Joanna E. Scheib

FACIAL ATTRACTIVENESS, SYMMETRY AND CUES OF GOOD GENES

Cues of phenotypic condition should be among those used by women in their choice of mates. One marker of better phenotypic condition is thought to be symmetrical bilateral body and facial features. However, it is not clear whether women use symmetry as the primary cue in assessing the phenotypic quality of potential mates or whether symmetry is correlated with other facial markers affecting physical attractiveness. Using photographs of mens faces, for which facial symmetry had been measured, we found a relationship between womens attractiveness ratings of these faces and symmetry, but the subjects could not rate facial symmetry accurately. Moreover, the relationship between facial attractiveness and symmetry was still observed, even when symmetry cues were removed by presenting only the left or right half of faces. These results suggest that attractive features other than symmetry can be used to assess phenotypic condition. We identified one such cue, facial masculinity (cheek–bone prominence and a relatively longer lower face), which was related to both symmetry and full– and half–face attractiveness.

Femicide: An Evolutionary Psychological Perspective

Homicide is gendered: The circumstances in which men and women kill and are killed tend to be quite different, as are the demographic patterns of risk and the apparent motivating factors. Whereas most male-victim homicides occur in the context of competitive conflicts among men, women almost never kill women in similar contexts (Daly and Wilson, 1988b, 1990; Wilson and Daly, 1985). Instead, killings of women are overwhelmingly perpetrated by men, and in the great majority of these cases, the fact that the victim was a woman is relevant to the reasons why she was killed. Most notably, a large proportion of slain women are killed by husbands (Wilson and Daly, 1992c; Wilson, Daly, and Wright, 1993) and many others are killed in contexts suggesting elements of sexual motivation.

Sperm donor selection and the psychology of female mate choice

Abstract Womens preferences for hypothetical sperm donors were compared to preferences for long-term mates (Experiment 1) and to those for long-term mates and extra-pair copulatory (EPC) partners (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, attributes believed likely to affect a resultant child were significantly more important in a donor than in a long-term mate. “Character,” which was the most important factor in a mate, was the second most important factor after “health” in a donor, despite the belief that character had little likelihood of affecting a resultant child. These results suggest that women were partly relying on the psychology used to choose a long-term mate when they assessed attributes in a sperm donor. An additional construct (“resource potential”) was introduced in Experiment 2, as well as an additional test condition (EPC). As with character, resource potential was believed to have little likelihood of affecting a resultant child, yet it was rated as moderately important to have in a donor, further supporting the hypothesis that women were partly relying on a mate choice psychology. Results did not provide support for the existence of an EPC psychology distinct from that used to select a long-term mate.

A multicultural study of stereotyping in english-speaking countries

Abstract Citizens of 9 different English-speaking countries (N = 619) evaluated the average, or typical, citizen of 5 English-speaking countries (Great Britain, Canada, Nigeria, United States, Australia) on 9 pairs of bipolar adjectives. Participants were drawn from Australia, Botswana, Canada, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, the United States, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. There were statistically significant similarities in the rankings of the 5 stimulus countries on 8 of the 9 adjective dimensions and a strong convergence of autostereotypes and heterostereotypes on many traits. The results relate to previous stereotyping research and traditional methods of assessing the accuracy of national stereotypes.

A Norwegian note on “sperm donor selection and the psychology of female mate choice”

O ne way to investigate the evolved psychology of female mate choice is to compare womens criteria for a long-term mate to those for a sperm donor (Scheib 1994). Assisted reproduction via donor insemination is an evolutionarily novel but related context to that of mate choice, in that the function of both contexts is offspring production. Women s choice criteria for a donor might be similar to those for a mate because, throughout our evolutionary history, reproduction and mate choice were inseparable. That is, it is plausible that the attributes a woman would find attractive in someone whose offspring she would carry would be related to her mate-choice criteria. Choice of a long-term mate and choice of a sperm donor will also have similar impacts on offspring condition and a womans future reproductive options. Given this, one might expect similar responses to those aspects of the sperm donor context that are shared with mate choice. These responses may reveal some of the cues that women pay attention to in mate selection while the actual choices are made in the more controlled setting of selection of sperm donor.

Beyond consanguinity risk: developing donor birth limits that consider psychosocial risk factors

Worldwide, advocacy groups, governments, and gamete donation programs strive to identify and implement policies that promote the best interests of the recipients, donors, and donor-conceived people. As discussed, donor limits are typically determined by attempts to minimize the risk that donorlinked individuals will have children together. We agree that mathematical modeling is useful to determine these limits in cases when donors are anonymous and parents do not disclose their children’s donor origins. However, when families are more open and/or when single women and lesbian couples represent the majority of donor insemination (DI) recipients (e.g., in the U.S.), additional consideration needs be given to the phenomenon of contact among individuals and families who share the same donor (2). Meeting a few or even ten donor-linked families can be joyous and incredibly positive; the impact of meeting 25–50 families may be more challenging and even negative. We suggest that birth limits may be better determined by psychologic factors primarily, and then secondarily informed by modeling based on consanguinity risk.

Female Choice in the Context of Donor Insemination

Female mate choice began to receive extensive scientific attention with the emergence of sociobiology, even though the study of animal behaviour had existed for centuries. Evolution-minded research on female choice thrived because of Trivers’s (1972) focus on the role of parental investment in mate choice, and perhaps, too, because of a changing culture that included that feminist revolution (for reviews see Andersson, 1994; Batten, 1992; Buss, 1994; Cronin, 1991).

Female-partnered women conceiving kinship: Does sharing a sperm donor mean we are family?

ABSTRACT This qualitative study explored how 36 initially female-partnered mothers defined their own, and their childrens, relationships with families who share their unknown sperm donor (i.e., “linked” families). Shared genetics among children were sometimes sufficient to describe relationships among linked families as familial, especially from the childrens perspectives. Most women described their own relationships with linked families as significant but not necessarily in traditional family terms. Family terms were sometimes seen as undermining ties to siblings and genetically unrelated mothers. As shared experiences have come to define “chosen family,” definitions of significant relationships must expand to include those defined by shared genetics alone.

Donor-conceived children: the view ahead

Sir, In response to the opinion expressed in Pennings (2017), ‘Disclosure of donor conception, age of disclosure and the well-being of donor offspring,’ we support the arguments of Crawshaw et al. and present an alternative opinion to that posed by Pennings. Pennings asserts that there is insufficient evidence on which to base the recommendation that parents share the use of donor gametes with their children. Further, he argues that mental health professionals make this recommendation based not on evidence, but on their own morals, and that such moralsbased advice violates the general principles of non-directiveness and respect for autonomy. The essential problem we see with Pennings’ view is that he ignores the major scientific advances emerging from the Human Genome Project in 2003 and the growth of direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing (Harper et al., 2016; Phillips, 2016). In their recent Human Reproduction paper, Harper et al. highlight the exponential growth in the number of people using DTC genetic testing and the centralization of genetic information in large worldwide DNA databases. Thus, at any point in their life, a donor-conceived person can order a simple, inexpensive saliva DNA test and learn that their DNA does not match their presumed ancestry, putting into question their genetic relatedness to their parents. Furthermore, with the emergence of genome-based personalized medicine, it is anachronistic to propose that donor-conceived people will not obtain information about their DNA and its medical relevance. These scientific advances render untenable the assumption that it is solely the parent’s choice to determine whether their child learns of their donor origins. Given that it is unrealistic to believe that secrecy can be maintained throughout the lifespan of a donor-conceived person, Pennings’ arguments about whether existing psychological evidence indicates that disclosure or nondisclosure is better for children seem irrelevant and should be replaced by questions about how potential inadvertent disclosure will affect parents and families. The field of reproductive medicine should no longer practice gamete donation under old, now faulty assumptions about the viability of secrecy as an option for parents. We should consider that it is our duty to offer information and guidance to prospective parents about the likely possibility that regardless of whether they share the use of gamete donation with their child, the child may discover it anyway. We object to Pennings’ portrayal of mental health professionals as counseling about disclosure based solely on their ‘moral convictions.’ On the contrary, it is our view that when parents are provided with carefully delivered and complete information, it remains the parents’ choice how, when and even whether they want to address the topic of gamete donation with their child. Our clinical experience tells us that a parent’s comfort with the idea of sharing the details of their child’s conception is dependent on whether their fears have been addressed (Daniels et al., 2007). Two common fears are that their children will reject them or will consider their donor as a parent. Mental health counseling serves intended parents by addressing these fears and by laying out the different scenarios and difficulties that may occur with both disclosure and nondisclosure. We have found that this discussion is often a response to unmet needs expressed by the parents themselves. The task of a mental health professional is not to make moralistic arguments about what is best for children, but it is certainly not to guide parents in how to lie to their child, as was suggested by Pennings. Our task is instead to help prospective parents grapple with the reality that choosing donor conception has implications for their family and child that may be unforeseen at the time of conception.

Worldwide, economic development and gender equality correlate with liberal sexual attitudes and behavior: What does this tell us about evolutionary psychology?

Shortcomings in the target article preclude adequate tests of developmental/attachment and strategic pluralism theories. Methodological problems include comparing college student attitudes with societal level indicators that may not reflect life conditions of college students. We show, through two principal components analyses, that multiple tests of the theories reduce to only two findings that cannot be interpreted as solid support for evolutionary hypotheses. We commend Schmitt for extending sociosexuality research to a broad multicultural sample and attempting to contrast several evolutionary theories of human mating. We share his interest in understanding human mating from an evolutionary perspective (Schachner & Shaver 2002; Scheib 2001) and welcome further tests of evolutionary hypotheses. Unfortunately, certain features of Schmitt’s study limit the conclusions that can be drawn. Most importantly, the study did not provide an adequate test of Chisholm, Belsky, and colleagues’ developmental/attachment theory (e.g., Belsky et al. 1991; Chisholm 1996) or Gangestad and Simpson’s (2000) strategic pluralism theory, because of problems with the sampling procedures and the use of population-level measures of each country’s reproductive environment and degree of gender equality. We explain these problems briefly below. First, whereas the sampling procedure “allowed . . .a large number of cultures to be studied,” information about the cultures came from a special subset of the population – college students. As Schmitt notes, this “seriously limited the representativeness of national SOI profiles . . .[making] generalizations beyond collegeaged populations . . .inappropriate” (sect. 7.1). Although Schmitt was able to compare average SOI scores from college students across countries, he could not perform legitimate tests based on variables at the societal level. For example, he tried to test developmental/attachment theory by examining the sociosexual attitudes and behavior of college students from countries with reproductively difficult versus less challenging environments. But it is in countries with reproductively difficult environments where one would expect college students to be least representative of the entire population. In cases where a large proportion of college students are members of the economic elite, they are a misleading sample on which to test ideas that apply mostly to the poorest, most stressed segment of society. Schmitt acknowledges this (sect. 6.7.1) yet still proceeds, following a logic that is akin to asking Stanford students about their sociosexual attitudes and then using their answers to test a theory likely to apply best to people living in the poor sections of Oakland. Not surprisingly, Schmitt finds no support for developmental/attachment theory using his method. Sampling from a wider range of countries (e.g., Jordan, India, Indonesia) with “more stress-related variability,” as suggested by Schmitt, does not solve the methodological problem. Second, to identify countries with reproductively difficult environments and measure their levels of gender equality and economic development, Schmitt used population-level indicators such as infant mortality, low birth weight, and child malnutrition (measures of reproductive difficulty), the gender development index, percentage of women in parliament, divorce rate, and women’s sex-role ideology (measures of gender equality), and gross domestic product and human development index (measures of economic development). These measures apply to the population as a whole and may not be representative of college students in a particular country. Thus, the meaning of Schmitt’s correlations between sociosexual attitudes and behavior, on the one hand, and population-level measures on the other, depend on the similarity of the college students sampled to the general population on which societal indicators are based. If the college students in a particular society are more liberal than their fellow citizens, as is likely in the US, for example, the findings will be distorted in one direction, but if the students in a society are less liberal than their fellow citizens, as might occur where students attend religiously conservative schools, the correlation will be distorted in the other direction. Thus, the finding that students in more reproductively challenging countries tend to be more restricted in their sociosexuality may indicate a real association or a misleading artifact. We cannot tell without knowing more about how the college samples in various countries differ from other people in those countries. Schmitt also used population-level measures to conduct multiple tests of developmental/attachment theory versus strategic pluralism theory. Table 5 outlines the predicted associations, based on each of the theories, between sociosexuality and nine of the Commentary/Schmitt: Sociosexuality from Argentina to Zimbabwe BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (2005) 28:2 293 population-level indicators. Schmitt finds that eight of the nine relationships are in the direction predicted by strategic pluralism theory, resulting in what looks like strong support for that theory and little support for developmental/ attachment theory. Tables 8–10 appear to provide further support for strategic pluralism theory. In fact, however, what appear to be multiple tests of these theories can be reduced to just two, because all of the populationlevel measures can be reduced to two principal components. In a principal components analysis of the correlation matrix in Table 4, we found that economically prosperous societies also have higher human development indexes, greater life expectancies, lower birth rates, lower teen pregnancy rates, lower infant mortality rates, lower fertility rates, higher average birth weights, and so on. (Not all variables could be included in our analysis because the matrix is not positive definite, but if we had been able to use the raw data, the other variables would most likely have loaded on the primary factor, too.) Only one principal component had an eigenvalue greater than 1.0; it accounted for 79% of the variance. All seven of the variables in the positive definite matrix loaded above .70 on this factor, with most loading above .90. Thus, all of the findings related to the correlation matrix reduce to one: College students in economically better off societies report more liberal sexual attitudes and behavior than students from poorer, less developed societies. Similarly, the measures of gender equality in Table 8 form a single factor (accounting for 68% of the variance) that correlates with both our poverty/wealth factor and liberal sociosexuality. Hence, what looks like 13 associations between gender equality and sociosexuality can be reduced to one: College students, especially women, in countries with greater gender equality report more liberal sexual attitudes and behavior. As before, there is no way to draw conclusions about evolutionary psychology from this finding. In other words, Schmitt inadvertently created a situation in which evolutionary theories predict nothing more than one would expect without reliance on neo-Darwinian theory. Fitting data to theory: The contribution of a comparative perspective Steve Stewart-Williams Department of Psychology, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada L8S 4K1. anonymous1@xtra.co.nz Abstract: In this commentary, I consider Schmitt’s cross-cultural investiIn this commentary, I consider Schmitt’s cross-cultural investigation of sociosexuality from a comparative perspective. I argue that such a perspective lends support to an evolutionary explanation of a number of Schmitt’s findings, including universal sex differences in sociosexuality and the sensitivity of mating behavior to contextual variables such as sex ratio. Schmitt’s cross-cultural survey of sociosexuality is a genuinely outstanding achievement. The data he presents are powerful and convincingly demonstrate sex differences and national differences in the extent to which people engage in monogamous versus promiscuous mating. However, the pattern of results and the explanation of those results are two separate issues. In this commentary, I address the latter issue. The question I explore is this: How confident should we be in attributing Schmitt’s findings to evolutionary selection? To answer this question, I place these findings within the framework of a comparative perspective. My conclusion is that, in many cases, adopting this perspective does indeed support an evolutionary interpretation of Schmitt’s findings. The clearest example relates to what is probably Schmitt’s least controversial finding: that in every nation surveyed in the International Sexuality Description Project (ISDP), men are more oriented toward promiscuous mating than women. How does a comparative perspective inform the interpretation of this result? The most striking thing about Schmitt’s finding from a comparative perspective is its consistency with a major trend found in the animal kingdom, namely, that the sex that invests less in offspring tends to exhibit more interest in indiscriminate mating with multiple partners than does the higher investing sex (Trivers 1972). When speaking of nonhuman species, theorists inevitably explain this sex difference in evolutionary terms. For example, no one would wish to explain the greater pursuit of sexual partners by male than female turkeys or frogs as a product of arbitrary cultural whims or patriarchal norms. Given that we accept an evolutionary explanation for this sex difference in other species, it would seem tenuous to argue that the same phenomenon in humans is wholly a product of a completely different cause: learning or culture. Certainly, it is possible. However, we should have a strong reason to make this exception. Without such a reason, the default interpretation of the data should be that we are continuous with t