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Weird Studies, Weirder Conclusions

What would you do if a study involving a group of men and a group of women reached a conclusion that suggested the men showed a more favorable trait than the women? Well, take a look at a MSNBC article titled "Researchers identify 'male warrior effect'":

NORWICH, England - Men may have developed a psychology that makes them particularly able to engage in wars, a scientist said on Friday.

'May have'? You'd think this scientist would be well aware of the several thousands of years of history that were shaped by war and the men that had to fight them to protect their civilization, not to mention the years before that in which men had to hunt and kill or be hunted and killed.

Honestly, this article strikes me as an anti-male hack job more than anything else. Consider that men have always had to fight the wars in history and were sometimes humiliated upon refusing to (see the "Order of the White Feather"). The way this article sounds is as if lots of women were just ready and eager to fight but were instead raped into submission by mean, evil men as a sign of rejection in order to keep war as some kind of male-only enterprise. Have these people no idea that women in general didn't fight wars for other, less sinister reasons? Also, saying that "men are more likely to support a country going to war" comes off as misdirected criticism of the War on Terror, seeing as how the article was written right before the 5th anniversary of 9/11 and the usual opinion that the War is mainly being fought as a bragging contest of manliness. If that weren't enough, note that nowhere in the article is it said or reasonably implied that aggressive men do things to protect their families or communities. What the casual reader sees is there to evoke images of excessive violence and oppressed women.

Guess what the study involved, anyway...

In experiments with 300 university men and women students, Van Vugt and his team gave the volunteers small sums of money which they could either keep or invest in a common fund that would be doubled and equally divided. None of the students knew what the others were doing.

Both sexes cooperated in investing in the fund. But when the groups were told they were competing against other universities, the males were more eager to invest rather than keep their money while the number of women contributing remained the same.

Ya got that? No paintball guns, no obstacle courses, no Civil War re-enactments, no back-alley fight club. All this study really did was measure how differently men and women may handle money given a particular situation. It may very well have given us insight into the way that businesses and economies are run, if only the author could shut the fuck up about aggressive men and wars long enough to let it sink in. Instead of a follow-up article that really focuses on what the study was about, we get yet another hack job meant to twist anything into demonizing men.

The logic is such that men being more likely to cooperate to protect their 'interests' (nice way to avoid putting something more positive in its place, like 'friends' or 'families') is somehow evil and suspicious since women don't also seem to do the same. It wouldn't be much of a stretch to say that had this study resulted in women handling the money more cooperatively, it would be presented with words like 'caring', 'nurturing', 'generous', and the like. With that in mind, we can conclude that articles like this don't show how science affects conventional wisdom so much as they show how conventional wisdom affect science.

posted by el-chozo-loco @ 10:19 PM