Lost in Geek

A study at York University (Toronto, Canada) has indicated that women's opinions of the attractiveness of other women varies with their fertility cycle, says the February 18 Toronto Star.

When women's fertility was at its highest, their opinions of other women's looks dropped, says the study, published today in Biology Letters, a journal published by the British Royal Society.

When fertility was at its lowest point, the subjects looked at the same pictures of the other women and rated them much more attractive.

The research, evidently the first of its kind, was described by lead researcher Maryanne Fisher as another piece in a "small but growing body of research that says women are actually competitive."

However, while I think the study is interesting on its own merits, Fisher's comments raise the very sticky issue of how to interpret the results of scientific tests. While I have a real interest in both, my background is more in the "hard" sciences than the social sciences, and in the hard sciences if you say your results prove the cause of some effect is A, you're also saying that the cause can't be B. As long as it can be reasonably suspected to be B, you can say you think it's A, you're confident it's A, it's most likely to be A, but you can't say it is A. All too often in the social sciences, researchers take results that are consistent with their hypothesis to be proof of that hypothesis, even when another idea might explain the same results.

The issue here is joined by Fisher's conclusion that a fertile woman is competing for males and is trying to gain an advantage by "competitor derogation," that is, by dissing her competition. Perhaps that's true. But another possible explanation springs to mind: A woman at the peak of her fertility cycle feels more self-confident and it's for that reason other women look less attractive than they do at other times. Nothing in the article reporting on the study indicates that possibility was considered, even though I think it could explain another finding:

Ironically, women didn't much care what men looked like. They rated their attractiveness consistently lower than women's, and it didn't change with their fertility.

"That was really interesting to me," Fisher said.

"I completely expected there would be some sort of fertility effect on men's faces. There wasn't. They actually rated men's faces less attractive than men did."

There would have been a simple way to test this: Just have the same group of women do self-assessment surveys at various times during the study to see if they felt differently about themselves at the peak of the cycle than at other times.

I think the failure to examine possible alternative explanations affects far too much of psycho-social research. I remember, in fact, what got me thinking about this. I recall reading a good number of years ago an article in "Psychology Today" (this was back in the days when it actually talked about real research) about a tribe in the South Pacific in which the men were specifically trained in giving sexual pleasure to women. One of the things they had to learn to do was to give a woman an orgasm by touching nothing but her genitals. One of the things the researchers claimed to have proved from this was that "female orgasm is a learned response."

Huh?? I had and still have absolutely no clue how that conclusion arose from the data presented. The only place it could have come from was a presumption going in - and since the evidence didn't conclusively disprove that idea, it was taken as proof of it. That wasn't science, that was sexism.

That, admittedly, was an extreme example. But it still is an issue I believe is inadequately addressed much too often.