Overcoming Bias

Biased Birth Rates

In poor societies richer couples have more kids, but richer societies have fewer kids.  This may be because female kid desires are biased low, relative to genetic interests, and in rich societies women have more relative power.  Ted Bergstrom explains in the May American Economic Review:

The demographic transition ... presents a challenge to ... evolutionary theories of reproductive behavior.  In Western Europe, starting in about 1870, real wages began to rise about 2 percent per year.  Net reproductive rates fell from an average of three children per woman in 1860 to fewer than two in the modern era. ... Evolutionary biologists find it puzzling that a species reproduces less rapidly when individuals have access to more material resources. ... Why was there a positive correlation between wealth and fertility before the demographic transition, but not after? ...

Because of a genetic conflict of interest between mates, evolution could have shaped preferences so that "human females would fail to bear the optimal number of children in the absence of pressure of mates and kin."  ...  Thus men would desire more children and women fewer children than their own genetic interest dictates.  Differences in birth rates across time and between cultures would occur as one side or the other gains increased leverage in this tug-of-war.  In modern economics, women have increased influence in household decisions and, together with improved contraceptive technology, have gained greater control of their own fertility.  ...

Malaysian husbands want more children than their wives and, when measurable household bargaining power favors the wife, a couple tends to have fewer children.  In a survey of Brazilian households, ... as the ratio of the wife's nonlabor income increases, couples tend to have fewer children. 

I've long been puzzled by the demographic transition, and so am excited to hear of a plausible theory that roughly fits people I know.  If it is true, and if we now have too many or just enough kids, relative to a social or moral optimum, then empowering women has helped.  But if, as I suspect, we now have too few kids, then empowering women may be largely to blame.

Added: Bergstrom credits Barkow & Burley. Ethology and Sociobiology, 1980.  If you want to play "find a better theory," at least try to explain all the related data, including fertility of the rich in poor societies, and the robustness of the demographic transition to cultures and contraception technology. 

Just A Smile?

A March 31 New Scientist article on "The Love Delusion" mentions these puzzling observations:

Martie Haselton ... research indicates that men typically overestimate the sexual interest conveyed by a woman's smile or laughter.  When men see someone of the opposite sex smile at them they tend to think "she must be interested."  Women simply see a smile.  That's not all.  It turns out that the smarter the guy, the more likely he is to show this "she wants me" bias.  ... Glenn Geher ... asked me how they thought women would respond to adverts in which other men offered no-strings-attached sex.  He found that the the higher the IQ, the more likely they were to think that women would be interested. 

It is surprising to see smarter people being less accurate.  So I wonder.  Yes, the men disagree with the women, but how clear is it that the women are right and the men are wrong?  Maybe around smart guys, smiles and laughter do indicate an interest which women will not admit, perhaps even to themselves.  After all, Tuesday's New York TImes says:

The body's entire motor system is activated almost instantly by exposure to sexual images, ... the body is primed for sex before the mind has had a moment to leer.  Moreover, she said, arousal is not necessarily a conscious process. ... Show a woman scenes of a man and a woman having sex, or two women having sex, or two men, or even two bonobos, Dr. Chivers said, and as a rule her genitals will become measurably congested and lubricated, although in many cases she may not be aware of the response.

Ask her what she thinks of the material viewed, however, and she will firmly declare that she liked this scene, found that one repellent, and, frankly, the chimpanzee bit didn’t do it for her at all. ... “with women, there’s a discrepancy between stated preference and physiological arousal.”

Libertarian Purity Duels

Many of my colleagues are reading Brian Doherty's "Radicals for Capitalism," so I read the first chapter.  Doherty describes how movement libertarians competed to show who was more devoted to principle: 

Many a movement libertarians's favorite pastime is reading others out of the movement for various perceived ideological crimes.   As Fred Smith, head of the libertarian think tank Competitive Enterprise Institute, says, "When two libertarians find themselves agreeing on something, each knows the other has sold out."  Libertarians are a contentious lot, in many cases delighting in staking ground and refusing to move on the farthest frontiers of applying the principles of noncoercion and nonaggression; resolutely finding the most outrageous and obnoxious position you could take that is theoretically compatible with libertarianism and challenging anyone to disagree.   If they are not of the movement, then you can enjoy having shocked them with your purism and dedication to principle; if they are of the movement, you can gleefully read them out of it.

Libertarians ... have advocated ... private ownership of nuclear weapons; the right of parents to starve their children; and that if you fell off a building and grabbed onto a flagpole and didn't have the explicit permission of the person who owned the balcony, you ought to let yourself fall rather than violate their property rights by crawling to safety. 

Seems quite a bit like arguments leading to duels.  Duels signal ability and willingness to defend yourself, which women find attractive because it suggests you can and will defend them.   Perhaps women like men committed to principles, in the hope that such men stay more committed to their women as well.

Awareness of Intimate Bias

A recent Journal of Personality and Social Psychology says we are biased to be generous in evaluating people we are intimate with, especially for mating-related traits, and are more biased for happier relationships.  We are also aware that we and others are biased in these ways:

Meta-awareness of bias in intimate partner judgments was investigated in 3 studies. In Study 1, participants rated fictional partners in happier relationships as more positively biased in their partner perceptions. In Study 2, participants thought their judgments of their own current partners were positively biased and that they were judged by their partners in a positively biased fashion. Using a sample of couples, Study 3 showed that metaperceptions of bias were anchored to actual levels of bias at the individual and relationship levels. In addition, positive bias was accentuated for traits that were more relevant to mate evaluation. These findings (as expected) suggest that positive bias in partner judgments can be a normative and consciously accessible feature of intimate relationships.

This is a clear example that being aware of our biases is not enough to eliminate them. 

Romantic Predators

Last summer a New York Times article worried that having more women on college campuses gave men more bargaining power in dates:

"When there were fewer men, the environment was not as safe for women," said Joyce Bylander, associate provost. "When men were so highly prized that they could get away with things, some of them become sexual predators. It was an unhealthy atmosphere for women."

Relationships are about give and take, but the person in more demand can give less while taking more.  If men tend to more want sex, and women tend to more want romantic devotion, then when men are scarce men should tend to get more sex while giving less romantic devotion.   

But when women are scarce, women should tend to get more romantic devotion while giving less sex.   So why don't we hear similar complaints about "an unhealthy atmosphere for men" due to "romantic predators"?   Just as we seem more worried about women and children being hurt in war than men, this seems another example where males complain less because they get less sympathy.

Buss on True Love

We have a request for more on romance.  Two years ago The Edge asked "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?" David Buss answered:

True love.

I've spent two decades of my professional life studying human mating. In that time, I've documented phenomena ranging from what men and women desire in a mate to the most diabolical forms of sexual treachery. I've discovered the astonishingly creative ways in which men and women deceive and manipulate each other. I've studied mate poachers, obsessed stalkers, sexual predators, and spouse murderers. But throughout this exploration of the dark dimensions of human mating, I've remained unwavering in my belief in true love.

While love is common, true love is rare, and I believe that few people are fortunate enough to experience it. The roads of regular love are well traveled and their markers are well understood by many - the mesmerizing attraction, the ideational obsession, the sexual afterglow, profound self-sacrifice, and the desire to combine DNA. But true love takes its own course through uncharted territory. It knows no fences, has no barriers or boundaries. It's difficult to define, eludes modern measurement, and seems scientifically wooly. But I know true love exists. I just can't prove it.

Eliezer and I both considered this to be clearly wishful thinking.  What else do we insist on believing without evidence?

If the payoffs from romance have changed little since our distant ancestors, then our evolved biases are likely to be pretty functional, at least from a selfish genetic point of view.  Does this make romance a better or worse place to focus our energies at overcoming bias? 

Words for Love and Sex

Do our words bias our thoughts?   Consider how differently we treat words for love and sex.

Words related to "love" tend to refer to usefully distinct concepts.  Words like "affection, devotion, fondness, and infatuation" describe identifiably different relationships and feelings.  But when we want to describe our affections for each other, we tend to gravitate to the common word "love." 

Words related to "sex," in contrast, tend to refer to pretty much the same concept.  Words like "intercourse, copulation, coitus, congress, relations" have a very similar connotation.  Some other words that don't go in a family blog give connotations that vary along a spectrum of shock value, and sometimes identify alternative physical positions.   But while we can construct concepts that describe differing sex details or context, we don't seem much interested in communicating those details.  Nevertheless, we go out of our way to use a wide variety of words for "sex." 

Perhaps those who use different words instead of "love" tend to be less focused on an exclusive relation with a single person, and so we gravitate to "love" to avoid this appearance.  Perhaps we use different words for "sex" in order to signal that we don't consider our sex partners to be easily interchangeable with others.   

Whatever the reasons, it seems that using a common word can distract us from useful distinctions, while using differing words can distract us from commonalities.  Thanks to Colleen Berndt for suggesting the topic. 

Biased Courtship

As we discussed recently, courting men seem too optimistic about their chances, while women seem too pessimistic about male intentions.   Some explain these as due to high male benefit from mating success, and high female cost of poor mating.   But why didn't evolution just encode this in the strength of our desires, instead of in our perceptions of chances?

The explanation that occurs to me is that these biases hide our low motives.  Men willing to bother women even though those men didn't honestly think they had much of a chance would seem rude, selfish, and desperate.   Women willing to reject almost all men while admitting those men had mostly good intentions and would provide enjoyable company would seem arrogant and selfish.  Our biased beliefs help us retain our image as concerned about the interests of others, and not too desperate or arrogant, while actually being very eager (men) and picky (women).

This seems a good test case for my claim that it is easier to resolve your hypocrisy by admitting to low motives than by honestly acting with high motives.  Will you idealist men stop bothering women, or you idealist women stop rejecting men?

Bias not a bug but a feature?

From here: an article discussing the benefits of biases

""Biased mechanisms are not design defects of the human mind, but rather design features," ...Haselton likens a biased decision pathway to a smoke alarm that can make one of two errors. It can go off in the absence of fire—a false positive: irritating, but far from lethal. The more dangerous error is the false negative, which fails to signal a real fire. "Engineers can't minimize both errors, because there's a trade-off," explains Haselton. "If you lower the threshold for noting fires, you're going to have more false alarms. Natural selection created decision-making adaptations not to maximize accuracy but to minimize the more costly error."

"Glenn Geher, an associate professor of psychology at SUNY at New Paltz, who, with Miller, edited a forthcoming volume on mating intelligence, is developing a mathematical model to demonstrate what many a grandmother has long cautioned: Women who are de facto skeptical of a man's intentions are almost always better off than women who spend hours deconstructing the first date. ("He gave me his home number, he asked about my family, he mentioned a concert this spring—he must be into me!") Geher found that if a woman cannot accurately judge a man's romantic designs at least 90 percent of the time, she's better off being biased. "Women using a 'men are always pigs' decision-making rule may be more likely to actually end up with honest, committed, and long-term-seeking males," insists Geher."