In my previous post, I discuss Finkel and Eastwick's forthcoming article in Psychological Science, which demonstrates that the typical and universal sex difference in mate selectivity, where men are much less selective than women, can be reversed by simply changing the institutional arrangement where men approach women. When women approach men, they begin to act more like men, and become just as aggressive and indiscriminant as men are. Sex differences in mate selectivity are a deeply genetically encoded part of male and female human nature. So how could it possibly be reversed by such a simple, temporary changes in the situational arrangement? What does this mean for evolutionary psychology?
I was ready to pack up my shop and sign up for the feminist boot camp, when my friend and LSE colleague, Diane J. Reyniers, reminded me that Finkel and Eastwick's finding may not be as devastating to evolutionary psychology as I first feared and that we might indeed be able to account for them from a strictly evolutionary psychological perspective.
Here's what Diane suggests. Suppose women have an evolved psychological mechanism in the domain of mate selection that produces a two-stage decision rule.
1. Do not approach men, but instead wait to be approached, unless I see an exceptionally desirable man (say, in the top 1% in desirability), in which case, approach him.
2. Reject 99% of men who approach me (because most of them are losers, anyway), but say yes to a much higher proportion (say, 50%) of the men that I approach, because, if I approached them, it means that I had already determined them to be of exceptionally high quality.
Under most real-life circumstances, this evolved psychological mechanism would result in women being much more cautious and "coy" than men, as, by definition, there are very few men of exceptionally high quality that women would want to approach. As a result, most of the time, men approach women, women wait to be approached, and women reject most of the men who approach them, both now and throughout evolutionary history.
What the novel institutional arrangement of "women rotate, men sit" in Finkel and Eastwick's experiment does is to force women to approach men. Because women are approaching men, the situation may trick women's brains into thinking that the men they are approaching are of exceptionally high quality. There has never been any routine situation throughout evolutionary history where women often approached men unless they were of exceptionally high quality, so women's brains may have difficulty comprehending such a situation. There were no evil experimental psychologists in the ancestral environment who forced women to approach men. As a result, women may become more likely to say "yes" to a much larger proportion of men they approach in the "women rotate, men sit" condition, falsely thinking that these men are all of exceptionally high quality.
Finkel and Eastwick's data are not currently sufficient to rule out this alternative explanation, so more experiments will be necessary to adjudicate between Diane's evolutionary psychological explanation above based on the Savanna Principle and Finkel and Eastwick's embodied cognition explanation. But at the very least Diane's alternative explanation saves evolutionary psychology for another day and suggests that Finkel and Eastwick's fascinating findings may not necessarily spell the death of evolutionary psychology.
Sorry, Uncle Larry, but I'm not ready yet to move to Fresno and start selling strudels....
