“Nitpicking”? These weren’t quibbles about the niceties of research methodologies. That study is junk from start to finish and anyone with half a brain should be able to work that out on first read (see, for example, Sunny Daze’s posts on it). I am genuinely surprised that you thought it worth bringing to the table.
What are you talking about? You cited this study as evidence of women’s hormonal driven attraction to symmetrical men. That is indeed what the study purports to show. If you want to spin on a dime and claim that it’s actually about male reproductive strategies, feel free but you’re going to need to show your working (and, if I’m being picky, acknowledge that you’re abandoning your original claims for it). I wouldn’t strive too hard though - it’s still a junk study with dodgy data, so it can’t provide much support for whatever new claims you want to rest on it.
I have no idea. But that’s not how this works. If you want to argue that it would crumble under withering skeptical analysis, you have to actually do the analysis. Simply positing that it might turn out to be bad if you ever got round to checking is a) lazy and b) stupid.
Haven’t read it. You could send a link, but really, I only dug into that paper because I was on a long train journey and it helped pass the time. I don’t have any more long journeys due, so I probably won’t have time to look at this metastudy.
But tell you what. I can see you’re not confident about your ability to critically appraise research papers. That’s fair enough, and it reflects well on you that you’re asking for help. If you want to outsource your critical thinking to me, I can take it on but I’ll have to charge. Normally my rates would work out at $500 an hour, but as you’re a fellow doper and this is really pro bono work, let’s call it $495.
The point being, we have to judge these studies, if we are fair, by the same standards that other research purporting to explain human behavior is judged. So compared to research in social psychology and the social sciences. And very little of that research would stand up to extremely rigorous tests of the kind you are imposing on this one.
There’s tons of peer-reviewed research out there linking ovulation with a change in women’s mate selection behavior.
What’s this “we” business? If you mean that, generally, standards of rigour in academic research should be both high and universal, I agree. If you meant that it’s down to you and me (and, given your admitted inability to critically evaluate papers, that really just leaves me), then, while conscious of the honour your doing me, I’m going to politely resile from any position where I’m the final arbiter of rigour.
Oh, really? How do you know? We’ve established that you lack the critical thinking skills to impose these extremely rigorous tests, so what’s your basis for this claim? (In fact, I wouldn’t say that my critique was extremely rigorous. Noting that n=11, or spotting that the authors **admit **their experiment design introduces a confounding variable, or seeing a standard deviation in a sub-sample of fucking zero is not massively rigorous. It’s elemental.)
Is there? I haven’t read the links, but are you completely certain that those studies show a link between ovulation and actual mate selection behaviour in the wild (as it were) rather than between ovulation and indicated or derived preferences in a lab setting?
Humans override their instincts every day in a way that mammals don’t. So I’m pretty confident that we are uniquely different in that respect. Do you want to argue that we’re indistinguishable?
The weak and dodgy study you thought was interesting was trying to show that coming off the pill was a threat to stable relationships and a net negative to human happiness. That coming off the pill affects mate selection to the exent that it is a primary or main or significant factor in women’s decisions to either end relationships or have affairs in real life is a much bigger claim and the burden of proof for that is not on me.
Another fundamental problem with that study that I don’t think was mentioned in Stanislaus’s excellent analysis of its shortcomings is the fact that women who stop taking hormonal birth control are consciously aware that they’ve done so and have generally done so for consciously chosen reasons. So the idea that a difference in women’s responses to men pre- and post-cessation of hormonal birth control represents some kind of direct unmediated measurement of the physiological effects of hormones on women’s spontaneous attraction levels is utter bullshit.
When women consciously know whether and why they’re on the Pill, that necessarily brings in a whole lot of confounding cognitive and social influences on the sexual responses that the study is attempting to analyze as a purely biological phenomenon.
Most people quickly learn that we are all very poor judges of the quality of our own takedowns of others. It’s just a fact of human nature that we are heavily biased toward our own arguments and are incapable of objectively evaluating how devastating we really were. So the true measure of whether a post was “a thing of beauty” can be made best by third parties, to a lesser extent by the person attacked, and to zero extent by the person making the attack. And when someone needs to call attention to their own post to crow over its devastation, it diminishes both them and the post even more.
This is still really something you should have figured out by now, assuming you’re as smart as you think you are.
It’s been obvious for quite some time that the pain of not being noticed and heard far outweighs any embarrassment or ridicule MomzerInc brings on himself.
I honestly am not super interested in whether going off the Pill has the precise hypothesized effect. I just think it’s fascinating how these behaviors and preferences change based on the reproductive cycle (or the way we crudely monkey with it using the blunt instrument of artificial hormones) without women consciously realizing it.
I never said they did, so I am definitely not certain of it.
Not at all. That’s precisely what I find so interesting about ev-psych: the way we navigate the often-conflicting strictures of civilization vs. instinct, and how we so often fail.
But the point you seem to be resolutely failing to grasp is that
a) the studies you cited don’t show in any statistically significant way that “these behaviors and preferences change based on the reproductive cycle”, and
b) the studies didn’t manage to isolate purely homonal/physiological effects of the “reproductive cycle” from the effects of “women consciously realizing” how their actions were impacting it.
You’re not wrong that it’s fascinating to study the effects of our evolved physiology on our “behaviors and preferences”. But you’re dead wrong when you assume that the findings of poorly designed studies tell us anything scientifically reliable about these phenomena.
Again, though, the insights gained from evolutionary psychology are only as good as the studies they’re based on. If you can’t tell a good scientific study from a bad one, you’re at a disadvantage for understanding what we really know or don’t know about the subject.
[ul]
[li]There are 272,261 people in the U.S. with the first name Chad.[/li][li]Statistically the 259th most popular first name.[/li][li]More than 99.9 percent of people with the first name Chad are male.[/li][/ul]
[ul]
[li]There are 227,709 people in the U.S. with the first name Stacy.[/li][li]Statistically the 305th most popular first name.[/li][li]87.68 percent of people with the first name Stacy are female.[/li][/ul]
Thinking about this makes my head hurt. Are the Stacys desirable because they are unattainable? If they are attained, does that mean they aren’t Stacys?
