Evolutionary Psychology is Horny and Stupid
Let’s read the blow job paper together!
During the first half of my PhD program, I had a not very well-kept secret: I was writing a science column for the school paper. If you search, you can still find some of the articles on-line. Some of them I’m even a little bit proud of (some less so, but such is life).
I’d usually start with a question of something I was curious about, then do a literature search, taking advantage of UT Austin’s subscriptions to academic journals.
As such, I got pretty good at telling whether or not a study was complete and utter bullshit pretty quickly. And nothing set off my alarms faster than evolutionary psychology studies.
Evolutionary psychology (evo psych) is a field based on the idea that natural selection acts on our behaviors as well as our physical traits. This is undeniable: beavers building dams is as much an adaptation as long necks on a giraffes.
Where they fail is their inability to offer even a middle school science fair level of evidence for their conclusions.
Plenty of others have done a thorough debunking of the field in general, but I thought I’d take a few minutes to talk about one of my favorite papers I’d found in my experience as a science communicator.
And by favorite, I, of course, mean the most ridiculous.
Readers, I present to you The Blow Job Paper: Women’s mate retention behaviors, personality traits, and fellatio
While this paper couldn’t possibly sum up all the problems with evo psych, it does provide quite a bit of insight into just how stupid and weird these people are under the guise of science.
What is the Paper Trying to Say?
Really, the whole thing is so bad and ridiculous that I truly do recommend you read it for yourself. Here’s just one example of the many gems you’ll find littered throughout:
Oral sex is a common sexual activity (e.g., Santtila et al., 2007) that is positively associated with sexual satisfaction (Brody & Costa, 2009)…
Not sure you needed citations there, but okay.
At any rate, in this short (five pages with references and one hell of a diagram) paper, the authors intend to demonstrate their hypothesis that blow jobs evolved as a “mate retention” strategy and correlates with “agreeableness” and “conscientiousness” in female partners.
Already, we come to several problems with the core assumptions of evo psych. One of the big ones is heteronormativity: Evo psych researchers pretty much always ignore that queer people exist. In general psychology, one could argue that they wanted to simplify the given study, which is valid (though ultimately leads to certain groups not being studied at all), but it makes zero sense in a field that is supposed to be understanding the underpinnings of our psychology as a species.
That leads to another big problem with the core of evo psych: the assumption that if we can observe something in humans, there must be an adaptive reason for it. This is what’s known as adaptationism, in contrast with structuralism which states that there may not be one. Natural selection is a powerful tool, but it has limits and certain traits are just… well, random.
In order to demonstrate that a feature is adaptive, the researchers need to show that, among other things, a feature is inheritable and leads to increased reproductive success. Evo psych studies almost never show either.
They don’t even do the bare minimum of showing that a feature is prevalent throughout a species, often focusing on convenient samples and, even there, fail to show anything meaningful.
But I’m already putting too much thought into this.
Terrible Sampling
The authors basically offered a survey to its participants and then put the numbers into a computer and made all sorts of weird statistical connections between those numbers.
How did they get people to complete those surveys?
They offered extra credit to girls in their classes.
I’m serious. The professors said to their classes, “Hey, girls, if you want some extra credit, could you fill out this survey about how frequently you blow your boyfriend?”
Female university students and community members were recruited by posted flyers on and around campus, word of mouth, and in-class announcements. Most participants were compensated with nominal extra credit in an undergraduate course in the social and behavioral sciences.
I guess, in the pre-#MeToo era, this kind of thing was acceptable?
This isn’t just weird and creepy, it results in an extremely biased sampling of young, probably white (I didn’t see any demographics listed) girls in the Michigan area. And expecting to generalize across the entire human race.
On top of that, they threw out the data of 17 participants who provided missing data or had some data that was more than three standard deviations away from the averages in particular results (this reeks of p-hacking).
Results
Okay, but what about the results?
Enjoy!
The hypotheses of the study, so far as I could tell, were not pre-registered, so these are just the results that popped out of a computer. With enough variables, you could find connections between anything (see: Spurious Correlations for examples of this).
Do I know what any of this means? Nope! And I don’t care to, either. If you want me to dig deep into it, you’re going to need to pay me.
But don’t worry, the researchers clear this up for us in the discussion section:
Women higher in Conscientiousness spend more time performing fellatio on their partner, and this relationship is mediated by their Benefit-Provisioning mate retention. Women higher in Agreeableness report greater interest in, and time spent, performing fellatio on their partner, but not more Benefit-Provisioning.
Okay, I lied, that clears nothing up.
Let’s jump to the very end:
The current research is the first to investigate the relationship between women’s personality dimensions and oral sex behaviors. This research adds to a growing body of research documenting that mate retention strategies are associated with sexual behavior.
I will say that this is pretty consistent with all of evo psych, where there’s an assumption (not always unspoken) that men enjoy sex and women just use sex to manipulate men. Whether that says something about the human race or just the losers cos-playing as scientists is something I leave for you to decide for yourself.
Anyway, I hope this has been educational.
