Summary: Having established that many evolutionary psychologists have studied no biology since high-school we turn to the question do evolutionary psychologists study psychology? Plus, challenging an accusation that criticism of ev-psych comes from “creationists.”

Via a tip from Twitter, reporter Kyle Wind of the Hudson Valley Daily Freeman says

NEW PALTZ — A SUNY New Paltz psychology professor attributes the evolutionary importance of maintaining close social bonds to his study’s finding that people are more upset by the idea of a spouse or significant other cheating with a friend or relative than with a stranger.

To conduct the study, published in the journal Evolutionary Psychology in late November, researchers surveyed two groups of college students to explore infidelity in heterosexual relationships through the “identity of the interloper,” said Professor Glenn Geher, one of the academics behind the study and the chairman of SUNY New Paltz’s Psychology Department.

...

From a “strict evolutionist perspective,” Geher said, “one might predict that we’d be more OK with our partner cheating with, for instance, our brother, who shares 50 percent of my genetic combination, but that’s definitely not what happens.”

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Researchers actually quantified the level of distress based on the identity of the person with whom participants’ partners would theoretically have sexual encounters by assigning rankings.

In the first sample, the group’s 194 women rated the thought of a partner cheating with their mothers as most upsetting, followed by, in order, daughters, sisters, friends, aunts, former lovers, nieces, cousins, co-workers, and strangers at the bottom of the list.

Similarly, the 65 men rated distress levels over the idea of their significant others’ sexual infidelity with their fathers at the top of the list followed by brothers, sons, friends, uncles, former lovers, cousins, co-workers, nephews, and strangers, according to the study.

Read the quote in context here.

I’m going to stop right there, having also left out a bunch of other… fascinating declarations about what Glen Geher says must be true about evolved behavior because one commenter, j2bryson, asked a really important question about the significance of that ordering.

“I wonder if this tells us anything about indentification with one’s partner, as these are the same people one shouldn’t one’s self have sex with.”

As usual I don’t have unpaid access to academic journals so I’m just going to assume that Geher meticulously documents how his experiment distinguishes ordinary social and psychological reactions to the prospect of near-incestuous relationships from evolutionarily-directed ones.

For instance while determining that his late-adolescent (i.e. university student) research subjects weren’t thrilled with the idea of a partner having sex with mom or dad did he he carefully control for differences in the same student’s reaction to the prospect of mom and dad having sex with each other? Because, dude, most young people cover their ears and go “la la la” about that.

For instance did he spend time discussing the peculiarly popular genre of written and photo porn with labels like “hot wife” and “loving wives” seem to have on middle-aged men? Did he assay the relative popularity of these stories based on the affinities of the approved-of interlopers who, as I recall, very often involve male relatives, best friends, and employers or employees?

And of course did he do any screening to answer j2bryson elementary question about people’s well-documented aversion to provide controversial answers to controversial questions?*

In other words while hopping all over the place trying to demonstrate evolutionary psychology did he do any psychology psychology?

Until proved otherwise I’ll assume, of course, that the answer is yes on all counts and that Geher’s confident that despite his small and narrow sample size he’s adequately filtered out all possible noise from his data such that the only possible explanation for his results involve inherited behavior selected for over many thousands of generations and preserved for many thousands more.

Ok, I’m not. I’m pretty sure he did none of those things. But if I find out he did all that, and that his findings are indeed incontrovertible, then you’ll see the retraction right here.

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What puzzles me is why evolutionary psychologists rarely investigate the almost certainly selected for tendency in humans, especially young adults, to gravitate towards group conformity that j2bryson. It’s easily reproduced (in fact it’s difficult to avoid.) It’s almost certainly less complex demonstrating a general human behavior than the kind of highly-contingent sexually dimorphic behavior. Especially since the gendered nature of that behavior often dissolves or even reverses as individuals age. But no, despite complexities that make their tasks almost exponentially more difficult it’s all sex or nothing at all with these guys.

I mention this in part to counter a conceit, forwarded by a number of Evolutionary Psychologists including Prof. Gher (pdf) that the only alternative to their specific variety of evolutionary psychology_ is either religious fundamentalism or…

...a new kind of creationist (Ehrenreich & McIntosh, 1997), so to speak, rooted in secular intellectualism. These so-called new creationists are, in fact, very different from fundamentalist Christians in their ideological foundation. The new creationists may be conceptualized as academics and scholars who study varied aspects of human affairs from the perspective of the Standard Social Science Model (SSSM; Pinker, 2002), a model for understanding human behavior which is largely premised on the notion of the blank slate.

First of all, sorry, whatever else one might call Barbara Ehrenreich she’s got enough history of science credentials to deserve better epithets. Second of all, as I think I demonstrate pretty consistently including in this post above, one can be entirely sympathetic to the notion of natural selection on behavior… while still being completely impatient with sloppy methodology, conclusion overreach, and unbelievably consistent status-quo-oriented selection bias in subject matter in the face of almost no basic research. That professors and department heads must resort to accusations of secular “creationism” in order to fend of criticism from other scientists speaks volumes.