Posts
I have previously criticized the current state of evolutionary psychology, as a field, both for the myopic range of research that seems largely limited to questions of human sexuality and sex differences, and for a formulaic adherence to a route adaptationist paradigm of explanation, more interested in why-questions (and so vulnerable to just-so storytelling) than how-questions. The article that inspired this post demonstrates both weaknesses, but that is not what I wish to focus on today.
Entitled "Sex Differences in Perceptions of Infidelity", the paper provides a basic rationale for hypothesizing that men would be more inclined to false positives--detecting sexual infidelity on the part of partners where there is none--than would women. It then goes on to present the findings of two studies where young men and women in heterosexual relationships were asked to indicate how likely they believed it was that their partners would cheat on them in the future. The wrap-up then reiterates and elaborates on the hypothesis, arguing for a number of strategies (some of which could be argued to be highly influenced by cultural norms) that men might use to mitigate anticipated infidelity.
There are a number of methodological issues with these studies. The confounding influence of self-esteem and level of commitment of subjects, for starters, neither of which is controlled for. i.e., if the men in the study were less confident as to their ability to retain the interest of their partners (internal rather than external causation), or alternatively, if the same young men were less emotionally committed to their relationships (as a function, for example, of gender-specific developmental patterns in intimacy formation) than were the young women in the same study--such factors might be predicted to produce results similar to those found in this study.
Were this merely a judgement task involving static, objectively-defined stimuli controlled by the researchers, personality and developmental factors would not necessarily come into play. However, by posing questions to their subjects about the likelihood of intimate third-party future actions, these studies have entered the domain of dynamic subjective experience and capacities individually inherent to their subjects, and so personality factors that moderate relationship stability and longevity and the developmental histories of both the subjects and each their respective heterosexual relationships come to the fore. That such variables may correlate highly with gender may be informative, but that does not mean that gender is a proximally caustive factor in the outcome on bias measures, or that the behavioral strategies the authors argue follow from said biases are ultimately gender-specific.
However, the more profound issue here is one of theory. The authors discuss their work as addressing questions of perception, which they synonymize with detection, but the studies are presented as measurements of inter-group differences in judgments, intended to identify bias in the estimation of the likelihood of future events (or, as the authors term it rather melodramatically, suspicion). Such a conflation of conceptual realms--perception, detection, judgment, bias--leads us nowhere.
To be clear, bias is properly the domain of studies in judgment, which include estimation of the likelihood of future events, insofar as research increasingly demonstrates that biases, operating out of limbic rather than cortical regions of the brain, direct our judgment in ways that call into serious question the schools of rational choice theory and bounded rationality.
However, judgment is not perception nor detection. A suspicion that one's partner will be unfaithful in the future is not the same thing as perceiving infidelity in the present. Likewise, elsewhere I have made a distinction between perception (an understanding of episodic sensory phenomena) and detection (the elevation to awareness of immediate salient stimuli). Suspicion may prime an individual to perceive a partner as unfaithful, or to detect cues or signals of infidelity in their environment, but as bias is distinct from judgment, so "suspicion" is distinct from perception and detection.
How we experience others in our social environment, and what acts and events in that environment we recognize as potentially meaningful, are undoubtedly shaped by biases, some of which may very well owe more to evolutionary-selected reproductive strategies than to cultural context, but to equate such heuristic biases with the experience that is perception is not only theoretically unsound, it reflects poorly on a field of inquiry struggling to overcome strong objections to its scientific grounding.
