Hat-tip to Savage Minds Around the Web

On a complementary note, especially for breast feeding at night, see our popular post: Cosleeping and Biological Imperatives: Why Human Babies Do Not and Should Not Sleep Alone

The Bump: The Inside Scoop of Pregnancy organization created the video. You can find out more about breastfeeding, including “10 Reasons Why Breastfeeding Doesn’t Suck,” over at TheBump’s breastfeeding page, which also has the clip. And they even have BumpTV.

Breastfeeding really does promote brain development and smarter babies! Here’s a very recent article by Elizabeth Isaacs et al. (2010): Impact of Breast Milk on Intelligence Quotient, Brain Size, and White Matter Development. You can get the pdf here; the abstract is below.

Although observational findings linking breast milk to higher scores on cognitive tests may be confounded by factors associated with mothers’ choice to breastfeed, it has been suggested that one or more constituents of breast milk facilitate cognitive development, particularly in preterms. Because cognitive scores are related to head size, we hypothesized that breast milk mediates cognitive effects by affecting brain growth. We used detailed data from a randomized feeding trial to calculate percentage of expressed maternal breast milk (%EBM) in the infant diet of 50 adolescents. MRI scans were obtained (mean age = 15 y 9 mo), allowing volumes of total brain (TBV) and white and gray matter (WMV, GMV) to be calculated.

In the total group, %EBM [amount of breast milk in infant's diet] correlated significantly with verbal intelligence quotient (VIQ); in boys, with all IQ scores, TBV and WMV. VIQ was, in turn, correlated with WMV and, in boys only, additionally with TBV. No significant relationships were seen in girls or with gray matter. These data support the hypothesis that breast milk promotes brain development, particularly white matter growth. The selective effect in males accords with animal and human evidence regarding gender effects of early diet. Our data have important neurobiological and public health implications and identify areas for future mechanistic study.

A burgeoning literature spanning sociologies of culture and social network methods has for the past several decades sought to explicate the relationships between culture and connectivity. A number of promising recent moves toward integration are worthy of review, comparison, critique, and synthesis. Network thinking provides powerful techniques for specifying cultural concepts ranging from narrative networks to classification systems, tastes, and cultural repertoires. At the same time, we see theoretical advances by sociologists of culture as providing a corrective to network analysis as it is often portrayed, as a mere collection of methods.

Cultural thinking complements and sets a new agenda for moving beyond predominant forms of structural analysis that ignore action, agency, and intersubjective meaning. The notion of “cultural holes” that we use to organize our review points both to the cultural contingency of network structure and to the increasingly permeable boundary between studies of culture and research on social networks.

Mark Pachucki is the first author, and a recent Ph.D in sociology from Harvard and current Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholar. Ronald Breiger, the second author, is a professor of sociology at Arizona.

The idea of cultural holes builds on Ronald Burt’s idea of “structural holes,” which Pachucki and Breiger summarize:

Burt’s idea refers to strategic bridging ties that may connect otherwise disjoint clumps of social actors; these ties are hypothesized to lead to enhanced information benefits and social capital for those who bridge holes.

Cultural holes fills a gap (yes, I couldn’t resist) by examining “cultural meanings, practices, and discourse” as part of social networks and social structures, basically positing that conceiving social networks as independent phenomena is wrong. Rather, social networks need to be recognized as “culturally contingent” even as we increasingly recognize the powerful impact of networks over the lifespan.

Here is their main justification in their essay:

The time is overdue for a conscientious shift beyond cultural explanations for social structure, and structural explanations for cultural outcomes, toward a more integrated vision of social scientific explanation. Social relations are culturally constituted, and shared cultural meanings also shape social structure…

[We] need to look beyond the structure at both the content of what is being transmitted—such as social norms and the credibility of information—and mechanisms of transmission, and more importantly how culturally meaningful individual action can result in drastic changes in the dynamics of social networks in which individuals are embedded.

I’ll finish off with the ending to their Annual Review article, which provides a good overview of the whole piece.

SUMMARY POINTS

1. Culture and social networks can be usefully seen as mutually constitutive and coevolving, having grown from common sociological roots in relational thinking.

2. Much empirical analysis over the past several decades has tended to treat social networks and culture as discrete realms rather than together. Notable attempts at synthetic engagement are reviewed.

3. A body of recent work shows how culture prods, evokes, and constitutes social networks in ways that may be envisioned and modeled by new analytic methods. Prominent emerging research areas include narrative and textual analysis, the civic sphere, studies of organizing principles such as fields and actor networks, boundaries, and cultural tastes.

4. In dialogue with the influential concept of structural holes, we suggest that cultural holes captures contingencies of meaning, practice, and discourse that enable social structure and structural holes.

5. Four aspects of cultural holes are identified: (1) Bridging social ties often exist because they connect people who both share and reject tastes, as well as those with complementary tastes. (2) Boundaries as well as affinities among genres are productively understood as patterned around absences of ties among cultural forms. (3) The use of structural holes as distinct from other organizing principles may depend on culture at levels ranging from interpersonal, to intraorganizational, to transnational. (4) Incommensurability in institutional logics prods actors to generate new meanings and forms of discourse.

Link to Pachucki & Breiger’s Cultural Holes abstract & citation

“We just had good chemistry,” is a reason often cited as an explanation for why two people find each other attractive. However, it is usually said without realizing that there is truly a science behind attraction. Chemistry can help guide people in finding their mate. For instance, attraction can be analyzed in terms of physical characteristics like smell and body type and how they can indicate potential reproductive success.

Recent research addressed attraction and the smells of various test subjects. In this research, women were exposed to t-shirts worn by various potential mates. They were asked to rate which smell they found most attractive, and the t-shirt each woman rated the highest belonged to the man that had DNA that was most dissimilar to her own (Sexual Attraction 2006).

This attraction to a mate with dissimilar DNA is important, as can be seen when studying the major histocompatibility complex (MHC), a set of genes that determines immunity to pathogens. Children born to couples with the most different MHC had a broader immunity and were healthier (Sexual Attraction 2006). Therefore, it would be ideal to be attracted to the mate with the most dissimilar DNA because this increases the chances of healthier children.

Another feature that determines attractiveness is the waist-to-hip ratio. Studies have generally shown that a low waist-to-hip ratio is considered attractive, with the ideal being about 0.7 (Berngner 2010). The waist-to-hip ratio itself is important because bigger hips are an indicator of fertility and ability to bear children (Carter 2006).

One study was conducted by Dutch psychologist, Karremans, using two identical mannequins that differed only in their waist-to-hip ratios. One had a ratio of 0.7, while the other had a ratio of 0.84. Men who had been blind from birth were asked to touch these mannequins, focusing on the waists and hips. Because they were blind, they were presumably less influenced by factors such as media and societal ideals. They also decided the more attractive mannequin was the one with the waist-to-hip ratio of 0.7. (Berngner 2010)

Other studies have been conducted around the world where men were shown line drawings of women, and again, the ones that were considered most attractive had a lower waist-to-hip ratio of 0.7 (Bergner 2010). These findings help prove the theory that the attractiveness of a female is based a lot on her capacity to be a good mate.

Male features that are considered attractive by women are broad shoulders and a strong jaw line, features that generally arise after puberty (Carter 2006). These are seen as trusted signals for virility and good health. This is because these are features are directly related to testosterone (Carter 2006). Women are interested in a mate that can provide healthy offspring as well as provide for them, just like men want women who can be good mothers.

Such findings suggest that attraction itself is deeper and more ingrained than cultural ideals. Yet is biology the only thing that is needed to explain human attraction?

Lolita

The short answer is no. Take the novel Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, where the main character Humbert Humbert finds himself completely in love with his housemate’s twelve year old daughter, Lolita. In our culture (and many others), the attraction of a forty year old man to a young girl is not something that is celebrated. Nonetheless, Humbert cannot help but to think about her all day long.

The things that attract him to his Lolita are the characteristics of a type of girl that he refers to as a “nymphet.” What separates a nymphet from her peers between 9 and 14 years of age is not only the “slightly feline outline of [her] cheekbone, the slenderness of [her] downy limb” but the magical quality that Humbert feels she exudes (Nabokov 1955, 17). He is attracted to her small, curved back and pre-pubescent chest. This love of a body type, though unusual, is what Humbert looks for in a mate when he stalks the playgrounds of America.

Clearly society has an issue with Humbert’s obsessive attraction to Lolita. One reason that it may find this attraction disturbing is that it is to a young twelve year old girl, making it unnatural. As her pre-pubescent chest and hips indicate, she is not able to carry his child. Following these, he should not be attracted to such a young, naïve girl because she would not be a good mate.

Another reason society could find this obsession problematic is because of its established ideals. Humbert is going against traditional ideals of when a girl becomes a woman and is ready for adult relationships; moreover, he is abusing his age and position to do so. The reason this attraction is frowned upon can be explained by either biological or societal terms shows that attraction itself is not easily understood.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover

In a more conventional attraction, like the one between Oliver Mellors and Connie in Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence, what Mellors finds attractive in his lover is also primarily physical. He praises her hips as well as her rump, like when during one of their nights together he says, “That’s got the nicest arse of anybody.” (Lawrence 1968, 244) Lady Chatterley likewise says that she is attracted to Mellors’s body and its virility. She explicitly says so, “I liked your body,” (Lawrence 186). Their attraction begins as mainly physical.

For the majority of their relationship, it is the physical qualities that are important. Mellors admires Connie’s physical features and vice versa. The attraction Connie feels for Mellors will never happen between Clifford and Connie. This is because she and Mellors share both the mental and physical intimacy of a relationship, and this combination permits their relationship to grow throughout the novel.

She can never have the physical aspect with Clifford, something she realizes is important. Even Clifford realizes how important sex and the possibility of having a child is when he encourages Connie to do this with another man, saying, “If we had a child to rear, it would be our own, and it would carry on. Don’t you think it’s worth considering?” (Lawrence 1928,45). While Connie’s attraction to Mellors may be more than merely physical, it is undeniable that one part of it is based on the fact that he can have sex and therefore give her children, while Clifford cannot.

Obviously Mellors and Connie do not make a conscious effort to be attracted to each other because of the other’s ability to produce and care for a child. This explicit thought does not cross their minds. However, it is clear that the features that they do admire can be directly associated to these family skills. Mellors enjoys Connie’s hips and rump. These indicate body fat and hip size, which are both important in fertility and childbirth. Mellors, on the other hand, can have sex and give her a child, which is more than Clifford can do. This suggests that a substantial part of attraction is subconscious, dealing with features related to reproduction.

Culture

It can be argued, however, that biology does not play such a major role in attraction because culture seems to dictate what is attractive as well. To illustrate the fluctuations in cultural values, it is nearly impossible to deny the popularity and attractiveness of sex and beauty icon of the 1950’s, Marilyn Monroe. The song “Big Girl (You Are Beautiful) by British singer-songwriter Mika would have definitely applied to her.

However, she was a size 14 in her day, which would translate to a size 8 by today’s standards (Lewis 2006). This ideal attractive body type has evolved since, shifting from the naturally curvy Marilyn Monroe to the waifish Kate Moss. In the 1960’s, the stick-thin Biritish model Twiggy, who was 5’ 6” and weighed 91 pounds, was idolized. Since the 1970’s, the ideal body type has evolved to value taller, thinner women as models.

However, there is a backlash to this desired body image as the archetypal model is seen as both unrealistic and unhealthy. The reality that the model body is typically unachievable is seen in the fact that by the 1990’s models weigh about 23 percent than the average woman (Body Image and Media 2008). The media is being used to point out the how unrealistic this “ideal” is. The Dove Campaign for Real Beauty has recently been putting up ads to show how the media is trying to make us conform to the thin, athletic, sexy, and totally unrealistic body type that is simply unrealistic.

This shocking video shows how young girls are being brainwashed into thinking that there is one way to look, which is not true. Dove’s campaign is a valiant effort to prove that bodies are beautiful, no matter the type.

Conclusion

With all these different body types coming in and out of fashion and being seen as attractive then suddenly not, it would be natural to suggest that biology does not play such a major part in attraction and that culture does. Yet as we have shown, there is a biological link to the traits that attract the different sexes to each other, like smell and body shape. Desire runs through biology and culture.

Attraction is apparent all around us. We’re sure you’ve figured that out already. So enjoy!

Works Cited

Bergner, Daniel. “The Anatomy of Desire.” The New York Times 12 Apr. 2010: n. pag. Web. 28 Apr. 2010.

Carter, Stuart. “Science of Sex.” First Science. N.p., n.d. Web. 29 Apr. 2010.

Lawrence, D.H. Lady Chatterley’s Lover. New York: Bantam Dell, 1968.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. United States: Random House, inc., 1955

Sturnheimer, Karen. “Thinking Like a Sociologist: Understanding Changes in the ‘Ideal’ Body Size” Everyday Sociology Blog. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1 Aug 2009. Web. 22 Apr 2010.

“Sexual Attraction: The Magic Formula.” Times Online. The Sunday Times, 28 May 2006. Web. 28 Apr. 2010.

Love is a process. That is the message that stuck with us after reading the novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover and watching the film Kinsey. Throughout Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the main character, the aristocratic Connie Chatterley, spends her time in relations with three different men, finally settling with the third after gaining more experience about what love is and how it can be expressed.

In Kinsey, the main character, the scientist Alfred Kinsey, presents the country with a new outlook on sex, encouraging and educating people on different ways of expression. Kinsey’s actions within the movie agree with our focus, that the physical side of a relationship matters in the larger picture of love and that love can undergo dramatic changes over time.

Connie Chatterley and Alfred Kinsey’s stories illustrate how love is a process with many facets. These facets include experiences in the physical and emotional sides of relationships, experiences with past lovers and their effect on the present, cheating, and sex as passion of the moment or steady habit.

Love: From Habit to Passion to Habit

Love making, in any form, can change from the passion of the moment to steady habit over the course of time. As presented by D. H. Lawrence in his afterword to Lady Chatterley’s Lover, at times “the act tends to be mechanical” (338). Lawrence described how we can lose interest when sex becomes just another chore instead of viewing it as a passion-filled act between two lovers. From the thrill and satisfaction of losing your virginity to relying on multiple partners outside of your marriage to sustain interest, love can be seen in different forms overtime.

With love as process, partners will learn over time what their relationship needs in order to thrive. Whether in the passion of the moment through sex, or through other ways, love between two people needs to be an active endeavor, not something that becomes mechanical and dull in which all forms of the expression of love are lost.

This article Does Having More Sex – Like Brazilian Health Officials Recommend – Actually Improve Your Health describes the effects of love as an active endeavor. Within the piece Dr. Ian Kerner, a certified clinical sexologist, proclaims, “Sex also strengthens the immune system, help you have a better relationship with your partner, and make you feel more connected with your partner….” From health to connection, sex does matter.

When asking the class if they believed if it would have been possible for Clifford, a paraplegic, to keep Connie interested in him despite them not being able to have sex, the overall response was yes, he could have, but only if he did not also treat her poorly at times. There was a point where Clifford also became disinterested in Connie. However, the class believed that if he had tried, it would have been possible. We also believe that if he gave her more attention and provided some form of physical intimacy to her, then her interest in other men might have decreased significantly.

In this Miller Light commercial, “Why Do You Love Me,” the man showers much more attention on the beer than on his beautiful partner. As humor often does, this clip captures a slice of human reality.

Cheating

With love being a process comes the possibility of one partner being cheated on. In Lady Chatterley’s Lover Connie cheating on her husband Clifford with two different men. She has a short fling with Michaelis, whom she disliked profoundly later on, and Michaelis struggles to understand her lack of interest in him even though they slept together. Mellors, the estate groundskeeper, comes to love Connie for both her physical and emotional sides first being interested only in their love-making. In Kinsey, the ground-breaking sex professor cheats on his wife with his male apprentice Clyde Martin. In each work, a different perspective is developed on the importance of cheating in a relationship.

In the case of Connie and her husband Clifford, they believed that “people can be what they like and feel what they like and do what they like, strictly privately, so long as [both spouses] keep the form of life intact” (Lawrence 197). In other words, they both think that it is okay to be involved with other people in different ways because, as Clifford says, “I doubt, once you’ve really cared, if you can ever really care again” (260). The idea here is that neither believes that once you are married and are in love with one person that you can ever be pulled away from that by another. Cheating is not cheating because you still love your spouse.

Cheating also occurs in Kinsey when he cheats on his wife with his male apprentice. His wife is crushed, and becomes angry and hysterical because she does not understand how her husband can think that it is fine to cheat on her, his wife whom he loves, with another person in any way.
Kinsey does not hesitate to tell her that he views sex as a purely physical and natural action, and that infidelity is okay as long as he loves her deeply. This viewpoint of sex as a purely physical act backfires when his wife has sex with the very same apprentice that he was with earlier. In this case, at first there was a misunderstanding of what their relationship constituted, but after both sides agreed that having other sex partners was okay, their love was not affected.

This video clip from the movie Kinsey portrays a part of the cheating triangle between Dr. Kinsey, his wife, and the apprentice. This comes as the cheating starts.

Still, the Kinsey’s mantra that sex is only physical did not apply for their colleagues, who shared multiple sexual partners with each others’ wives. One wife fell in love with her husband’s friend after they slept together, thus displaying why sex is more than just a physical act because emotional connections are difficult to avoid.

In the modern world, this more tolerant view of cheating in marriage is not normal – most people view cheating as very negative. Although cheating might be relatively common, the public mostly hears about it through the media. In current events, Tiger Woods is an example of a man who cheated on his wife, and the press attacked him. Similarly, a public scandal erupted over Sandra Bullock’s relationship with her husband Jesse James, and how he recently cheated on her. James has said repeatedly that he still loves Sandra; Bullock has filed for divorce.

When the differing circumstances about cheating were brought up in our presentation, the class seemed to think that “cheating” might be acceptable as long as both partners agree to it. They seemed to be under the impression that it would not be that bad especially since it is only cheating physically, assuming that you truly love your partner. They all also said that it would be pretty much unforgivable if your partner cheated on you emotionally, because that might be harder for a relationship to overcome.

We would have to agree with the class in this respect. All relationships are different, and if both members are okay with it, there is nothing really wrong with cheating physically, because the view would supposedly be that it really means nothing. We do however think that the action still definitely speaks against the integrity of the marriage vows. Promises are made with wedding vows, particularly the promise of staying true and faithful, and marriage comes to mean something symbolically to a relationship. Still, for someone like Connie, caught in a relationship where love has fled, through “cheating” she found a physical and emotional connection with Mellors, and fell in love with him.

For a steady relationship to exist, both partners need to play an active role in continuing to satisfy the other partner’s physical and emotional needs. We believe that by adhering to both of these aspects, partners can be on the right track to forming and maintain a long-lasting and healthy relationship.

Figuring It Out

In tying everything together, we saw the joint concepts of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Kinsey as being the most successful together. Kinsey’s showing the world the different ways people are sexually as well as Lady Chatterley’s Lover’s illustration of the dynamics of relationships as people find love are both ways of teaching people about the different ways of looking at love and the processes which will eventually land you with your partner. Love is a complex process that requires the balancing of physical and emotional sides of a relationship. It takes effort to learn from past experiences and apply them in the present, whether within the same relationship or a different one, and this can bring a partner one step closer to finding the love they desire.

Christakis & Fowler Obesity Network

“Is Happiness Catching?” is the feature article in this week’s New York Times Magazine. Clive Thompson writes about the Framingham Heart Study, which has followed 15,000 people starting back in 1948. Originally framed as a study of physical disease, the data are now being turned to social ends.

Nicholas Christakis, a medical sociologist and doctor at Harvard, and James Fowler, a political scientist at UC San Diego, have taken this data set to examine a question that dates back to Durkheim and his ideas about collective effervescence, anomie, and suicide – how do our social relationships affect what we experience and do? As Thompson frames it:

By analyzing the Framingham data, Christakis and Fowler say, they have for the first time found some solid basis for a potentially powerful theory in epidemiology: that good behaviors — like quitting smoking or staying slender or being happy — pass from friend to friend almost as if they were contagious viruses. The Framingham participants, the data suggested, influenced one another’s health just by socializing. And the same was true of bad behaviors — clusters of friends appeared to “infect” each other with obesity, unhappiness and smoking. Staying healthy isn’t just a matter of your genes and your diet, it seems. Good health is also a product, in part, of your sheer proximity to other healthy people.

Their research shows that common explanations for problem behavior, such as individual being at fault or peer pressure, are inadequate. What we experience and how we act spreads further than we think. Take a major illness affecting a mother late in life, and the strain and stress her daughter experiences caring for her mother. That strain can affect the daughter’s husband, who in turn shapes his friend’s life.

Christakis saw this through his clinical experience, and with Fowler, decided to study the impact of social networks. One of their main findings is that in the Framinghamn study, “drinking spread socially, as did happiness and even loneliness. And in each case one’s individual influence stretched out three degrees before it faded out. They termed this the ‘three degrees of influence’ rule about human behavior: We are tied not just to those around us, but to others in a web that stretches farther than we know.”

When a Framingham resident became obese, his or her friends were 57 percent more likely to become obese, too. Even more astonishing to Christakis and Fowler was the fact that the effect didn’t stop there. In fact, it appeared to skip links. A Framingham resident was roughly 20 percent more likely to become obese if the friend of a friend became obese — even if the connecting friend didn’t put on a single pound. Indeed, a person’s risk of obesity went up about 10 percent even if a friend of a friend of a friend gained weight.

Christakis and Fowler’s work provides an in-depth description of the functioning of social networks – not a examination of why loneliness spreads so much as an examination of how it does. In other words, there is not a theory of social contagion of behaviors, but an examination of the role of social networks in loneliness. As they write in an in-press paper co-authored with John Cacioppo:

Results indicated that loneliness occurs in clusters within social networks, extends up to three degrees of separation, and is disproportionately represented at the periphery of social networks. In addition, loneliness appears to spread through a contagious process even though lonely individuals are moved closer to the edge of social networks over time. The spread of loneliness was found to be stronger than the spread of perceived social connections, stronger for friends than family members, and stronger for women than for men.

For why social contagion works, for this “more than peer pressure” effect (that third degree of influence – a friend of a friend of yours), Christakis and Fowler throw out a range of neuropsychological ideas such as “subconscious social signals that we pick up from those around us, which serve as cues to what is considered normal behavior” and “the spread of good or bad feelings, they say, might be driven partly by “mirror neurons” in the brain that automatically mimic what we see in the faces of those around us — which is why looking at photographs of smiling people can itself often lift your mood.”

But there are also intriguing signs of everyday dynamics that help or hinder the spread of behaviors (in other words, don’t blame it all on the brain):

The Framingham findings also suggest that different contagious behaviors spread in different ways. For example, co-workers did not seem to transmit happiness to one another, while personal friends did. But co-workers did transmit smoking habits; if a person at a small firm stopped smoking, his or her colleagues had a 34 percent better chance of quitting themselves. The difference is based in the nature of workplace relationships, Fowler contends. Smokers at work tend to cluster together outside the building; if one of them stops smoking, it reduces the conviviality of the experience. (If you’re the last smoker outside on a freezing afternoon, your behavior can seem completely ridiculous even to yourself.) But when it comes to happiness, Fowler said, “people are both cooperative and competitive at work. So when one person gets a raise, it might make him happy, but it’ll make other people jealous.”

Other explanations include homophily, or like people gravitating towards each other, and shared environment, for example, a McDonalds opening which people then visit. Jason Fletcher, for example, has shown that using the social contagion methodological approach, one can show that very implausible things appear contagious according to the Christakis/Fowler analysis – such as tallness (hmm, maybe they play basketball together?).

A more significant limitation is that the Framingham data is good on family but not so much on friends – respondents were required to only list one significant friend over time. Thus, what might appear as contagion could be due to missing data.

With drug use, it is clear that when adolescents take drugs, two effects happen: they start to proactively seek out friends who also use drugs (largely because they approve of their behavior) and those friends can reinforce the initial behavior itself (often leading to a rise in substance use). In other words, our social networks have reciprocal effects, us on out, and others on in.

Christakis and Folwer demonstrate that the directionality of these reciprocal effects matter. If I consider you a good friend, but you don’t consider me a good friend, your behavior is more likely to influence me than vice versa. “According to their data, if Steven becomes obese, it has no effect on Peter at all, because he doesn’t think of Steven as a close friend. In contrast, if Peter gains weight, then Steven’s risk of obesity rises by almost 100 percent. And if the two men regard each other as mutual friends, the effect is huge — either one gaining weight almost triples the other’s risk.”

The article then goes into some very interesting public health considerations, with a focus on smoking and obesity. But I’ll leave you to read those yourself, and end with a more basic piece of advice. The Christakis/Fowler research suggests an addition to an old motto. Don’t worry, be happy… by getting connected.

Their findings show that the gamble of increased sociability pays off, for a surprising reason: Happiness is more contagious than unhappiness. According to their statistical analysis, each additional happy friend boosts your good cheer by 9 percent, while each additional unhappy friend drags you down by only 7 percent.

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Christakis and Fowler have a book coming out later this month, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives. It comes complete with a fancy website, Connected the Book, complete with a 3 minute view, discussion boards, reviews, and more.

Here’s their 2007 New England Journal of Medicine article, The Spread of Obesity in a Large Social Network over 32 Years.

You can also read an in-press article written with John Cacioppo, entitled Alone in the Crowd: The Structure and Spread of Loneliness in a Large Social Network (pdf), if you want to get more at the science side.

And here’s the NY Times Clive Thompson article, Is Happiness Catching?

In particular, Bergner gives us thumbnail portraits of women engaged in sex research: Meredith Chivers of Queens University (Kingston, Ontario), Lisa Diamond of the University of Utah, and Marta Meana from UNLV, although there’s also commentary from Julia Heiman, the Director of the Kinsey Institute, and others. As with so much of contemporary science writing, we get researchers as characters, with quirky personal descriptions and accounts of meeting the author, each one standing in for a particular perspective in current scientific debates.

Chivers is portrayed as arguing that women are existentially divided ‘between two truly separate, if inscrutably overlapping, systems, the physiological and the subjective,’ Diamond is made to stand in for the ‘female desire may be dictated… by intimacy, by emotional connection,’ and Meana stands in for the argument that women are narcissists desiring to submit. Whether or not these are accurate portrayals—and they might be—the model is prevalent in science writing: get characters to represent lines of thinking, even though many of us are not so clearly signed on with a single theoretical team. Here, we know the score: Diamond arguing women want intimacy, Meana that they want a real man to take them, and Chivers that women want it all, even if they don’t realize it and contradict themselves.

The irony is that, with such a tangle, the conclusion is foreordained: women will seem enigmatic, inconsistent, and irremediably opaque. As I’ll suggest in this, I think that the conclusion is built into the way the question is being asked. If a similar question were asked about nearly any group, in nearly any domain of complex human behaviour, and then a simple single answer were demanded, the questioner would face nearly identical frustration.

I must admit that, although I found the article readable, even enjoyable, the last paragraph confused me, so I can’t be entirely certain of my analysis. I’ve read the last paragraph at least four times and am still not sure I understand. I’m going to quote it just so you don’t think I’m crazy, but I’m willing to read to anyone’s comment if you think you know what it means.

Bergner was watching Dr. Chivers scrub her data of outlying data points (I remember being shocked by my girlfriend when I found her doing the same thing in her psychology research before finding it was common practice – more on this in another post.). Chivers spent hours with a graph of ‘arousal’ reported by measuring vaginal blood flow, trying to smooth a red line on a computer screen to make sense of which video images were most arousing. Bergner writes in conclusion:

It was possible to imagine, then, that a scientist blinded by staring at red lines on her computer screen, or blinded by peering at any accumulation of data — a scientist contemplating, in darkness, the paradoxes of female desire — would see just as well.

‘It was possible to imagine… a scientist blinded… would see just as well…’ Huh? What I’m getting at is not just to make sport of some tortured prose, but rather to suggest that Bergner, after reporting scads of findings highlighting a whole range of interesting phenomena connected to women’s sexuality and sexual desire, on a number of analytical levels, still wants to reach out for the brass ring, the one thing that ‘women want.’ He has to conclude that women’s desire is paradoxical, a ‘giant forest… too complex for comprehension,’ because there’s no simple answer.

One can imagine an article with the title, ‘What do diners want?’, which bemoaned the fickleness and impenetrable complexity of culinary preferences: Sometimes they want steak, and sometimes just a salad. Sometimes they put extra salt on the meal, and sometimes they ask for ketchup. One orders fish, another chicken, another ham and eggs. One day a guy ordered tuna fish salad on rye, and the next, the same guy ordered a tandoori chicken wrap, hold the onions! My God, man, they’re insane! Who can ever come up with a unified theory of food preferences?! Food preferences are a giant forest, too complex for comprehension. What do diners want?!

You get my drift. The line of questioning is rhetorically time-tested (can we say clichéd even?) but objectively and empirically nonsensical. So many of these experiments seem to be testing a series of different, related, but ultimately distinct questions: With whom do women mate? With whom do women have sex? With whom do women say they would have sex? What causes women’s bodies’ automatic arousal responses (and under what conditions)? What type of guys do women like in soft porn stories? What type of guys do women like in photographs? Do certain women get aroused by a particular type of porn movies? Does a particular woman realize or acknowledge that she is getting aroused by a particular stimulus? What affects women’s self-reported sense of sexual identity as it changes over time in women who say they are lesbian, bisexual or not sure? They’re all good questions, some better than others, and they’re all about ‘sex,’ but they are testing a whole range of different things. Can they all be glossed as, ‘What do women want?’ Yeah, sort of, but you’re going to get a hopeless answer.

Sometimes I feel like the research makes sense in context, but once it’s sampled, sound-bited, mixed and matched into a single article with the title, ‘What do women want?’, the simplification tragically robs all the individual studies of any of the insight they could have offered in the first place. Here, synthesis makes understanding impossible because the heterogeneity of what is being studied is ignored, as if all these research projects had the same research question. The reason the article is a fun read in the first place is that the research that the people being interviewed are doing is intriguing; the reason the conclusion is hopeless is that everyone is asked (or is treated as if asked) to extend their findings to cover all women in all situations.

For example, questions about women’s reactions to visual images of sex and nudity are intriguing on a number of levels. Dr. Chivers showed women videos of ‘heterosexual sex, male and female homosexual sex, a man masturbating, a woman masturbating, a chiseled man walking naked on a beach and a well-toned woman doing calisthenics in the nude,’ even a clip of bonobos mating. She sexed up the last one by adding hoots and screeching, because the female’s pleased ‘chirping’ sounds weren’t hot enough.

Chivers found at the University of Toronto that straight male subjects’ genitals (presumably college aged, by the way) responded to heterosexual and lesbian sex, female masturbation and nude callisthenics, but were less moved by male-on-male action or the ‘chiseled’ gent’s ocean side walk. Gay men were just the opposite. Neither group got aroused by hot monkey love (even with dubbed-in hooting and screeching).

The women in the study, in contrast, had increased blood flow vaginally when any sort of sex was on screen—except the bonobos. They also were aroused by the naked workout but not by the man strolling nude on the beach, and pretty much liked any footage with people in it. Except for the naked man, oddly enough.

When Chivers asked the subjects to rate how stimulating each bit of footage was, she found that women’s reports of arousal did not coincide with their vaginal blood flow spikes whereas men pretty much reported what the plethysmographs on their penises were saying.

These results, to me, are fascinating. Not only have they caused me to swear off beachcombing au naturel, at least until I find out it’s the ‘chiseled’ quality that turned off some subjects. They also spark a whole series of questions: Is it the phenomenology of male arousal that helps men to be more aware of physiological arousal? Do women report something different as ‘arousal’ when asked (that is, the research instruction was probably not, ‘push this button when your vagina swells’)? Are all women everywhere equally unaware of physiological arousal? Are men and women trained differently through exposure to different sorts of visual sexual images? Are women unaware they are aroused if having an intimate conversation with an attractive potential partner? Are women aroused by any images of human sexually aroused (after all, beachcomber guy presumably wasn’t sporting a serious chubby, although I could be wrong)? Why are both heterosexual men and women aroused by naked women doing callisthenics when gay men are not? And, perhaps most importantly, doesn’t someone find bonobos getting it on sexy?

In other words, I think Chivers research is fascinating, but when it’s paired with the question, ‘What do women want?’, it prematurely leads to some simplistic conclusions. The logic goes sort of like: ‘A number of things turn women on; therefore, we don’t know the one thing that women want. Damn, women are inscrutable.’ Uh, no, actually, we have pretty clear results on the video arousal tests, it’s just not a simple one-line sound-bite answer (nor, for that matter, does it necessarily tell us about what women desire sexually; it tells us about a certain group’s response to videos).

The gap between measured arousal and reported arousal is interesting, but it’s hardly big news that people don’t know exactly what is happening in their own perceptions or bodies. We’ve been down this road before at Neuroanthropology.net (for example, at How well do we know our brains?), but the bottom line is that there are lots of areas of life where self-reported state is out-of-step with objectively measurable physiological or neurological conditions. For example, we have very little conscious access to motor-perceptual information about our own movement and object tracking; we can move things around in people’s visual fields and they are often lousy at noticing it. This doesn’t mean we throw up our hands and say, ‘People are confused and inscrutable because they don’t even know when objects have moved.’

This is the reason that, although it’s great to hear that sexologists studying female arousal are carving out some important research results, I kept seeing some very tired old interpretive frameworks being prematurely introduced. For example, a couple of times Bergner threw in the gratuitous ‘evolutionary’ explanation that men are ‘programmed’ by evolution one way, women another (although this tendency was not NEARLY so bad as some of the other research on human sexuality we’ve discussed, and for that we’re grateful; see Chicks dig jerks?: Evolutionary psych on sex #1). At another point, we got the ‘female narcissism’ explanation for the fact that some women seem to be stimulated by the sense that they are desired more than a desirable object itself.

Fair enough, we can bring it whatever interpretation fits the data, but it seems to me that if women’s desire is really a ‘giant forest’ that is poorly understood, and if the data is multiple and contradictory, it’s likely that any blanket statement (‘Women just want to be desired.’ ‘Women only feel desire after they feel intimacy.’ ‘Women just want money.’ ‘Women use sex to get love.’) will always be inadequate. Some of the older models of an essential female sexual identity contain a partial truth, or they wouldn’t even seem plausible, but they aren’t the simple answer to the simplistic question, ‘What do women want?’

At times in the article, I was reminded of discussions of ‘My Type’ in high school and college. I’m sure you’ve heard these discussions as well, with someone going on ad nauseam about what sort of person they find arousing. Then you show up at the five year reunion, and the guy who said he liked tall, bronzed, blonde beach girls is with a short, perky, darked-haired sexologist wearing high boots and fashionable rectangular glasses (apologies to Bergner). Turns out that ‘desire’ is a more slippery term, and that our sexual arousal and sexual behaviour are in more complex relations than just desire-leads-to-arousal-leads-to-sex. If it were only that easy…

Often, when I read studies of ‘attractive faces,’ I get the same response. The research projects ask students to rate how faces in photographs look, and then make conclusions about desirable mates. But the research is really asking about attractive faces in photographs, not peering into the actual sorting mechanism that produces our mating behaviour. Thank God people don’t pick mates on the basis of their headshots, or I for one likely never would have gotten married. And I’m sure that the research subjects in these experiments would strenuously object if the researchers said that they had to pick a mate on the basis of a photo of a face only, even if they thought symmetrical, feminine faces looked good in pictures.

So often, even when we’re dealing with these research papers, we’re still only seeing a statistical majority or even less when someone is making statements about men and women (for another case, see Girls gone guilty: Evolutionary psych on sex #2). Dr. Meana points this out in her interview with Bergner when she suggests that ‘the variability within genders may be greater than the differences between genders’ in arousal and desire. Although I was pleased to read this, it was immediately followed with some blanket statements about female desire and contrasts with male arousal. The section with Meana was one of the most interesting in the whole article, with some provocative statements about women’s narcissism, the effect of female nudity, the problem of desire in committed relationships, and even sexual fantasies of submission. Don’t get me wrong—it’s well worth reading. But prefaced by this statement about variability within and difference between ‘genders,’ it sort of contains its own critique.

One of the wisest books I ever read about sex was Passionate Marriage by David Schnarch. One of the thing he points out is that the reason sexuality in marriage is a challenge is because so many psychological issues, so much of our own individual, idiosyncratic life experience, can be brought into intimacy for resolution and healing. In fact, other areas of our life are not that different. People make eating and food about all sorts of things, as they do shopping, sports, and so on. That is, the idea that a person desires some one thing in sexuality is part of the problem for understanding sexuality. I suspect that the sexologists Bergner was interviewing are well aware of this, and it’s only this journalistic framing that makes it seem so simple that the question becomes unanswerable: ‘What do women want?’ (For a subtle discussion of the complex experience of desire for drugs, see Daniel’s piece, Wanting to Craving: Understanding Compulsive Involvement with Drugs.)

To go out on a limb, I would argue that most women, like most men, probably desire a number of things, some of which are more likely to be found in sex than others. Not all societies encourage us to seek out the same satisfactions in our relationships, nor do they all saddle us with the same psychological issues to contend with in our sexual relationships. Even within a single society, different people bring different issues to the bedroom (or wherever they deal with sex), whether they are straight, gay, bi- or other. Moreover, once we satisfy one set of desires, that hardly means we are finished with desiring, and we might seek something else in sex. Same activity, but looking for ‘something else’ within it.

I’m not convinced that what men want is all that much less complicated than what women want in sex; perhaps, men’s constellation of desires in sex seem more internally consistent because they conflict less with each other, but that doesn’t mean men only want one thing (just that getting many needs met at once might be easier). We’ve seen a change in women’s desires and how they might be met in Western society over the past half century (and longer), and I suspect that these will continue to change.

In other words, sex is a field for interaction, and arousal is a physiological phenomenon that both influences how those interactions play out, and is influenced by these interactions. Arousal doesn’t determine sexual behaviour. Every time we get aroused, we don’t have sex; every time we have sex, we may not be aroused, although, again, the interaction might end up affecting our physiological state (for better or worse). One of the things that makes humans human is that layers of other considerations can override or modify basic physiological processes like fear, arousal, anger, and panic. Stripping back or ignoring these other factors like inhibition, enculturation, and socialization doesn’t get us to ‘human nature,’ it erases so much of what makes humans distinctive.

What do women want? Lots. Just like men. And, just like men, as soon as they get what they want, women are liable to want something else. If you fine that inscrutable, or ‘semi-shocking’, you need to hang out with humans more often.

Credits:
Image by Ryan McGinley/Team Gallery from New York Times.

Where a baby sleeps is not as simple as current medical discourse and recommendations against cosleeping in some western societies want it to be. And there is good reason why. I write here to explain why the pediatric recommendations on forms of cosleeping such as bedsharing will and should remain mixed. I will also address why the majority of new parents practice intermittent bedsharing despite governmental and medical warnings against it.

Definitions are important here. The term cosleeping refers to any situation in which a committed adult caregiver, usually the mother, sleeps within close enough proximity to her infant so that each, the mother and infant, can respond to each other’s sensory signals and cues. Room sharing is a form of cosleeping, always considered safe and always considered protective. But it is not the room itself that it is protective. It is what goes on between the mother (or father) and the infant that is. Medical authorities seem to forget this fact. This form of cosleeping is not controversial and is recommended by all.

Unfortunately, the terms cosleeping, bedsharing and a well-known dangerous form of cosleeping, couch or sofa cosleeping, are mostly used interchangeably by medical authorities, even though these terms need to be kept separate. It is absolutely wrong to say, for example, that “cosleeping is dangerous” when roomsharing is a form of cosleeping and this form of cosleeping (as at least three epidemiological studies show) reduce an infant’s chances of dying by one half.

Bedsharing is another form of cosleeping which can be made either safe or unsafe, but it is not intrinsically one nor the other. Couch or sofa cosleeping is, however, intrinsically dangerous as babies can and do all too easily get pushed against the back of the couch by the adult, or flipped face down in the pillows, to suffocate.

Often news stories talk about “another baby dying while cosleeping” but they fail to distinguish between what type of cosleeping was involved and, worse, what specific dangerous factor might have actually been responsible for the baby dying. A specific example is whether the infant was sleeping prone next to their parent, which is an independent risk factor for death regardless of where the infant was sleeping. Such reports inappropriately suggest that all types of cosleeping are the same, dangerous, and all the practices around cosleeping carry the same high risks, and that no cosleeping environment can be made safe.

Nothing can be further from the truth. This is akin to suggesting that because some parents drive drunk with their infants in their cars, unstrapped into car seats, and because some of these babies die in car accidents that nobody can drive with babies in their cars because obviously car transportation for infants is fatal. You see the point.

One of the most important reasons why bedsharing occurs, and the reason why simple declarations against it will not eradicate it, is because sleeping next to one’s baby is biologically appropriate, unlike placing infants prone to sleep or putting an infant in a room to sleep by itself. This is particularly so when bedsharing is associated with breast feeding.

When done safely, mother-infant cosleeping saves infants lives and contributes to infant and maternal health and well being. Merely having an infant sleeping in a room with a committed adult caregiver (cosleeping) reduces the chances of an infant dying from SIDS or from an accident by one half!

Research

In Japan where co-sleeping and breastfeeding (in the absence of maternal smoking) is the cultural norm, rates of the sudden infant death syndrome are the lowest in the world. For breastfeeding mothers, bedsharing makes breastfeeding much easier to manage and practically doubles the amount of breastfeeding sessions while permitting both mothers and infants to spend more time asleep. The increased exposure to mother’s antibodies which comes with more frequent nighttime breastfeeding can potentially, per any given infant, reduce infant illness. And because co-sleeping in the form of bedsharing makes breastfeeding easier for mothers, it encourages them to breastfeed for a greater number of months, according to Dr. Helen Ball’s studies at the University of Durham, therein potentially reducing the mothers chances of breast cancer. Indeed, the benefits of cosleeping helps explain why simply telling parents never to sleep with baby is like suggesting that nobody should eat fats and sugars since excessive fats and sugars lead to obesity and/or death from heart disease, diabetes or cancer. Obviously, there’s a whole lot more to the story.

As regards bedsharing, an expanded version of its function and effects on the infant’s biology helps us to understand not only why the bedsharing debate refuses to go away, but why the overwhelming majority of parents in the United States (over 50% according to the most recent national survey) now sleep in bed for part or all of the night with their babies.

That the highest rates of bedsharing worldwide occur alongside the lowest rates of infant mortality, including Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) rates, is a point worth returning to. It is an important beginning point for understanding the complexities involved in explaining why outcomes related to bedsharing (recall, one of many types of cosleeping) vary between being protective for some populations and dangerous for others. It suggests that whether or not babies should bedshare and what the outcome will be may depend on who is involved, under what condition it occurs, how it is practiced, and the quality of the relationship brought to the bed to share. This is not the answer some medical authorities are looking for, but it certainly resonates with parents, and it is substantiated by scores of studies.

Understanding Recommendations

Recently, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) SIDS Sub-Committee for whom I served (ad hoc) as an expert panel member recommended that babies should sleep close to their mothers in the same room but not in the same bed. While I celebrated this historic roomsharing recommendation, I disagreed with and worry about the ramifications of the unqualified recommendation against any and all bedsharing. Further, I worry about the message being given unfairly (if not immorally) to mothers; that is, no matter who you are, or what you do, your sleeping body is no more than an inert potential lethal weapon against which neither you nor your infant has any control. If this were true, none of us humans would be here today to have this discussion because the only reason why we survived is because our ancestral mothers slept alongside us and breastfed us through the night!

I am not alone in thinking this way. The Academy of Breast Feeding Medicine, the USA Breast Feeding Committee, the Breast Feeding section of the American Academy of Pediatrics, La Leche League International, UNICEF and WHO are all prestigious organizations who support bedsharing and which use the best and latest scientific information on what makes mothers and babies safe and healthy. Clearly, there is no scientific consensus.

What we do agree on, however, is what specific “factors” increase the chances of SIDS in a bedsharing environment, and what kinds of circumstances increase the chances of suffocation either from someone in the bed or from the bed furniture itself. For example, adults should not bedshare if inebriated or if desensitized by drugs, or overly exhausted, and other toddlers or children should never be in a bed with an infant. Moreover, since having smoked during a pregnancy diminishes the capacities of infants to arouse to protect their breathing, smoking mothers should have their infants sleep alongside them on a different surface but not in the same bed.

My own physiological studies suggest that breastfeeding mother-infant pairs exhibit increased sensitivities and responses to each other while sleeping, and those sensitivities offers the infant protection from overlay. However, if bottle feeding, infants should lie alongside the mother in a crib or bassinet, but not in the same bed. Prone or stomach sleeping especially on soft mattresses is always dangerous for infants and so is covering their heads with blankets, or laying them near or on top of pillows. Light blanketing is always best as is attention to any spaces or gaps in bed furniture which needs to be fixed as babies can slip into these spaces and quickly to become wedged and asphyxiate. My recommendation is, if routinely bedsharing, to strip the bed apart from its frame, pulling the mattress and box springs to the center of the room, therein avoiding dangerous spaces or gaps into which babies can slip to be injured or die.

But, again, disagreement remains over how best to use this information. Certain medical groups, including some members of the American Academy of Pediatrics (though not necessarily the majority), argue that bedsharing should be eliminated altogether. Others, myself included, prefer to support the practice when it can be done safely amongst breastfeeding mothers. Some professionals believe that it can never be made safe but there is no evidence that this is true.

More importantly, parents just don’t believe it! Making sure that parents are in a position to make informed choices therein reflecting their own infant’s needs, family goals, and nurturing and infant care preferences seems to me to be fundamental.

Our Biological Imperatives

My support of bedsharing when practiced safely stems from my research knowledge of how and why it occurs, what it means to mothers, and how it functions biologically. Like human taste buds which reward us for eating what’s overwhelmingly critical for survival i.e. fats and sugars, a consideration of human infant and parental biology and psychology reveal the existence of powerful physiological and social factors that promote maternal motivations to cosleep and explain parental needs to touch and sleep close to baby.

The low calorie composition of human breast milk (exquisitely adjusted for the human infants’ undeveloped gut) requires frequent nighttime feeds, and, hence, helps explain how and why a cultural shift toward increased cosleeping behavior is underway. Approximately 73% of US mothers leave the hospital breast feeding and even amongst mothers who never intended to bedshare soon discover how much easier breast feeding is and how much more satisfied they feel with baby sleeping alongside often in their bed.

But it’s not just breastfeeding that promotes bedsharing. Infants usually have something to say about it too! And for some reason they remain unimpressed with declarations as to how dangerous sleeping next to mother can be. Instead, irrepressible (ancient) neurologically-based infant responses to maternal smells, movements and touch altogether reduce infant crying while positively regulating infant breathing, body temperature, absorption of calories, stress hormone levels, immune status, and oxygenation. In short, and as mentioned above, cosleeping (whether on the same surface or not) facilitates positive clinical changes including more infant sleep and seems to make, well, babies happy. In other words, unless practiced dangerously, sleeping next to mother is good for infants. The reason why it occurs is because… it is supposed to.

Recall that despite dramatic cultural and technological changes in the industrialized west, human infants are still born the most neurologically immature primate of all, with only 25% of their brain volume. This represents a uniquely human characteristic that could only develop biologically (indeed, is only possible) alongside mother’s continuous contact and proximity—as mothers body proves still to be the only environment to which the infant is truly adapted, for which even modern western technology has yet to produce a substitute.

Even here in whatever-city-USA, nothing a baby can or cannot do makes sense except in light of the mother’s body, a biological reality apparently dismissed by those that argue against any and all bedsharing and what they call cosleeping, but which likely explains why most crib-using parents at some point feel the need to bring their babies to bed with them —findings that our mother-baby sleep laboratory here at Notre Dame has helped document scientifically. Given a choice, it seems human babies strongly prefer their mother’s body to solitary contact with inert cotton-lined mattresses. In turn, mothers seem to notice and succumb to their infant’s preferences.

There is no doubt that bedsharing should be avoided in particular circumstances and can be practiced dangerously. While each single bedsharing death is tragic, such deaths are no more indictments about any and all bedsharing than are the three hundred thousand plus deaths or more of babies in cribs an indictment that crib sleeping is deadly and should be eliminated. Just as unsafe cribs and unsafe ways to use cribs can be eliminated so, too, can parents be educated to minimize bedsharing risks.

Moving Beyond Judgments to Understanding

We still do not know what causes SIDS. But fortunately the primary factors that increase risk are now widely known i.e. placing an infant prone (face down) for sleep, using soft mattresses, maternal smoking, overwrapping babies or blocking air movement around their faces. In combination with bedsharing, where more vital normal defensive infant responses and may be more important to an infant (like the ability to arouse to bat a blanket which momentarily falls to cover the infants face when its parent moves or turns) these risks become exaggerated especially amongst unhealthy infants. When infants die in these obviously unsafe conditions, it is here where social biases and the sheer levels of ignorance associated with actually explaining the death become apparent. A death itself in a bedsharing environment does not automatically suggest, as many legal and medical authorities assert, that it was the bedsharing, or worse, suffocation that killed the infant. Infants in bedsharirng environments, like babies in cribs, can still die of SIDS.

It is a shame and certainly inappropriate that, for example, the head pathologists of the state of Indiana recommends that other pathologists assume SIDS as a likely cause of death when babies die in cribs but to assume asphyxiation if a baby dies in an adult bed or has a history of “cosleeping”. By assuming before any facts are known from the pathologist’s death scene and toxicological report that any bedsharing baby was a victim of an accidental suffocation rather than from some congenital or natural cause, including SIDS unrelated to bedsharing, medical authorities not only commit a form of scientific fraud but they victimize the doomed infant’s parents for a third time. The first occurs when their baby dies, the second occurs when health professionals interviewed for news stories (which commonly occurs) imply that when a baby dies in a bed with an adult it must be due to suffocation (or a SIDS induced by bedsharing). The third time the parents are victimized is when still without any evidence medical or police authorities suggest that their baby’s death was “preventable,” that their baby would still be alive if only the parents had not bedshared. This conclusion is based not on the facts of the tragedy but on unfair and fallacious stereotypes about bedsharing.

Indeed, no legitimate SIDS researcher nor forensic pathologist should render a judgment that a baby was suffocated without an extensive toxiological report and death scene investigation including information from the mother concerning what her thoughts are on what might or could have happened.

Whether involving cribs or adult beds, risky sleep practices leading to infant deaths are more likely to occur when parents lack access to safety information, or if they are judged to be irresponsible should they choose to follow their own and their infants’ biological predilections to bedshare, or if public health messages are held back on brochures and replaced by simplistic and inappropriate warnings saying “just never do it.” Such recommendations misrepresent the true function and biological significance of the behaviors, and the critical extent to which dangerous practices can be modified, and they dismiss the valid reasons why people engage in the behavior in the first place.

For More Information:
A Popular Parenting Book
Sleeping With Your Baby: A Parent’s Guide To Cosleeping by James J.McKenna (2007). Platypus Press.

The Scientific Perspective
McKenna, J., Ball H., Gettler L., Mother-infant Cosleeping, Breastfeeding and SIDS: What Biological Anthropologists Have Learned About Normal Infant Sleep and Pediatric Sleep Medicine. Yearbook of Physical Anthropology 50:133-161 (2007)

McKenna, J., McDade, T., Why Babies Should Never Sleep Alone: A Review of the Co-Sleeping Controversy in Relation to SIDS, Bedsharing and Breastfeeding (pdf). Paediatric Respiratory Reviews 6:134-152 (2005)

The article “If I Were You: Perceptual Illusion of Body Swapping” by the Swedish researchers Henrik Ehrsson and Valeria Petkova appears this week in PLoS ONE, and is ably summarized over at Neurophilosophy. You can also read Ehrsson’s previous article on the virtual arm illusion and his Science piece on the experimental induction of out-of-body experiences.

The approach in all of this research is rather simple. You can see the out-of-body experiment design pictured to the right. Body swapping adds another person with goggles.

A subject stands or sits opposite the scientist, as if engaged in an interview.. Both are wearing headsets, with special goggles, the scientist’s containing small film cameras. The goggles are rigged so the subject sees what the scientist sees: to the right and left are the scientist’s arms, and below is the scientist’s body. To add a physical element, the researchers have each person squeeze the other’s hand, as if in a handshake. Now the subject can see and “feel” the new body. In a matter of seconds, the illusion is complete.

This “switching” happens because the brain is literally embodied – after growing up with this particular body, it’s a fair assumption to assume that one’s eyes and one’s hand are getting feedback about the same interactive phenomenon. For a first-person view of this, see Karl Ritter’s AP article today on the body-swap illusion, which includes this photo of the two-goggle set-up.

Ehrsson is excited about being able to trick the brain in this way: “You can see the possibilities, putting a male in a female body, young in old, white in black and vice versa.” The NY Times article pushes the uses body swapping can have in therapy.

Couples who fight, self-centered adolescents, people who prey on others like rapists, all could take on the perspective of another body. Seeing “the encounters in their daily life from others’ point of view” can help prompt change. Kristene Doyle, head of clinical services at Albert Ellis Institute, says, “This is especially true for adolescents, who are so self-involved, and also for people who come in with anger problems and are more interested in changing everyone else in their life than themselves.”

But will this really work? As Ehrsson notes at the end of the report, the sensations are strange. Strange sensations are not quite therapeutic change. Part of the work to be done will be through virtual reality. Jeremy Bailenson and Nick Yee at Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab have studied the Proteus Effect (pdf) or “transformed digital self representation.” People can get morphed in physical attractivess, weight, age and gender, and the effects of the experimental linger into the real world. Suddenly old people start contributing more to retirement (see pdf). Those with a fit image exercise more.

Still, producing identification with others is a difficult task. It’s not just about perception. So even virtual reality and body swapping will have its limits. But over time it might even be able to help with problems like autism. Jessica and Robert Hobson have proposed identification as a crucial component to intersubjective engagement, arguing in this 2007 paper that “the propensity to adopt the bodily anchored psychological stance of another person is essential to certain forms of joint attention and imitation, and that a weak tendency to identify with others is pivotal for the developmental psychopathology of autism.”

Rachel Brezis, who presented at our Encultured Brain panel, takes this sort of research a step further, linking it back to what Ehrsson does – the identification is also about the self and not just others. This move brings us to disorders like anorexia where body image also plays a role. And that brings us to gender, relationships and culture, explored so well in Caroline Knapp’s book Appetites.

Today, I’m going to discuss a different set of articles, this time on ‘female guilt,’ sparked by research done by Prof. Anne Campbell, a psychologist at Durham University. Prof. Campbell surveyed people online and found that women regretted ‘one-night-stands’ more than men. This has led her to argue that women are ‘ill adapted’ for promiscuity, that the ‘sexual and feminist revolutions’ didn’t work because women couldn’t shake their inherent nature, which is to long for committed relationships and loathe themselves if they act like cheap floozies.

I delayed posting on this because I cannot get to the original article (my university library has a six-month delay on the journal Human Nature; Springer press release here). I hate posting on second-hand versions, but I feel like I don’t want to wait six months to write #2 in my series on ev psych stereotypes…. I mean, ‘perspectives’ on human sexuality or to put in my own two cents worth of opinionation. So I have to base most of my discussion on the press release from Durham University about Prof. Campbell’s recent article.

I can’t imagine that I’m EVER going to persuade the hardened core of evolutionary psychologists that there is not a thing called ‘human nature’; I’m not opposed to the concept for political, feminist reasons but because I don’t think living organisms have ‘essences,’ especially when it comes to behaviour. Nothing I can say, no theoretical point or comparative data from around the world of human variation, will convince the evolutionary psychologists because they know, they just know, that human nature — especially sex — has been shaped by evolution, hardened and set in our genes (or brains or hormones…), to rear it’s head when we do something against our nature (like a woman having sex and not trying to find a mate).

But if you’ve clicked through the link, you’ve signed on, at least for a bit, so I’ll try to be mildly entertaining.

To repeat my most serious objections to the ‘bad boys get more action’ research from my previous post (there were eight, although several had multiple points), they included: a confusion about how one would test ‘reproductive success,’ questions about whether jerk traits are actually genetically determined, and whether there were other, more proximate, less strained explanations than ‘evolution’ for why these ‘dark’ men reported more sexual partners than ‘nice guys.’ Although I’m no authority on sex research, I brainstormed a few ideas that didn’t require resorting to Mother Evolution, such as the men’s expressed intention to have many partners might lead to them having more partners (but evolution is so much more plausible as an explanation…), the men’s potential inability to maintain long-term relationships, women discovering men had the ‘dark triad’ and throwing them out…

Ev Psych: Repeating stereotypes, making headlines

Even with these problems, however, the ‘girls dig bad boys — evolution makes it so’ story had great legs, showing up all over the place. Likewise, today’s story — we’ll call it, ‘bad girls feel regret’ — got around faster than a greased pig in a sausage factory. The BBC, for example, discusses it under the headline, Sexes split over one night stands, The Telegraph offers, Women have more regrets than men over one night stands, Salon gives us, Men: Score! Women: Whoops! (having fun with the title), and The Independent gives us the resounding, Men like casual sex more than women – scientific fact (and an Indy Blog entry, too). I’d link to more, but the articles are virtually identical, evidencing the way that a story like this can circulate with minimal critical comment being able to get traction.

Bloggers also picked up the study published in Human Nature, although they are much more critical: check out Echidne of the Snakes, The Dawn Chorus, Noli Irritare Leones (and again the next day), and Dante and the Lobster (nice blog name!). I’ll try not to just repeat some of the many objections that these bloggers raise to this study, but there’s a lot of good ones being offered.

What does the study say?

According to the press release put out by Durham University, and echoed verbatim by virtually every major press outlet to pick up the story:

THE sexual and feminist revolutions were supposed to free women to enjoy casual sex just as men always had. Yet according to Professor Anne Campbell from Durham University in the UK, the negative feelings reported by women after one-night stands suggest that they are not well adapted to fleeting sexual encounters. Her findings are published online in the June issue of Springer’s journal, Human Nature.

Okay, men have ‘always’ enjoyed casual sex? Really? Always? Are you sure? No society anywhere, at any time, has had anxiety about ‘casual sex’ among men? You get what I mean…

And, in addition, before I go further, was the ‘feminist revolution’ really about enjoying casual sex? I seem to remember something about equal pay, property rights, suffrage, you know… like things other than casual sex…

Prof. Campbell explains that her research is designed to test two opposing views of how women would have been shaped by evolutionary pressures. An older evolutionary psychology idea held that women should be very choosy and demand fidelity out of men with whom they mated because pregnancy and child rearing were such intensive, demanding processes. More recently, some biologists who have studied genetic evidence of paternity (and found that many ‘monogamous’ species are much less so than once thought) have argued that female promiscuity might be adaptive; as Campbell explains, women’s promiscuity ‘would increase the genetic diversity of their children and, if a high quality man would not stay with them forever, they might at least get his excellent genes for their child.’

To test whether women were adapted to casual sex, Campbell surveyed people after they had a one-night stand: 1743 people answered questions about how they felt after a ‘one-night stand.’ Now this is where I REALLY regret not having access to Human Nature; I can’t really answer any of the many questions I have about the data collection. An on-line survey about feelings after a one-night stand? Really? And how did they know it was a ‘one-night stand’ if they reported immediately following the event? Oh, the mind races…

But let’s stick with the study. The results were compelling, irrefutable: ‘Eighty per cent of men had overall positive feelings about the experience compared to 54 per cent of women.’ Wait, 54% had overall positive feelings?! Somehow, I don’t think that the headlines are going to be ‘Majority of women pretty okay about one-night stands’ or, for that matter, ‘One-fifth of men programmed by evolution to regret meaningless nookie.’

According to Campbell’s survey, in addition:

Men were more likely than women to secretly want their friends to hear about it [the one-night stand] and to feel successful because the partner was desirable to others. Men also reported greater sexual satisfaction and contentment following the event, as well as a greater sense of well-being and confidence about themselves.
The predominant negative feeling reported by women was regret at having been “used”. Women were also more likely to feel that they had let themselves down and were worried about the potential damage to their reputation if other people found out. Women found the experience less sexually satisfying and, contrary to popular belief, they did not seem to view taking part in casual sex as a prelude to long-term relationships.

We’ll come back to these interesting wrinkles, details that don’t fit under the heading, ‘evolution means girls don’t just want to have fun.’ With all of these conflicting, intriguing facts from an Internet survey, fortunately we have evolution to explain everything.

Why women just aren’t down with the sexual revolution: ev psych explains

Prof. Campbell helpfully explains how ‘evolution’ gives us emotions so that we do what’s good for us:

Evolution often acts through positive or negative emotions which draw us towards adaptive behaviours or drives us away from harmful ones. For example, we enjoy other people’s company but get depressed if we spend too much time alone. Basic emotions guide us down pathways that have been advantageous for our ancestors. It seemed obvious that if our female ancestors really were adapted to short–term relationships they ought to enjoy them, just like men do.

That sound you hear is me pulling clumps of hair from my scalp and running around the room shrieking; yes, I’m far away in Australia, but listen carefully… Okay, let’s try this again: are we using the Internet survey on our female ancestors?

Seriously, where do I begin on this one. Let’s do it nicely, if we can. For this to be true, the following would have to hold:
1) All or at least the vast majority of emotions would have to correlate with being ‘good for us’ (uh-oh, see recent story on ‘part of the brain’ which allegedly makes us want to ‘try new things,’ like say, those delicious-looking red mushrooms with white spots in my yard).

2) Emotions would need to be pretty inflexible in their development and it shouldn’t be too easy to develop strong emotions about irrelevant issues for survival (like, say, shame at being naked or phobias about things that didn’t seem to correlate to survival issues, like fear of the number ’13′ or of elevators).

3) It would be helpful if there weren’t more proximate causes for the social emotion that might better explain it, like, oh say, hundreds or maybe even thousands of years of religious teaching, literature, popular stories, social mores, patriarchal structures, and the like that might, just might, be a viable way to explain why someone might feel a bit ‘negatively’ about ‘casual sex’ (which already seems to me like a term that casts the behavior in a negative light; how about ‘entrepreneurial sex’ or ‘adventure sex’ or ‘high efficiency sex’ or ‘New Sex Lite with a 1/3 less commitment!’…).

4) If ‘evolution’ made it so, then it should be pretty uniform in the species, right!? So why do 54% of women and 80% of men feel positive about casual sex? If evolution makes it so, why isn’t that closer to, I don’t know, 0% and 100% respectively?

5) I know ‘basic emotions’ are supposed to lay down clear instructions for life, but there’s another possibility for women being almost evenly split after a one-night stand: maybe their feelings depend on the quality of the event. Or, maybe people feel ambivalently about ‘one-night stands.’

5) And although this isn’t really in the whole ‘evolutionary psychology’ framework: isn’t the press release confusing two different arguments? What was that stuff about the ‘feminist and sexual revolutions’ changing attitudes towards sex? We don’t have an internet survey on one-night stands done in 1880 or anything, but do you think there’s a chance that, if we did, the numbers might look a little different?

Ignoring the loose ends: Ev Psych goes silent

Buried in the later parts of the press release, unexplained by the ‘evolution makes chicks choosy’ argument, are all these little bits that never show up in the popular press version. For example, according to Campbell, ‘Women found the experience less sexually satisfying and, contrary to popular belief, they did not seem to view taking part in casual sex as a prelude to long-term relationships.’ Hmmm… Is this another potential explanation for the disparity in how men and women felt? Perhaps 80% of men had a good time, and 46% of women found the whole event ‘less sexually satisfying’ than the blokes.

That is, if you went in with a different framework for explanation — like, ‘too many guys in one-night stands don’t know how to satisfy women’ or ‘women are better at sex than men’ — you could construct another story around this data that was equally plausible — no, more plausible — than women are programmed to want long-term relationship (errrr… except for the majority 54% who had positive experiences and the fact that they didn’t see casual sex as a prelude to long-term relationships. Again, can someone explain to me why the evolutionary-programmed fembots were doing one-night gigs at all as it is inherently against their programming?).

The kicker for me in the press release is the discussion of what emotions the women actually did feel. Did they feel emotions that were clearly linked to mating and reproduction, to those driving ‘basic emotions’ programmed into us by evolution to lead us down ‘pathways that have been advantageous for our ancestors.’ No, they felt mostly social emotions and some complex ambivalence about their own sense of identity:

The predominant negative feeling reported by women was regret at having been “used”. Women were also more likely to feel that they had let themselves down and were worried about the potential damage to their reputation if other people found out. Women found the experience less sexually satisfying and, contrary to popular belief, they did not seem to view taking part in casual sex as a prelude to long-term relationships.
“What the women seemed to object to was not the briefness of the encounter but the fact that the man did not seem to appreciate her. The women thought this lack of gratitude implied that she did this with anybody,” Professor Campbell explained.

This account seems to me to be far richer than ‘Mama-evolution-makes-girls-feel-guilty-about-getting-jiggy.’ The emotions described are not ‘basic emotions.’ Those would be fear, anger, happiness, anxiety, panic, surprise… Instead we have complex social emotions like regret at having been used, worry about potential damage to reputation, a sense of having ‘let themselves down,’ objecting to being under-appreciated, and concern that a lack of gratitude suggested they were indiscriminate in sexual choices. That last one requires a pretty sophisticated sense of self, desire to been seen in a particular way by others, and attribution to others of specific attitudes. As I reread it, I’m not even sure that I can follow it, let alone feel it in the compelling sort of way that it can guide me on the right ‘pathway.’

The survey wouldn’t really tell us anything terribly new without the ‘evolution’ framework propped up around it; in fact, I was kind of surprised to hear that only 46% of women regretted ‘one-night stands,’ that distinctly anxiety-producing Western sexual encounter, so often defined in the negative and fueled by booze in the bizarre forums where unmarried people try to sort out sexual lives. (And by this, I don’t mean to imply that married ways of sorting out sexual lives are any less bizarre, just that they don’t tend to get sorted out in the same places — I can’t say whether booze is more or less likely to be involved.) Campbell’s data is still interesting, but a bit of longitudinal leverage might give us a clearer sense of whether attitudes toward ‘one-night stands’ are changing among men or women.

But I can imagine that the only reason that this piece got the mileage it did was because the ‘evolution’ story was tied to familiar sex-role stereotypes. I’ve already had a couple of goes at evolutionary psychology for tagging labored evolutionary ‘explanations’ onto normal (often stereotyping) psychology research (for example, Bad brain science: Boobs caused subprime crisis and Craving money, chocolate and… justice). It’s hard to know sometimes whether to just laugh at the stuff or to cry, but when stories like this get so much attention, it’s hard not to wind up with the weepies.

Finally, I just have to take issue with the title of one of the popular accounts of Prof. Campbell’s research. The Daily Record (UK) titled its piece, Science finds evolutionary reason behind women’s hatred of one-night stands. Let’s just get this clear: ‘Science’ didn’t find the ‘evolutionary reason,’ like it was hidden behind the shrubs or fallen between the couch cushions, or even like one ‘finds’ a new species or a neurotransmitter. Evolutionary psychologists tend to assume from the very first moment that social phenomena will have ‘evolutionary reasons,’ and then discover them. All Prof. Campbell found was what her survey data gave her; she interpreted it the way she did — the ‘evolutionary reason’ — although there are other, at-least-as-plausible non-evolutionary reasons that the data might look this way. As a genetics researcher recently said in an article I discuss in a later post (Bench and couch), ‘finding’ this sort of explanation is sort of like packing your own lunch box and then getting surprised by what you find when lunch rolls around.

References

Campbell, Anne. 2008. The morning after the night before. Affective reactions to one-night stands among mated and unmated women and men. Human Nature 19(2) 157-173. doi: 10.1007/s12110-008-9036-2

Credit: Graphic from Despair Inc., Demotivators (Regret).

Cartoon from www.gapingvoid.com archives. Hugh MacLeod is great — check out his site.

Some of the problems that beset these articles are pretty general objections a person could have to evolutionary psychology, so I feel like I want to go over them a little bit (but I’ll try to keep it short).

Why women like bad boys: ev psych explains

Jill Filopovic discusses a story, Do Jerks Get Laid More? Good news for psycho-narcissists, by Jessica Wakeman, which is commentary on a story in New Scientist, Bad guys really do get the most girls (a similar piece also appeared on ABC News). In other words, this story has been ricocheting around the Internets for a while, getting reposted and commented upon all over the place (such as here, here, here and, my favourite, here, where democracy confirms ev psych stereotypes). With all sorts of people having things to say, some share a bit too much about their own personal lives and some involve cueing up familiar cliches (‘nice guys finish last,’ for example, is a favourite).

Two researchers seem to be responsible for this upsurge in discussion of ‘bad boy’ magnetism; one is Peter Jonason at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, who set up their project to explain why the ‘dark triad’ of personality traits ‘persists in human nature’ (from New Scientist): ‘the self-obsession of narcissism; the impulsive, thrill-seeking and callous behaviour of psychopaths; and the deceitful and exploitative nature of Machiavellianism.’ Because these traits, Johason aledges, are maladaptive ‘at their extreme,’ they must be good for something, or else evolution would have kindly wiped them clean from ‘human nature.’ After all, we know that Mother Evolution makes all things perfectly adapted and that everything we do–especially SEX–must be a result of a deep ‘nature.’ Fortunately, we have a research team to explain what how these anti-social traits are really an evolutionary advantage.

Jonason’s team surveyed 200 college students (I’m assuming male), comparing personality traits and correlating them with the number of sex partners each subject reported having, their attitudes toward relationships, and whether they were seeking brief affairs.

The study found that those who scored higher on the dark triad personality traits tended to have more partners and more desire for short-term relationships, Jonason reported at the Human Behavior and Evolution Society meeting in Kyoto, Japan, earlier this month…. James Bond epitomises this set of traits, Jonason says. “He’s clearly disagreeable, very extroverted and likes trying new things – killing people, new women.” Just as Bond seduces woman after woman, people with dark triad traits may be more successful with a quantity-style or shotgun approach to reproduction, even if they don’t stick around for parenting. “The strategy seems to have worked. We still have these traits,” Jonason says.

Aside from the confusion provided by using James Bone, a fictional character (note to Mr. Jonason: Bond gets the girl because it’s in the script), I don’t even know where to start on this paragraph. First, I have to suspend judgment on Mr. Jonason as we know about problems with science writing at Neuroanthropology, but if he’s touting James Bond as a way to understand human evolution, he’s got to share a bit of the blame.

Lo and behold — evolution explains why James Bond gets chicks! And it’s because he’s narcissistic, aggressive, and mean, not because he’s brave, charming, funny, rich, well-dressed and handsome (again, let’s recall that this is fiction). And men who are seeking short-term relationships, who are aggressive, who don’t want long-term relationships, and are self-absorbed are cycling through lots of women because women like them that way (not because they can’t and don’t want to maintain a relationship).

(And why doesn’t anyone point out that men find ‘bad girls’ alluring when we talk about this stuff? I bet if you did a study of ‘bad girls,’ you’d find that they had more sexual partners, too — but would this make the news?)

In addition, the resurgent discussion of those alluring ‘bad boys’ also references ‘another study of 35,000 people across 57 countries found a similar correlation “between the dark triad and reproductive success in men.”‘ This research, less well-discussed in New Scientist was reported by Prof. David Schmitt of Bradley University at the Kyoto meeting. Schmitt is also the founder of the International Sexuality Description Project. Schmitt’s bibliography is extensive and reflects his long-term interest in the subject, so I’m hesitant to critique what are, at best, second-hand accounts of his presentation in Kyoto (Jonason, in contrast, provides plenty of material to work on at his website). I suspect that if I read a lot more of his work, I’d probably still be having some issues with it.

Okay, so why do I have problems with this research? Ooooo, let me count the problems:

1) Methodological problems with survey research on number of sexual partners: Jill at Feministe and some of her comments focus on this — ask guys with mild narcissist, manipulative, and aggressive tendencies around the age of 20 how many women they’ve slept with and can you assume that they’re telling you the truth? In addition, as Jill also points out, the survey asks the number of partners these men had, not the number of times they were having sex, unlike some of the reports on the research (which imply being ‘bad’ leads to more sex).

2) Correlation, causation and using men’s reports to judge women’s preferences: We find out that narcissist, manipulative, aggressive young men report more sexual partners than normal guys; should we assume that the reason is that women like these qualities? (By the way, why didn’t we ask the women about this?) We could assume that being narcissist, manipulative, and aggressive makes you more motivated to seek more partners, or that it makes you more likely to pressure people into sex, or that you’re more likely to cheat and have multiple partners at once, or even that it makes women more likely to toss you out quickly once they’ve slept with you a couple of times (thus boosting your number of partners, but not by your own choice). But these explanations wouldn’t fit into our James Bond theory of male hotness. And all these ‘reproductive strategies’ might be much less successful than having fewer partners, but we don’t know because we’re theorizing about ‘reproductive success’ (which presumably involves BABIES from data on dating and sex among young people, at least in Jonason’s research).

3) Assumption that subjects’ behaviour demonstrates universal human trait: Jill Filopovic also points out the problem of extrapolating from university students to ‘human nature’; I would agree with this wholeheartedly. But the problem runs deeper than this. We would be extrapolating from the behaviour of college students, in 2008, at an American University, likely without full-time jobs, probably in an environment with birth control, maybe in dorms, and in a setting with tons of alcohol. One could argue, for example, that the risk environment in 2008 is substantially different from that likely experienced by foraging ancestors. For contrast, a whole host of health problems that now are among our most serious–obesity, diabetes, hypertension, high blood pressure–would have been extremely rare in an evolutionary environment; anyone who looked at our current disease profile and said it was a result of ‘human nature’ would obviously be mocked. One could argue that we have an even harder time talking about how sexuality might be different.

4) Assumption that contemporary attitudes are not affecting partners’ choices: Since the researchers didn’t focus much on female preference, it’s hard to say (Jonason’s research report is apparently under review), but contemporary attitudes about what ‘bad boys’ are good for might be affecting sexual behaviour. For example, I doubt very much that the same male behaviour would have produced the same numbers given a substantially different social, cultural, and sexual climate (think 1950s, or Taliban Afghanistan, or another radically different situation, and ask yourself if the numbers would be the same). Are ‘bad boys’ always attractive? Given a different situation, the ‘dark triad’ may be more of a turn off than it now is (but again, we don’t even know this because the researcher’s weren’t really measuring attractiveness, only reported number of sexual partners; maybe all the nice guys get locked into long-term relationships with lots of sex and thus are taken ‘out of the pool’ so that their number of partners drops).

5) Assumption that sexual behaviour is analogous to mating behaviour or successful reproduction: This kind of follows on from the previous point. That is, with current reproductive control technologies, the gap between mating and having sex has likely grown. I suspect that some women might be having sex with men now that they might avoid if they had no way to diminish the likelihood of reproducing in the process.

The problem may be especially pronounced in Schmitt’s statements. He is reported as saying: ‘It is
universal across cultures for high dark triad scorers to be more active in short-term mating. They are more likely to try and poach other people’s partners for a brief affair.’ In the interpretation we’re given in the articles, the almost tautological statement, ‘men who are aggressive, impulsive, callous, and extroverted are more likely to try to have affairs’ (as opposed to the passive, careful, sensitive, and introverted lotharios prowling the streets), turns into ‘they have more reproductive success.’ We don’t know if they have ‘success’ in evolutionary terms because we don’t KNOW if they reproduce. This problem points to two more:

6) Assumptions about reproductive goals already imply ‘strategy’: ‘Evolutionary psychology’ sex researchers suggest that the ‘dark’ traits are good for pursuing the men’s agenda, which happens to be short-term relationships. So, let me get this straight: your survey asks men if they are pursuing short-term relationships, they say, ‘yes,’ and then you realized that they had a lot of short-term relationships (in comparison to the guys who wanted long-term relationships), so you’ve proven that the ‘strategy’ is evolutionarily successful because they had short-term relationships? I’m not sure where to even crack into that circle of reasoning. All this is finding is a correlation between character traits and the actions that we would see as indicative of these character traits. We haven’t demonstrated that it’s evolutionarily successful strategy, nor even that the ‘trait’ exists. In fact, the rarity of the ‘dark triad’ actually points to the possibility that it is not a ‘successful’ strategy, my next issue…

7) Logical problem arguing that a trait is superior but that it’s not universal: This is a simple statistical problem that tends to crop up with evolutionary psychology. If a strategy for reproducing is supposedly superior to others, and if behavior is inherited as a trait, than one has to explain why everyone doesn’t display the same trait after enough generations. If narcissism, callousness, and a Machiavellian character are such a good strategy for reproduction, then why don’t all men use the same strategy?

Some evolutionary psychologists will bring up the concept of ‘frequency dependence’ (see Wikipedia), the idea that a mix of genetic traits will predominate because one of them is only adaptive given a limited frequency (such as the danger of ‘Machiavellian’ traits if everyone were to become Machiavellian); Linda Mealey made this argument about sociopathy in a 1995 Behavioral and Brain Sciences article. But then we run into the problem of achieving the equilibrium. If the ‘bad boys’ are successfully knocking up all the girlfriends of the ‘good boys,’ then it’s going to be kind of hard to keep any sort of stable equilibrium.

8 ) Assumption that behaviour is subject to selection: This is a bigger problem than it sounds like because it requires that behaviour be inheritable, the result of inherent organic properties (usually attributed to genes, seldom with genetic evidence, and yet potentially with other conduits of transmission). Even the story that ABC News opens their article with undermines this idea: the ‘bad boy,’ Ricky, admits that he’s ‘more or less mastered the art’ of being bad, reinforced by his desire for ‘sexual conquest.’ If we follow the ABC News story logic, we have a hard time arguing that Ricky’s behavior is a ‘trait’ fixed in his genes; instead it starts to look like a learned social pattern of behaviour.

If the ‘dark triad’ can’t be transmitted or is not inherent, you still have the issue about women liking ‘bad boys,’ but now you have a whole different dynamic to explain. To me, that question looks a hell of a lot more like a sociological one than an evolutionary one.

In place of conclusion

As Daniel pointed out in his piece on homosexuality recently, so much of the research on human sexuality decontextualizes sexual behaviour from relationships, from love, from the way that life changes us. By taking 20- to 22-year-old men and asking them how many partners they’ve had, and using this to measure ‘reproductive success,’ it’s substituted a culturally charged vision of ‘sexual success’ (call it, scoring with the ladies) for actual reproductive success.

Let me give you a hypothetical example of what I mean. Let’s assume that every time a man and woman have intercourse, there’s a 10% chance the woman gets pregnant (it’s actually about 20-25% during a cycle given normal fertility, which also varies). If Bad Boy sleeps with five women one time, he has a lower chance of successfully reproducing than if Good Boy sleeps with the same woman six times (and presumably, if Good Boy is spacing them out, he stands an even better chance of getting her at the right time of her cycle of ovulation). The Jonason method would assume, however, that Bad Boy is much more reproductively ‘successful,’ when in fact he’s just ‘getting it’ with more women.

Like many discussions of evolutionary psychology, however, I feel like I’m getting genetic arguments without genetic evidence (and not much discussion of behavioural genetics) and evolutionary arguments without much evolutionary evidence (or sophisticated evolutionary theory). To even begin to argue that there was an inheritable ‘dark triad’ that was good for reproducing, at the very least, we’d have to demonstrate that the ‘dark triad’ was inherited, using such things as twin studies or adoption studies (oh, god, I can’t believe I recommended either). In the Human Genome Project Information website’s page on ‘behavioural genetics,’ none of the ‘dark triad’ show up as the subject of extensive genetic studies. If we’re going to argue about female preference, I think we would need to test women, and not just the dumb ‘show them a picture and ask if the guy’s attractive’ kind of study — we’d have to actually study mating behaviour, who people are really sleeping with.

But I’ll come back to that in Part 2 of my discussion of sexuality from evolutionary psychology…