in recent years evolutionary psychology has taken off in the media why do you make your lips red because they turn red during sexual arousal that's why why do you put Rouge on your cheeks same reason how about high heels what about them they're there to exaggerate sexual attractiveness excuse me I'm just putting on lip gloss to Signal my sexual fertility as a potential mate hi I'm Anna a Clinical Psychology doctoral intern today we're going to be talking about the controversies of evolutionary psychology [Music] thank you [Music] evolutionary psychology has many many controversies a lot of which I'll be going over in this video as well as providing the common counter arguments of evolutionary psychologists as well as my own perspective on matters trigger warning there will be brief censored mentions of essay in this video because apparently that is a big Hot Topic in evolutionary psychology so do what you need to do to protect yourself if you're going into this video what is evolutionary psychology evolutionary psychology or EP for short hinges on the belief that human psychology evolved as a result of natural selection during the Stone Age now there's nothing inherently erroneous about this belief only Evolution deniers would really say that Evolution doesn't play a role in the way that we are today EP generates hypotheses about what might have been helpful for our ancestors in the Stone Age and then it tests whether those behaviors are common in today's population it uses something called of the eea which is the environment of evolutionary adaptedness to create these hypotheses and these hypotheses tend to be limited to things that we actually know about our ancestors which are actually very few things that were common across different cultures it was things like women were the ones who had the babies and when we had predators to look out for and interpersonal aggression with other tribes and we had to look for food and we had to mate in order to reproduce things like that and so this is the reason why EP so often focuses on gender differences between men and women because sexual dimorphism was the one thing that evolutionary psychologists feel they can safely assume about our ancestors the idea that men and women were biologically different and had very different roles in society which more on that later foreign critiques of evolutionary psychology one criticism of evolutionary psychology is that it has very few clinical real-life applications it is not a theoretical orientation used by psychologists in therapy you know we have like cognitive behavioral therapists who View cognitions and behaviors Central to solving mental health struggles there are psychodynamic therapists who view childhood experiences and defense mechanisms as Central to solving mental health struggles there are humanistic existential therapists who focus on how people make meaning of their lives helping provide them empowerment to take control of how they want to live but no one goes to a psychologist tells them their symptoms and then the treatment is for them to be more aligned with how their ancestors used to live thousands of years ago that's simply not a way that we do therapy why because if we did that would be the naturalistic fallacy and in fact the naturalistic fallacy is a very common criticism of evolutionary psychology as well EP has been accused of justifying social hierarchies under the guise of the way things should be is the way that they have traditionally or naturally been in the past it's the conflation between is and ought just because something is that means that it ought to be this way for instance because women tend to be higher in warmth they should be higher in warmth if there's a woman who is not high in warmth there's something wrong with her she's inherently unfeminine this can be also reversed you know something that I talk a lot about with my clients is just because something ought to be doesn't mean that it is you know we need to accept that just because things for instance should be fair that doesn't mean that they are and that's just kind of something we have to live with just because our mom should be kind to us doesn't mean that she is and that's something that again we need to accept what cannot be changed because what is is not necessarily what ought to be for the most part real evolutionary psychology biologists are well aware of the naturalistic fallacy and they know that what is is not necessarily what ought to be but of course there are those who do abide by the naturalistic fallacy who actually have used EP as a way to justify some truly deplorable claims such as the idea that helping the poor access education is useless because rich people got to where they are just by having smarter genes additionally some critics have argued that evolutionary psychologists themselves misrepresent what the naturalistic fallacy is to divert attention from unethical implications that they have made they would argue that a fact must be accompanied by an ethical statement in order to reach an ethical conclusion so when an evolutionary psychologist implies for instance that sa increases the fitness of a woman's Offspring and the implication is that increasing the fitness of Offspring is a good thing the in implication that we all draw from that is that Osa must be an ethically ambiguous if not actually an ethically good thing which is a very concerning conclusion to say the least but again you know like I said the counter argument to this is very simple which is that a lot of evolutionary psychologists do not use the naturalistic fallacy are well aware of it and actually caution other people against using the naturalistic fallacy but if they don't use the naturalistic fallacy I'm kind of at a loss for what is the helpfulness of this field if it cannot make clinical applications or the real life applications are a little bit ethically questionable why research this stuff at all who does it help who cares if something is natural to be so preoccupied with whether something is natural is on some level to imply that natural equals virtuous another criticism is that evolutionary psychology has received quite a number of supporters from Far Right circles and some of its main proponents have been accused of bigotry EP is often accused of supporting bigotry and right-wing politics while its critics are often accused of cultural neo-marxism to very quickly go over some of the individual controversies of many prominent epiers Richard Dawkins is a British evolutionary biologist who was one of the first people to have found EP he has been accused of transphobia most notably he asked his followers to sign an anti-transgender advocacy group that has been linked to misinformation campaigns he's also been accused of islamophobia such as creating a piece of writing in which he was speaking very harshly about Muslim women he's also implied that Muslims haven't achieved anything great since the Middle Ages he's also been accused of victim blaming such as minimizing what he called mild CSA and also a controversy he took part in known as elevator gate Randy Thornhill was one of the peers who published a controversial paper about essay in that he proposed that essay can be understood through an evolutionary psychology lens and that it is actually sexually motivated rather than power motivated as we seem to think in modern times he has appeared on Jordan Peterson's podcast he has been accused by his peers of taking scientific shortcuts in the way he came to his conclusions based on his data some people have said he actually produced bizarre conclusions such as the idea that telling risks the Apparently evolutionary reasons behind their behavior is supposedly going to make them stop committing these crimes he also lumped together both child and adult victims in order to obtain statistical significance one of the questions he asked victims was whether they had developed insecurities about their sexual attractiveness which as you can imagine doesn't quite sit well when you're asking it to a two-year-old when confronted with this criticism Thornhill claimed that his work was misunderstood because of political correctness The public's lack of scientific sophistication and distorted coverage by the American Media disco he also posed the classic stop being so emotional Woman by saying that once people's initial emotions subside and they actually look at the facts of the situation they're going to see how wrong they are Stephen Pinker is a linguist and proponent of evolution psychology he has claimed that police brutality doesn't indiscriminately affect people of color and he's been accused of racist dog whistling on Twitter he has suggested that the underrepresentation of women in the Sciences could partly be attributed to biological differences he has defended Lauren Summers a former Harvard president who theorized that innate differences between men and women explain why there are so few women in stem there was an open letter that came out against Dr Pinker which said that he has a pattern of speaking over genuine Grievances and downplaying injustices frequently by misrepresenting facts and at the exact moments when black and brown people are mobilizing against systemic racism for crucial changes now of course we cannot judge an entire field by a few bad apples there are people like this in every field and there are many people within evolutionary psychology such as David Buss Jerome Barco Lita cosmidas and John tube who seem fairly unproblematic from what I found if you have information I don't do let me know but I think it makes sense that a lot of the top proponents of EP are people with these sorts of social views because what you put out into the world you attract and if you create a theory that could be used as ammunition by bigots then bigots are going to be drawn to that theory of course which is why we have so many alpha male podcasters who espouse these sorts of Concepts but let's discuss why exactly evolutionary psychology is thought to Garner so much far-right support another criticism is that it focuses too much on differences between men and women like I said because sexual dimorphism is thought to be the one fundamental thing that we really know about our ancestors it's one of the few things that peers can hypothesize about David Buss says the assumption that male and female sexual psychologies are identical is a harmful position to take given that we know they are not he also calls his critics sex difference denialists I don't disagree that there tend to be some differences between men and women I think there's a lot of denial conspiracies these days about things that empirically we have assessed to be true but it's important to mention that within group differences will always be bigger than between group differences meaning me and the next woman could have a far bigger difference than me and the man over there a 2010 meta-analysis looked at almost a thousand studies with over 1 million participants and demonstrated that actually most gender differences in sexual attitudes and behaviors were small there were of course a few exceptions which I would argue are due to socialization of a peers would of course disagree with me they said Nations and ethnic groups with greater gender Equity had smaller gender differences for some reported sexual behaviors than Nations and ethnic groups with less gender Equity gender differences decreased with age of the sample for some sexual behaviors and attitudes meaning again differences between men and women are not as substantial as we think that they are and in places where there is gender equity in higher amounts those tend to become even smaller and also the passing of time the mar the modernization of society has been further decreasing those differences and even if the differences were large again who's to say that it's not due to socialization I also think that while certain Trends and differences between men and women can certainly exist I think hyper focusing on them tends to kind of cause hatred of the out group erase commonalities between groups of people and also pathologize when someone isn't living in accordance with those trends for instance if we say that men tend to be more promiscuous than women and we see a woman who is promiscuous of course it is always the assumption that that is wrong of her you know it's difficult to say something like Men Are from Mars and women are from Venus without silently implying that a woman from Mars is inherently pathological because again people think that what is natural must be right a fifth criticism of evolutionary psychology is that these alleged differences between men and women can and are frequently used to justify human rights violations particularly against women like I said there was this theory proposed by a few big evolutionary psychologists that sexual violence against women occurs because it could increase the fitness of their offspring completely ignoring of course that sexual violence occurs in male only spaces as well and also against children who obviously cannot reproduce completely also ignoring the general consensus that sexual violence is about power not about attraction or survival of the fittest some evolutionary psychologists will say that they never meant to justify human rights violations only to warn women on how to protect themselves for instance David Buss is a big proponent of this he says in an Ideal World women would be free to not worry the certain behaviors such as imbibing intoxicants or rejecting undesirable suitors might subject them to male sexual aggression or coercion but in our world he says not informing women about the circumstances in which they're at risk is more really problematic to put it mildly and to an extent I agree we need to know what to protect ourselves from even if it's not our fault that we have to protect ourselves it's again this false responsibility fallacy so for instance you need to know about these things you need to know about the threat of violence in order to be able to protect yourself but not all evolutionary psychologists are this empathic about violence against women as we've seen with Thornhill and Palmer it was quite a callous attitude of no this is an evolutionary mechanism it happens because of natural selection and women just need to deal with it but in reality a 2001 study by Smith and colleagues created a cost-benefit mathematical analysis of whether essay is more costly or beneficial for a typical 25 year old male and they found that the costs outweighed the benefits on a 10 to 1 scale meaning the costs of a 25 year old male committing essay were 10 times bigger than the benefits Beckerman and colleagues in 2000 0009 showed that in the tribes that they looked at the most aggressive Warriors actually had the fewest descendants so it's not actually true that essay is evolutionarily adaptive for men or their offspring so where does this concept come from and also it's kind of offensive to make it sound like it's written in men's DNA to commit these sorts of crimes but go off I guess another criticism is that the manosphere frequently uses evolutionary psychology to validate and perpetuate their harmful beliefs what's your thoughts on the manosphere I've mixed feelings about it but largely positive red pillars will have you thinking that male aggression is natural and adaptive and normal and they use evolutionary psychologists to enforce this belief I read a blog post by an evolutionary psychologist who was telling an anecdote about the time that he gave a speech somewhere where he was dispelling the misconception that it's only men who tend to do short-term mating strategies that actually it's very adaptive for women to have short-term mating strategies as well and that everyone was gasping and saying this is not possible evolutionary psychology does not tout this how can this be he said it seems to me many critics of evolutionary psychology cling steadfastly to false stereotypes of this field but has he considered why those stereotypes exist it's because many of the very prominent proponents of evolutionary psychology or at the very least the loudest ones about it and to promote sexist misinformation and cherry-pick science to fit their Narrative of course they're not talking about how it's adapted for women to have short-term mates too because that doesn't fit in line with their ideology that they're trying to promote and then of course sexist lay people are going to eat that up I think if you're asking yourself why does everyone think my field is bigoted it's worth examining what are the main messages that my field is actually putting out there for consumption counter argument to this point of criticism is that actually Studies have found evolutionary psychology PhD students aren't more conservative than the general population nor are they more conservative than other types of psychology students fair enough I can't deny the findings of this study from what I could tell it seems valid in its methodology but I will say that it is in consistent with my anecdotal observations evolutionary psychologists also point out a study that concluded exposure to evolutionary psychology doesn't cause people to condone or Justify male sexual violence against women but the actual study in question says across two studies a consistent pattern emerged compared to a control condition exposure to EP theories had no observable impact on male judgments whereas exposure to social constructivist theories did affect judgments Leading Men to evaluate sex crimes more harshly meaning yes exposure to EP doesn't cause men to justify male sexual violence but exposure to other types of psychology does cause them to condemn male sexual violence more strongly in other words this article doesn't make ep look bad but it certainly doesn't make it look good either personally I don't think it's a matter of EP leads to misogyny but rather people with an underlying pensioned for misogyny are going to be drawn towards something that can easily be used with the little sprinkle of naturalistic fallacies to disempower women and we do have some research to suggest that the people who are most likely to promote AP are those who are most likely to benefit from it the privileged CIS had white men another criticism is that EP often ignores the importance of social factors for instance men kill Unfaithful wives because this would have been adaptive to them thousands of years ago it couldn't be because we live in a culture that normalizes and actually deeply promotes violence against women that can't be it of course evolutionary psychologists would argue that we live in such a society precisely because it was adaptive to evolve as such and they would argue that social psychologists actually do the same thing they accuse evolutionary psychologists of doing which is ignoring half of the equation for instance confer and colleagues argue that evolutionary psychology fully accepts that nature and nurture interact with each other and the scientists can test theories to see which one better explains a phenomenon but the thing is just because evolutionary psychology and social psychology are both likely parts of the equation just because they both to some extent explain human behavior that doesn't necessarily mean that they explain it to the same extent I do acquiesce that evolutionary forces probably shape the way that we have developed in the way that we behave but I don't think it's the main thing driving it and I think it's a little bit silly to focus on something that from my perspective plays a far smaller role than social forces and here are some of the reasons why I think social factors play a much stronger role people do things that go against their survival and reproduction all the time whether it's not being attracted to the opposite sex which of course means you can't reproduce whether it's substance abuse which tends to destroy both survival and reproduction Eating Disorders which do the same thing destroying the climate which of course harms our survival at an extremely rap and Pace there's even a Freudian concept called the death instinct which says that to some degree all humans have this desire to self-terminate to obliterate themselves and on a much smaller scale self-sabotage and self-harm are very well documented clinically just ask any therapist to tell you how common it is yes humans are animals but our prefrontal cortex which is the part that deals with executive functioning and planning and decision making is very complex and it does allow us to make certain decisions in accordance with our own values as opposed to just what would be best for our reproduction or our survival our prefrontal cortex is incredibly developed compared to other animals and that doesn't make it Superior to those animals but it also means that we're less Instinct driven than most of them and we have the capability to make certain decisions and take responsibility for our actions we're also incredibly social creatures there's a reason why solitary confinement is one of the worst things that you can do to another person and we know from attachment theory that attachment is extremely important for instance I don't know if you've heard there was a study that came out a few years ago about cats trying to dispel the myth that cats don't care about humans they're just using them for food and play and all that stuff and they found that when a human comes home after an extended period of time the cat will run to them to say hi far before they run to food it's not that they want to survive and to eat they want that companionship they want that attachment you need only ask someone what their reasons are for doing something and you'll typically hear a social reason rather than an evolutionary one never forget the study I read for my dissertation which claimed that women experience higher rates of sexual regret after hookup because evolutionarily it's basically like Evolution saying like oh don't do that that's not good for you but ask any woman why she feels regret after hookup and you'll hear that actually has a lot more to do with being objectified and dehumanized in those interactions being made to feel like she's nothing except her body being able to feel like she's not allowed to pursue a relationship or a connection with this person if she wants to and these are all things that I actually did I asked my participants this and this is what they told me but we're meant to believe this is actually not the case it's because thousands of years ago something else would have been adapted for you so now your brain is trying to punish you because you shouldn't do that because it wasn't good for you kind of feels like we aren't respected in our ability to understand the cause and effect of our own lives and decisions and I think it's part of what rubs people the wrong way about EP is that it kind of operates under this assumption that you don't actually know what you want I don't care what you have to say about what your reasons are for doing this I know better than you it's because this is what your ancestors would have done but of course this debate of how much of this is Evolution versus socialization is ongoing in the research it's very specific to the construct being researched and this is just my perspective you know you can decide for yourself what you think which ones more important actually why don't you let me know in the comments which one do you think is more important socialization or Evolution another piece of criticism is that we know very little about our ancestors and therefore it's pretty difficult to generate good hypotheses within EP and not only do we know very little about them we also know that there are very few universals in this life across different tribes and cultures from the past and currently EP ignores the role of culture because it has to we don't know what this specific culture did we only suspect that there were certain universals across all humans in that time period but this often leads to evolutionary psychologists making the assumption that that their own current cultural context and circumstances are applicable to everyone essentially a form of ethnocentrism for example there's this common assumption in evolutionary psychology that the ideal ways to hip ratio which is a marker of beauty among women is 0.7 yet studies from Peru and Tanzania show that it's more like 0.9 another example there's this evolutionary psychology phrase that either you're someone's mother or you're not and it's supposed to make it sound like oh well there are a few things that are just common sense that you know no one can question but even those things are not necessarily as universal as we think they are it might sound straightforward but in actuality there are plenty of tribes where motherhood is not delineated by biology but by Rank and marital status for instance which is why In some cultures aunts are considered mothers or there are words for a male mother because it's the uncle so while evolutionary psychology tries to focus on the very few universals across all humankind from the Stone Age we have to be honest about the fact that we don't know what those universals are or how Universal they actually were so why focus on a few very finite universals when we could focus on the beauty of cultures and the variation across people instead that to me seems so much more beautiful enough other really important piece of criticism is something called a just so story many of our current behaviors likely evolved to serve completely different adaptive functions than they do now for instance back in the day it was adaptive for us to hold on to body fat because we didn't know when our next meal was going to be whereas today it's not as adaptive anymore because we have no shortage of food around us so these evolutionary psychology hypotheses are essentially trying to make a backward inference into history Noam Chomsky pointed out that you can make almost any outcome sound like it is true with an evolutionary psychology this concept called a just so story you can make anything sound like it has a plausible explanation even if there's no way to test it or verify it for instance if you say that people in some sort of setting are going to cooperate rather than fight because it's adaptive to do so you can say oh it's to perpetuate the survival of the pack but if your study finds that actually no they weren't cooperating they were fighting you can say oh it's so that they can compete for mates or so that they can ensure the survival of their offspring by being aggressive no other field of psychology do you get so much wiggle room to make your theory work in other fields you generate a hypothesis you see does the data support the hypothesis if not maybe you'll say ah it could be because of this thing I didn't think of either from my theory or someone else's Theory or it could be that I'm just plain wrong but with an evolutionary psychology because of Just So Stories there is always a plausible sounding story that you can make up for pretty much any sort of outcome the modularity hypothesis has also been criticized within EP due to evidence of brain plasticity in response to environmental and personal experiences modularity hypothesis is this very common EP assumption that our brain is made up of cognitive modules in order to perform specialized tasks for instance epiers believe that this is what helped our ancestors respond quickly to threats because they could categorize something in their brain and that because of this modules were promoted by natural selection and more General brain functioning was not but cognitive scientists have pointed out that actually the brain is quite plastic and different parts of the brain can take on different functions that have been lost for instance when you have a traumatic brain injury or a stroke or some sort of damage to a different part of the brain this is called neuroplasticity it's when one part of the brain makes up for something else that has been lost in a different area of the brain another common criticism is the time machine argument and this is the argument that there are too many alternate explanations for the origin of a trait you cannot go back in time and see how this happened or how it was adaptive or if it was adaptive for it to evolve this way some evolutionary psychologists say well plenty of other fields confirm predictions based on the past such as the bing bang or the asteroid that killed off dinosaurs to which I say sure but cosmologists don't make hypotheses that could be used to justify human rights violations natural selection is not the only way a species changes across time that there are other non-adaptation forms of evolution such as genetic drift which is responsible for substance abuse addiction genes we think such as evolutionary byproducts such as spandrel and so forth you know like a lot of the time we change not necessarily because it's evolutionary to do so but because of chance it just happens because of different reasons and evolutionary psychologists argue that well our critics will just accept any other alternative other than adaptation and to this I say yeah I see where both of you are coming from evolutionary psychologists only focus on adaptation and their critics only focus on non-adaptation truth is somewhere in the middle probably and lastly evolutionary ecology has been criticized for being predeterministic and reductionistic essentially framing people as if they are just servants to their own genetics not really someone that has willpower it basically makes human sound like robots or wild animals evolutionary psychologists say that this is a straw man actually evolutionary psychologists do recognize that people have willpower and when they're saying that oh this is why humans behave this way they're not saying humans will always behave this way only that because something is adaptive in a situation they're more likely to behave that way the genes increase the probability of a behavior that doesn't mean that the probability is a hundred percent if that makes sense but again I feel like in a lot of the ways that evolutionary psychology has been appropriated by pop culture and a lot of the people who are misrepresenting the science it does sound kind of like we're programmed to behave in a certain way which is not actually accurate so what are my conclusions from this whole debate I think that evolutionary psychology probably holds some level of truth to it I don't know how much but I suspect it's not as much as evolutionary psychologists think it is and I also think that theories hold power and if you're creating a theory that could hypothetically be used to justify human rights violations by a naturalistic fallacy or not I have to wonder why you're making that theory in the first place who is it benefiting there better be some really good explanation or some really strong evidence that learning this is going to help us apply it to the fabric of society and be able to change things for the better because if not very questionable what do you think about this let me know in the comments what you thought I may have missed or what your own perspective is this video definitely took me a long time to research but I'm sure there are still things that I'm missing if you're a big fan of evolutionary psychology I don't necessarily think you're bigoted or that you were wrong I just think in my opinion your energy might be better spent towards something that has more clinical applications or real life applications and if you are a person who loves evolutionary psychology because it validates your harmful beliefs then leave a comment too because it boosts me in the algorithm and I could really use it alright have a great one bye