This study has been making the rounds on the internet. It purports to show that men are better at detecting when their partners are cheating, but also that men are more likely to suspect cheating when there is none. It’s all based on the oh-so-accurate method of asking people in anonymous surveys if and how often they’ve cheated and if and how often they’ve suspected their partners of cheating (and, presumably, if and how often they’ve been right about this). Since the study is based entirely on self-reported data (and is thus really a story about gender differences in attitudes about cheating rather than facts), we might as well throw in some evolutionary psychology.
Andrews says this makes evolutionary sense because unlike women, men can never be certain a baby is theirs. “Men have far more at stake,” he says. “When a female partner is unfaithful, a man may himself lose the opportunity to reproduce, and find himself investing his resources in raising the offspring of another man.”
Brilliant! No doubt if it had come out the other way, Andrews would’ve been convinced that THAT made evolutionary sense because as women don’t go off with hunting parties in hunter-gatherer tribes as often, they were uniquely adapted to detect things such as cheating at long distance.
If anything is pseudoscience it’s Evolutionary Psychology. This field of “science” spits out more untestable hypotheses based on confimation bias than Astrology. I’m not even being all that flippant. Just like we can’t adjust the position of Mars to see if it makes people more aggressive, there’s no way to go back in time and push humans down another evolutionary path to see whether things turn out differently. In the meantime, since we can’t test anything, we might as well just make it up as we go along.
The thing is, Andrews’ “explanation” for his data actually does make sense - it’s just that I’m not sure we needed evolution to reach this stunning insight. Even without the idea that these attitudes were hardwired in genetically, we’d no doubt achieve the same results. I’m willing to bet a metric assload of money, for example, that if we set up an Economics experiment wherein we gave people money and partnered them up so that they bought stocks together, we could simulate the same effect. Here’s my idea.
We’ll take a group of people and divide them randomly up into “red” and “blue” and have them play a stock market simulation game. Everyone starts out with an account of money and is informed that they have a week to pick partners. Red has to pair with blue because, in this society, due to some crazy laws invented probably by Democrats for special Democrat reasons, only red players can invest, but they can’t do it unless part of the money they’re investing is contributed by one of the blue people. Now, let’s say that there’s also a rule that says that red has to split profits from investments proportionally among all the contributors. So, if I’m a blue and I have $400 and I meet a red who has $500 and we pool our accounts (because remember, red can only invest with seed money from blue), then at the end of 6 months red gets 5/9 of the total value of stocks we “own” and I get 4/9. Whichever individual ends the game with the most money wins. The game needs one final constraint: for the duration of the game, partners can only access stock quotes from a shared account set up in such a way that both passwords have to be entered. So, this ensures that they only play in cooperation in pairs. They come in once a week, each types in his password in secret - but the existence of two passwords ensures that both have to be present - and they make simulated trades.
Ok - obviously there will be some incentive for the blue to invest some of his money in some other red. The catch is that he can’t see what the red is doing with this money - but he can hope he gets a nice fat bonus at the end of the game. Likewise, there is some incentive for red to accept money from some other blue besides her designated blue, since this gives more to play with, thus increasing the chances that she comes out on top. The catch, of course, is that each blue makes his investments with some suspicion that some portion of the money he is playing with on screen will simply disappear at the end of the game (because she pays it to the other “outside” blue in proportion, rather than her designated partner). The red, likewise, plays with some suspicion that at the end of the game her partner will shoot ahead of her in total wealth as he might have invested some of it in another, possibly more successful, red and get a big payout.
I am willing to bet that the blues are more suspicious than the reds here on average - again, for the reason that they are doing a lot of work trying to win a game with money some of which might turn out not to be theirs. Red will be somewhat suspicious of blues as well, but probably a bit less so since all reds are sure to get a payout on in proportion to the money they invest. The red member of each pair is only suspicious that her partner may, at the end of the game, suddenly show up with an account bigger than reported. However, she knows exactly what her account will be. Since reds have a bit more control over the situation than blues, they are less likely, I think, to be resentful and suspicious.
Of course, I don’t know this until I do the experiment, but I’m willing to bet that any readers have the same intuition that I do. No sex or evolution or genes of any kind are needed to explain this effect. It is an economic phenomenon - and we can explain it perfectly well with Game Theory.
In other words, if I want marriage advice, I’ll talk to Gary Becker before I consult a lab quack.