- 09 Jul 2018 03:32
#14931168
To clarify I doubt that the narrative you were presenting is relevant to mate choice, i.e. that BS is a protection against HS. Admittedly I hadn't read the paper you quoted or the one mentioned in the article, but as it happens, the latter (see here) makes a similar argument to the one I touched on in my first post. From the conclusion:
That said, I'm skeptical of the quality of most of these studies. The sample of the one above is, as usual, US college students and the one you quoted points out that no sample, except for one, was representative for the country in question. In general social psychologists are among the worst offenders when it comes to spurious non-reproducible results and lack of methodological rigour.
I'm therefore also skeptical of the claim that BS has detrimental effects on women (see the introduction), such as exposure to BS reducing women's cognitive performance, and I would also argue that some of the mentioned negative effects aren't necessarily negative. Many of these assertions rest on the idea that there must be absolute equality between the sexes and that being a women must lead to support for eradicating any and all inequalities.
I also doubt that the ASI scale Rugoz linked to is a particularly good way to measure sexism. It conflates hostility to feminism with hostility to women, considers support for intimate relationships being important as sexist and includes statements that may well be regarded as true or false by many people independent of sexism. Examples:
I might be wrong, but I'd say such an ideology hasn't arisen because it's not how men and women (on average) function psychologically. That is, there is an underlying evolved psychology that makes this kind of preference less likely to occur in females. This difference can be moderated or intensified by culture but it probably won't go away completely.
In social psychology the further back the research goes the more scrutiny and skepticism is warranted. Mind you, the field is certainly not alone in this, but its list of "well-established" concepts that have turned out to be non-existent or have a much smaller effect is especially long, e.g. priming, stereotype threat, power pose, etc. It's also among the fields with the strongest left-wing bias.
The vast majority of research in the social sciences is based on the assumption that there aren't inherent psychological and behavioural differences between the sexes (and equally important that traits are not heritable), so that all traits are 100% malleable by society. Hence the consensus in the social sciences on why women don't perform as well as men on some measure is almost always because they are held back or discriminated against.
Since these assumptions are almost certainly false, we should be very careful in accepting their claims especially when they are purporting to show causation.
Wellsy wrote:Why do you doubt that how much women endorse BS in a country is irrelevant to their selection in romantic partners?
It seems intutive to me that when more women endorse such values, they expect it in their partners and it would result in greater satisfaction.
For example, such women who endorse BS are likely to value a clearer division of labour in the household and dislike it when their partners aren't on the same page.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/sites/default/files/attachments/153068/ogolsky-dennison-monk-2014.pdf
So I think you'd be right to point out that the paper I cited doesn't directly make itself relevant to romantic attraction but it's not too big a leap between them to think that as womens endorsement of BS was reduced along with reduced HS, that women adopt a egalitarian attitude (even if they don't actualize it).
To clarify I doubt that the narrative you were presenting is relevant to mate choice, i.e. that BS is a protection against HS. Admittedly I hadn't read the paper you quoted or the one mentioned in the article, but as it happens, the latter (see here) makes a similar argument to the one I touched on in my first post. From the conclusion:
Drawing on evolutionary and sociocultural perspectives on human mate preferences, we offered a novel explanation for why women prefer BS men, despite its potentially harmful effects. Specifically, we proposed that attitudes and behaviors typically defined as BS reflect women’s preferences for mates who are willing to invest by being protective, providing, and committed. This benevolence as a mate-preference hypothesis suggests that women may prefer BS men, despite knowing that they can be undermining, because the desirable aspects of a man’s benevolent attitudes and behaviors outweigh the potential downsides.
Studies 1a and 1b showed that women rated a man with BS attitudes as more attractive than one with non-BS attitudes (in accordance with Bohner et al., 2010), despite women rating the same BS man as having more patronizing and undermining manner. Mediation analyses indicated that even after controlling for perceived warmth, perceived willingness to invest explained the effect of BS attitudes on attractiveness when the man was a potential romantic partner, but not when he was a work colleague.
Studies 2a and 2b demonstrated that effects generalized to evaluations of men displaying BS behaviors. Moreover, Studies 1a and 2a showed that these findings applied to both high and low feminist women.
Finally, Study 3 ruled out the protection racket hypothesis as an alternative explanation by showing that the degree of male HS that women perceived in their environment did not predict attractiveness of the romantic partner with BS attitudes.
That said, I'm skeptical of the quality of most of these studies. The sample of the one above is, as usual, US college students and the one you quoted points out that no sample, except for one, was representative for the country in question. In general social psychologists are among the worst offenders when it comes to spurious non-reproducible results and lack of methodological rigour.
I'm therefore also skeptical of the claim that BS has detrimental effects on women (see the introduction), such as exposure to BS reducing women's cognitive performance, and I would also argue that some of the mentioned negative effects aren't necessarily negative. Many of these assertions rest on the idea that there must be absolute equality between the sexes and that being a women must lead to support for eradicating any and all inequalities.
I also doubt that the ASI scale Rugoz linked to is a particularly good way to measure sexism. It conflates hostility to feminism with hostility to women, considers support for intimate relationships being important as sexist and includes statements that may well be regarded as true or false by many people independent of sexism. Examples:
Feminists are making entirely reasonable demands of men.
People are often truly happy in life without being romantically involved with a member of the other sex.
Women, as compared to men, tend to have a more refined sense of culture and good taste.
Wellsy wrote:Like with your example that women wouldn't tolerate a man who wished to be provided for financially because there isn't a corresponding ideology based in division of labor in which women wish to paternalistically care for men as men do for women in traditional gender roles.
I might be wrong, but I'd say such an ideology hasn't arisen because it's not how men and women (on average) function psychologically. That is, there is an underlying evolved psychology that makes this kind of preference less likely to occur in females. This difference can be moderated or intensified by culture but it probably won't go away completely.
Wellsy wrote:I'm not sure what to say about the "real sexist benevolence" in that the concept of BS has been derived from research on ambivalent sexism which has some years behind to back it's basis and of course as with earlier link it's malleability.
In social psychology the further back the research goes the more scrutiny and skepticism is warranted. Mind you, the field is certainly not alone in this, but its list of "well-established" concepts that have turned out to be non-existent or have a much smaller effect is especially long, e.g. priming, stereotype threat, power pose, etc. It's also among the fields with the strongest left-wing bias.
Wellsy wrote:I'm not sure men pretending women can have masculine traits without consequences is a prevalent or significant social norm and if it is, what it's significance is meant to be in this context.
The vast majority of research in the social sciences is based on the assumption that there aren't inherent psychological and behavioural differences between the sexes (and equally important that traits are not heritable), so that all traits are 100% malleable by society. Hence the consensus in the social sciences on why women don't perform as well as men on some measure is almost always because they are held back or discriminated against.
Since these assumptions are almost certainly false, we should be very careful in accepting their claims especially when they are purporting to show causation.
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts"
Richard Feynman
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