The other day I ran across this post at Brains on Purpose, which I found very interesting and somewhat discomfiting, as it describes the dangers of popularizing neuroscience (oversimplification or distortion, for example, or creating a greater sense of certainty than is warranted). It got me thinking about whether I’m doing my best to report neuroscience news carefully enough that the limitations are clearly spelled out and the provisional nature of much of the work is obvious. (The Catholic Church has a ritual it calls examining your conscience, and I guess that’s the best description of what that article spurred in me.) And it’s a good warning for anyone who either writes about or reads about brain science.
Along the same lines, this article about the Mozart effect from the e-Skeptic debunks the amazingly popular but ill-founded idea that passively listening to Mozart’s music can affect your mental performance significantly. The Mozart Effect meme, once it escaped into the wilds of commercial culture, spawned a mini-industry, even though the research on which it is based doesn’t really prove what it’s supposed to prove. By all means, listen to Mozart and play his music for your children (along with a wide range of other music), but take the claims about IQ scores with a grain of salt.
The Science Cafe in Bloomington last night was interesting, and also provided a couple of examples of how the media misunderstood or oversimplified a story. Peter Todd of Indiana University talked about recent research on mate choice (a topic in which everyone is extremely interested but for which the scientific explanation is still under construction, making it ripe for misunderstanding). In choosing a mate, we’re faced with a situation where we have to know which of a sequence of potential mates is the best one, without being able to go back in time to an earlier possibility or knowing who we might meet in the future. You must evaluate enough of the options to gauge both the range of possible mates and your own desirability as a mate, which affects how good a mate you can expect to end up with (because you need not only to choose but also to be chosen).
To examine how organisms solve this problem, Todd and others have used agent-based models (simplified computer-based simulations). They’ve also looked at real-world demographic data and, more recently, run some speed-dating experiments. (Speed dating is where a small group of equal numbers of men and women, typically matched for age or other demographic factors, gather for a series of brief one-on-one meetings, each man meeting with each woman. Participants know each other by number and check “yes” or “no” on a card for each person they meet. If two people both check “yes” for each other, the facilitator gives each of them the contact information for the other.)
One result, I believe from the agent-based models, is that the optimal number of potential mates to evaluate is 12; that should provide an organism with a good enough idea of both the mating pool and its own place in the pool. Based on that data, the organism should then basically set a threshold for the best it can expect to get, and choose the first one to come along after those 12 that meets or exceeds the threshold. This is all pretty vague if you try to translate it into human terms—does that mean you need 12 serious relationships (yikes!), or should go on dates with a dozen different people, or look at a dozen profiles in an online dating service? However, a German women’s magazine evidently did not worry about the finer points, and advised its readers that the twelfth man is Mr. Right, which is not only oversimplified but incorrect, because you’re not supposed to choose the twelfth one but to select the best one to come along after the twelfth one.
In the speed-dating studies, Todd and his colleagues gathered tons of data about the participants; the results he showed last night had to do with how men and women in different age groups differed with respect to how many offers they made, and how well people gauged their own place in the mating pool. Further data analysis and a one-year followup are planned. He also mentioned that they compared data about what people said they wanted beforehand to data on who they actually chose. When asked, the participants tended to say they wanted someone like themselves, but the choices they made supposedly reflected more of a bias toward the status/fertility tradeoff that evolutionary psychologists believe that men and women make when selecting a mate (women favor high-status males, and men favor females who show signs of fertility–youth, a particular body shape, etc.). The press picked this story up as basically “Men choose attractive women”. (Gee, you think?) By the way, I’ve been reading an excellent critique of evolutionary psychology by David Buller, and just yesterday I read his painstaking analysis of the data supporting the existence of the status/fertility tradeoff, which convinced me that it’s not nearly as well established as it appears to be. However, that’s a subject for another day.
It seems to me that mate choice studies model actual choices–like picking out the best produce at the market–rather than the hypothetical choices (select vs. wait) that real life mate choice presents.
Here’s another type of hypothetical experiment: I would pay you (only one time) over the next year, 100 times for whatever money you found on the ground (for example, if you found a penny and gave it to me, I would give you a dollar. If you found a dollar, I would give you a hundred).
The next time you saw a quarter on the ground, the choice to pick it up would be based on how you feel about your luck, what you’re willing to settle for, and how much thrill or stress the game brings to you. These types of internal factors seemed to be left out of the mate choice research, but to my mind play a large role in the process.
I would hope that everyone takes the newest results from neuroscience and evolutionary psychology (and so on) with a grain of salt. I think it’s important to disseminate new results widely because it is such fruitful ground for musing. Even if our understanding of the results is flawed, we still are asking many interesting questions as a result. It is true that most of us will not follow up with our questions, but some of us will, and in our deeper investigation we will likely shed some misconceptions.
The fact that every step in the path of scientific enlightenment is paved with misconceptions is simply one among many facts we’ve learned about the universe. We need not be ashamed.