Many readers will have already seen Jess Prinz’s recent blog post criticizing a psychological study defending the Male Warrior hypothesis, according to which men are evolved to seek out violent conflicts in order to get women. He now has a reply to the objections raised by two other bloggers, one of them one of the authors of the study (H/T Feminist Philosophers). I’m not sure this is appropriate language for blogging, but I just can’t help myself: Prinz is really kicking ass, there is no better way to describe it. Some excerpts:
According to the male warrior hypothesis, men evolved to form violent coalitions that would wage wars in order to capture women or collect resources that would make them more attractive to women. This is supposed to explain why, today, men wage all the wars and commit much more violent crime. I summarized an alternative account, which is commonly defended by anthropologists. This alternative explains male violence by appealing to historically obtained male dominance. I will call this the HOMDom hypothesis, and it can be summarized as follows: with the advent of agriculture, men became the primary food suppliers because their strength made them more efficient farmers; this allowed them to attain economic power over women and political control; once men achieve political dominance over women, they are the only ones who are in a position to wage war; and once men dominate women economically, they become the ones who must compete for property and resources.
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van Vugt and Ahuja [the authors of the post raising objections to Prinz’s post] state that chimpanzees engage in coalitional violence, but, they also concede that bonobos, an even closer relative, may not. They also fail to note that chimps do not conduct raids to capture females. Moreover, we should not assume that chimps are innately programmed to be warriors. Their violence may result from the fact that their territories are diminishing. In any case, it is risky drawing inferences from other species. It is more illuminating to look at human cultures, where we find remarkable variation in the frequency of violence, suggesting that there is no biological instinct forcing men onto the battlefield.
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The HOMdom account is actually a biocultural account. It begins with the biological fact that men are stronger. The idea is that a simple physical difference like this can have downstream consequences under certain social conditions. I think nature and nurture are both important, and evolutionary psychologists agree. There are, however, two issues that divide us. We differ on what biology is contributing in the specific case of male violence (a warrior instinct or a simple difference in strength), and we would probably place different bets about the relative size of biological and cultural differences. I suspect that if we looked across societies, variation in violence would correlate more strongly with social variables than with biological ones.
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Evolution clearly matters, but the focus on evolutionary explanations may lead us to overlook ways in which culture influences behavior. This is regrettable, since cultural factors are often larger than biological factors in explaining differences across groups.
(But do read the whole thing, a highly rewarding read!) He also elaborates towards the end of his response on why this whole debate matters tremendously:
The hypothesis that men are warriors yokes sex to violence in a way that is both implausible and unsettling. One shudders to think that it might be used to get men off the hook for their most vile behavior. If, in reality, male violence is the result of a historically obtained male dominance, then we can combat violence by working to change the male sense of entitlement.
Prinz’s main points are related to a general methodological observation, namely that evolutionary psychologists (in fact, psychologists in general) have the tendency to draw general, universal conclusions about the human species on the basis of partial, limited samples. From the outset, the importance of cultural variation is not taken sufficiently seriously, and anthropological evidence pointing in the direction of great variability is seen as not relevant. This is a severe limitation of such studies, which in fact seems to underpin a great deal of work in experimental psychology, as also argued in a recent BBS paper, 'The weirdest people in the world?'
I’ve had similar qualms with both the methodology and the interpretation of results in psychological studies of reasoning (see final section of chapter 4 and final section of chapter 7 in my forthcoming book). The overwhelming majority of these studies have been conducted with highly homogeneous groups of participants, namely undergraduates in universities in Western Europe and North America, who all share a common cultural and educational background. The very few studies conducted with participants with different educational backgrounds (Luria, Scribner) suggest enormous cultural variability in reasoning practices.
To be sure, let me add that the whole idea of a ‘Western logic’ as opposed to a ‘Zande logic’, to refer to the famous debate initiated by Bloor, is also deeply problematic (C. Greiffenhagen has an interesting paper criticizing it), so I am most definitely not advocating social constructivist ideas here. But the heart of the matter is that there is a methodological flaw in these studies in that the education factor has not been isolated: at this point, we simply cannot conclude that the results observed truly support e.g. dual-process accounts of reasoning, which have a strong ‘innateness’ component. For all we know, cultural processes of education may play a major role in the development of reasoning practices, but it is only by isolating the education factor that the hypothesis can be investigated. Here too, it seems that “the focus on evolutionary [or more generally, biological/universalist] explanations may lead us to overlook ways in which culture influences behavior.”
(And just to be clear, let me add that I have absolutely nothing against evolutionary explanations of behavior as such; the point is simply that things are often much more multi-causal and multi-faceted than presented by (evolutionary) psychologists. As mentioned before, I am a big fan of the work of Sarah Hrdy, which is clearly highly inspired by evolutionary ideas, but combined with meticulous attention for data coming from anthropology and other fields which study cultural variation.)
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