’ll admit I was attracted to my husband because of his masculine qualities: strength, virility, he’s a good hunter.
Speaking only for myself, I think I’m often motivated by what you’d call primitive instincts. It’s ingrained in me to mate and I have always chosen men (as in my husband and ex-boyfriends) that were strong and potential providers/protectors.
Is any of this news?
Right up there with “long-term relationship prospect” = “interested in babies”
If you want kids, yeah, “long-term relationship prospect” should = “interested in babies.” This isn’t the kind of decision you can split down the middle, and, however much some men may change their minds about babies, down the line, marrying someone hoping he’ll change is a bad idea.
Being a person who really, really wants kids and settling down with someone who really, really doesn’t is like being someone with a really high libido and settling down with someone who’s happily asexual – the safest assumption is that the conflict won’t go away.
The good news for all you guys who don’t want kids ever is that, after all, not wanting kids ever is a minority viewpoint among men as well as women, so all the women who don’t want kids ever are also having to weed through people who will pass them up for long-term relationships because they don’t want kids. Eventually, you can link up with each other.
Good point, Lynn (post 6). Even before becoming frustrated with the “men who like kids are unmanly” BS in this so-called study, I was frustrated with its “all women want kids” assumption. As a woman who doesn’t want kids, I’ve been “weeding through” men for years, hearing along the way a lot of comments like “what’s wrong with you,” “you must be a lesbian” (never got that one though I’ve heard it several times), all the way up to “what are you, some kind of sociopath.” The last guy I dated thought I was crazy for breaking up with him after as soon as I found out he really wants children, because he assumed I’d change my mind or he could change it for me, but I’m 100% with you – it’s a deal breaker and needs to be considered ASAP.
I know the title of the post was a rhetorical question.
However, that never stopped me before. :)
Google CFDA
Which stands for the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance. Inside you will find every Federal Grant available and yes, some of them are mind-bending.
I think that Brooklynite (post 3) made a good point. The study did not say that women find masculinity a detriment to choosing along-term mate or “goodness with infants” a detriment to having a fling.
All that it said was that women tend to value “masculinity” (which I will interpret to mean “macho-ness” and physical attractiveness) as the most important trait when looking for sex, and consider his interest in infants as a more important trait when looking for a mate. Which means that for men who have a lot of one trait and not much of the other, women are going to be more likely to want one type of relationship and not the other. Presumably there are men who have a lot of both traits, and certainly there are ones who have neither.
Yeah, cuz, I mean, even though humans are the end result of the same 4 billion years of evolution as every other organism, it makes total sense that we’d be the one organism for whom evolution had absolutely no role in our behavior and cognition.
I’m increasingly convinced that anybody who so immediately dismisses evolutionary psychology isn’t much different than the creationists – they’re convinced that the basic laws of biology simply don’t apply to them, because they’re special.
Oh, Chet!
You’re here! You came! You brought your bullshit theories with you!
sigh.
The Theory of Evolution is a bullshit theory?
That puts you in some pretty good company, I guess – Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and the like – but I suspect you’re not going to find them terribly welcoming company.
No, Chet, any theory that posits that men evolved to harass women on the internet is a bullshit theory.
Evolutionary theory is an entirely different animal.
Evolution is a bullshit theory?
Since I’ve never advanced such a ridiculous position, why do you describe that as my bulshit theory?
Oh, right. Since i’m disagreeing with you, I must automagically agree with everybody you disagree with. How simple it is in your little world.
Sorry, Chet. When you conflate evolutionary psych with the theory of evolution, I’m going to call it bullshit.
Evolution can only trace biological changes, not behavioral ones. Anything that purports to trace behavioral changes necessarily operates without evidence, and thus must rely on “just so” stories.
Biology, you may be aware, is not the same as psychology. So unless you can come up with something more than “well,4 million years *must* have produced behavior in men that makes it natural for them to harass women on the internet,” I’m going to, again, call bullshit.
What, exactly, is bullshit about the hypothesis that some human behavior may have an evolutionary basis? I don’t believe that anybody is saying that everything we do is genetically determined, since that would be silly. But it is equally silly to suggest that humans are magically exempt from biology.
Disagreement is not synonymous with harassment. And he’s right – you sound very much like a creationist.
And it’s your impression that biologists never study behavior?
Working as I do in a field of biology, I can assure you that’s not the case.
Funny. You’re using quote marks, as though you were quoting me, but I can’t find any place in this thread, or any other, or on any other website where I’ve ever written those words. Are you going to have this discussion with me, or with the Strawvolutionist?
“Evolution can only trace biological changes, not behavioral ones.”
Wrong. Please see:
Bailey, W.J. 2003. Insect duets: underlying mechanisms and their evolution. Physiological Engomology 28 pp 157-174.
Branham, M.A. and Wenzel, J.W. 2003. The origin of photic behavior and the evolution of sexual communication in fireflies (Coleoptera: Lampyridae). Cladistics 19 pp 1-22.
In fact, behavior can act in speciation. It is possible to reconstruct ancestral states for behavior. It turns out that it is indeed possible to track the evolution of behavior.
Exactly like many creationists I’ve encountered, you make claims about biology that are not true. It is difficult to determine whether it is because you are lying to protect your beliefs or because you simply do not know better.
*that should be “Phisiological Entomology”
It’s silly to say that because we behave a certain way right now, we evolved that way. Especially because there’s no fossil record like there is in biology.
Coming from someone who got *entirely* bent out of shape because she disagreed with my post about comics fanboys, that’s rich.
Oh, and before you go on and accuse me of being a creationist for a third time, I don’t dispute that biology can *influence* behavior. I just don’t think that biology can entirely *explain* behavior, particularly when the explanation ignores cultural factors and ignores differences between cultures.
And of course the question at hand isn’t even whether biology can explain behavior. It’s whether sociobiological just-so stories can explain behavior.
Ah, right. The constant criticism of evolutionary psychology – it’s just a bunch of just-so stories.
Indeed, how very conveeeeenient that evolutionary psychologists are explaining the behaviors we actually observe with their theories, rather than behaviors we don’t observe. It would make much more sense, of course, if they wasted all their time explaining made-up behaviors in made-up organisms. Something’s fishy there, for sure!
Huh. Maybe somebody should tell that to the archeologists and paleoanthropologists who have been studying the physical fossil record of human behavior for decades, now. Not to mention, every single one of us has a fossil record of all of our genetic traits – inside of every one of our cells.
I realize that evolutionary psychology comes dangerously close to calling into question a lot of fundamental underpinnings of the academic feminist field. If a woman can’t consent while under the influence of drugs, maybe a man can’t be culpable for rape while under the influence of his own body’s mind-altering chemicals. Now, that’s a ridiculous equivalence, of course, but I realize that’s the sort of questions that sociobiology and evolutionary psychology can raise, and you’re afraid of them.
But acting like creationists and rejecting an entire field because you’re terrified of the implications is idiotic.
Ah. So, you’re not having this conversation with us; you’re having it with the Strawvolutionist.
Studying the physical fossil record and piecing together behavior based on what people actually did and left behind is a far cry from saying that X behavior that exists now must be natural and/or must be innate because … we say so. Or are you saying they’ve identified a gene that, say, says that women “naturally” want babies or “naturally” are suited for housework?
Gosh, really? Because you didn’t seem quite as sure that it was “ridiculous” on the other comments thread on this blog:
Ooh, burn!
Hoist on his own petard, as my dad likes to say.
I’m scared. Hold me.
Wait, no.
The question of whether a rapist’s internal chemistry might absolve him of moral or legal responsibility for his crime isn’t remotely “the sort of question that sociobiology can raise,” because it’s an ought question, not an is question.
And the bit of text of yours that Piny quoted is just as silly. If our hormones are rightly considered “mind-altering chemicals,” then we’re all under their influence every moment of every day of our lives. If they absolve rapists from culpability, then they deprive all of us of responsibility for all our acts, good and evil. And then what? (Or, to put it another way, so what?)
This is the stuff of high-school bull sessions, and it doesn’t call into question the fundamental underpinnings of anything at all.
“It’s silly to say that because we behave a certain way right now, we evolved that way. Especially because there’s no fossil record like there is in biology.”
Forehead meets desk. Note how ancestral reconstruction using phylogenetic trees only needs extant taxa. You keep talking about biology and behavior like they are two separate things, which is wrong. (Why are you even arguing if you don’t know what biology is?) Behavior is one aspect of biology. There are biologists who specifically study behavior. Since it is impossible to determine whether we have souls, and there is no evidence of a tiny elf inside our brains with her hands on the joystick, all we have to work with is physical evidence. And since chemicals can alter our behavior, that must mean that our behavior (in part) can be influenced by the products of gene expression. There is ample evidence in other species that chemicals like pheromones have a direct effect on behavior (think about the pheromones produced by queen bees). But you would make the argument that humans are exempt from this? That alcohol can influence behavior but hormones cannot? Or that our self-awareness gives us the magical ability to stop certain select chemical reactions in our cells?
And this probably pisses a lot of you off. It probably makes you really angry when Chet poses a perfectly reasonable question about the influence of hormones on behavior because it calls into question many assumptions that are near to your heart. But just because you find these questions offensive does not mean they should not be asked. Obviously, biology is not a sufficient explanation for every single thing that we do, but nobody is claiming that it is. But biology is one aspect, and to deny that aspect is to halt the study of human behavior.
In the future, if you’re going to critique a study I suggest that you look at the original paper. Journalists tend to make wild extrapolations in order to make the study more interesting. Scientists typically make far more conservative conclusions about the results than journalists.
*And actually, it should be Physiological Entomology. Christ, I can’t fucking type.
“If our hormones are rightly considered “mind-altering chemicals,” then we’re all under their influence every moment of every day of our lives.”
Yay, somebody else who is pretending to know things about physiology! Granted, I’ve only ever studied insect physiology, but this stuff should be obvious to everybody who has taken bio 101. Different levels and types of hormones are expressed at different points in time and for different reasons. Expression changes with age, with time of day or month, with diet (in insects, anyway), etc. So, no. We aren’t subject to the exact same influence every moment of every day of our lives.
My undergrad animal behavior professor said there are “how” questions and “why” questions, and the theory of evolution answers the “why” questions. For example “How do birds fly?” vs “Why do birds fly?”
You can’t fucking read.
No, no, and no.
Talk about extant data: we know that it is entirely possible for men to use their “self-awareness” to refrain from raping, testosterone levels be damned. We know that social pressure can keep men from raping. Therefore, hormones do not control behavior to the extent that men should be relieved of culpability for rape, and it does not constitute an explanation in the same way as alcohol does for motor impairment.
It pisses me off when Chet conducts thought experiments about “mind-altering chemicals” like the ones currently coursing through my bloodstream that are not hypothetical. The sense of equating alcohol with testosterone is a settled question; testosterone does not do similar things. There’s no assumption to it. This means that Chet is not thinking empirically; Chet is instead being an asshole.
I have access to a control group of sorts: biological women who start taking testosterone such that they are at normal male levels. We all get a standard dose. Almost all of us report moodiness (and we’ll just assume for the sake of argument that that’s due to the hormones rather than the whole going through a sex change thing). Almost all of us report increased libido. The ones who turn into violent misogynistic assholes are the ones who believe that men get to be violent misogynistic assholes–and, incidentally, the ones who tend to have been violent misogynistic assholes beforehand.
Nymphalidae, I don’t purport to know everything about biology, and I’ve already stated that I’m well aware that behavior is influenced by biology. The problem I have is with the evo psych theories that look at data that says, for example, that women are less likely to initiate sex than men are and concluding from that that women are just *naturally* less sexually aggressive than men, that humans *evolved* that way, and therefore, we don’t need to question the status quo. Because it misses out on all sorts of cultural factors that punish women for initiating sex, and it misses out on historical evidence that for centuries, women were considered to be sexually licentious and in need of controlling.
I do the same eye-rolling when someone rolls into a discussion of, say, the achievement gap between blacks and whites in this country and starts waving around genetic data that “proves” that blacks are just inferior to whites and starts moaning that You People Are Just Afraid To Discuss The Evidence. No, just far more interested in NOT reinforcing the status quo, especially since these genetics folks never seem to be able to point to anything definitive and engage in the same kind of just-so stories the evo psych people do.
Wow, really? I’m sure no woman could have figured that one out all by herself!
That’s not what she was saying at all. We are all on hormones all the time; while they fluctuate and cause complex body responses, they never disappear. To use the brilliant alcohol analogy, testosterone levels go from buzzed to four martinis, but they don’t slide down to zero.
And the very complexity of influences on behavior — genetic, hormonal, social, cultural, etc. — is a damned good argument against evo psych just-so stories.
Nice snark. But you elide the most fundamental issue.
If you aren’t willing to consider evidence of souls or tiny elves, then what is there to take into account, other than brain chemistry? Why imply that hormones are somehow an external influence on a non-hormonal “us”? If we’ve got free will, that free will operates even when our hormones are surging, and if we don’t, then hormones are just one part of the biochemical mix that determines what we do.
Oh, and physiology maven? It’s absolutely true that diet affects hormone levels in humans, testosterone included.
Gonna try to hit everything at once, here.
And both those things are a far cry from what studies in evolutionary psychology actually do. How long am I going to have to wait for you to assess this field on its own merits?
Looks like it’s you who can’t read, Piny. Unless you can’t tell the difference between asking a question and giving an answer?
Good question. Why is it that nobody here seems to want to address it? Why is that they’d rather shoot the messenger than address the message?
If the conclusion of science is that our behavior is a lot less volitional than we all pretend, why should we go on pretending that we have all this free will? Does it really seem better to pretend that something false is true, just because it makes the laws a little easier to write? Is that justice, to you?
And… your citation for this research?
I’d like you to link to a study in evolutionary psychology that ends with “and therefore the status quo should not be changed or questioned.”
No, really. I’m asking you to defend an assertion.
Yes, I can. “Now that’s a ridiculous equivalence, of course,” is an assertion, which would fall squarely on the “answer” side of the table. You answered the question about whether it would make sense to compare shitfacedness and life on testosterone: it’s not. “Isn’t it reasonable to wonder”–aside from the fact that “isn’t it” is a rhetorical construction–is a question, which would indicate that you believe that it might indeed make sense. That’s inconsistent.
It’s based on the thousands of ftms I know personally. They don’t rape, and don’t feel any greater impulse towards rape than they did before they started taking testosterone. We all–or virtually all–get horny and angry, but sexually violent behavior does not follow from that. The difference between an ftm who hurts women and one who doesn’t is that the former believes he has the right. Maybe you could point me to a study that supports the idea that testosterone in ftms causes greater sexual violence regardless of personal attitudes towards it? I’d love to see it, if it exists.
Oh please. You tromp in saying that evolutionary psychology calls “into question a lot of fundamental underpinnings of the academic feminist field,” including the question of whether a man is “culpable for rape while under the influence of his own body’s mind-altering chemicals,” and you’re hurt that nobody responds by engaging you in an undergraduate colloquy on free-will versus determinism?
If you’re trying to say that nobody’s responsible for anything they do because we’re all a bunch of meat robots, then you should work on your communication skills. You should also try not to get so upset when we don’t want to play with you — we’re just a bunch of meat robots, after all. We can’t help ourselves.
The plural of “anecdote” is not “data.” Again, your citation for this research? In particular I’d like to know your interview methods, your statistical controls. Where did you publish your research? I’ve got access to a pretty significant library so if you can just let me know where I can look up your published findings on the subject, that would be great, thanks.
I’ve posited no such connection, merely asked you to support your own assertions.
No, I guess I’m hurt that Zuzu told me that I deserved to be physically abused because she didn’t like what I had to say.
If you think that’s what I said, maybe you should join Piny and work on your reading skills.
Isn’t that just it, though? Aren’t there situations were we find it totally reasonable to assert that a person has become a kind of meat robot?
No. I said you were annoying. You’re doing nothing to change my mind about that.
Like I have already said: my assertions are based on personal experience, but my personal experience has uncovered no evidence of “higher testosterone levels lead to rape” where you’d expect it to occur: namely, in a fairly large group of people who have gone from normal female levels of testosterone to normal male levels. If that connection were significant enough to lead to reduced culpability, wouldn’t you expect to see increased amounts of uncontrollable sexual violence in this population? We’re pretty interesting to the scientific community, and you’d expect something like that to get around, particularly if it supported the idea that you can bottle masculinity.
You made an analogy to alcohol; do you think humanity had to conduct a study to figure out that drinking alcohol led to impaired judgment? Or that drinking milk did no such thing? You, on the other hand, are asserting that the informal evidence is ambiguous enough that we need to conduct a study to figure out whether higher levels of testosterone impair judgment such that men on that particular drug may well have reduced culpability for rape. I call common-sense bullshit.