"Ten politically incorrect truths about human nature"

[el_boss]

Found this interesting article. It's loooong but it's worth the read.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-20070622-000002.xml

[DB_Hunter]

That is the biggest load of bullshit I have heard in a long, long time.

There are some articles you read which you know are talking crap, but you read them anyway to indulge yourself in the theories of other people. This is perhaps the first one I have read ever that didn't fall in to this category.

I can't believe this was written by someone with a PhD. Even though I disagree with most of the point, I could have come up with better crap to justify them than the authors. Sad, sad people.

[el_boss]

I think most of them are quite spot on. Could you say what you don't agree with, 'cause most of these points seem natural to me and make perfect sense.

[Carnage]

4. Most suicide bombers are Muslim

6. Beautiful people have more daughters

10. Men sexually harass women because they are not sexist


#4 and #6 cracked me up. Im going to keep #10 in mind just incase I'll need it in the future ;)

[darkshadow]

that was an interesting read.

[DB_Hunter]

I think most of them are quite spot on. Could you say what you don't agree with, 'cause most of these points seem natural to me and make perfect sense.

I first thought it was someone trying to be funny, but as I continued reading I realised the article was serious in what it was saying.

Although some points (and I say some just to give the authors the benefit of the doubt on something) may be interesting observations, the idea that any of these is true due to the reasoning used is preposterous.

I mean take the first thing about Men being genetically pre-disposed to liking blue eyed blondes with a small waist, large hips and big breasts. Taking my own preferences out of this discussion for the sake of impartiality, this is just wrong on so many levels. I'll get straight to the point on this one, and say read this (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/3429903.stm) article. Clearly its people's concepts which dictate what kind of things they like in life, not some genetic code.

I won't go on to the other points, as the stupidity in this one was brain damagingly large. The article completely lost credibility with me by the time it got to talking about why men like blue eyed women.

If you ask me, seeing as one of the authors seems to be japanese I would say we got some heavy cultural bias going on here towards blue eyed blondes.

[el_boss]

Dammit it's so annoying that you can't edit your own thread titles. Could a pretty mod please edit the title so it says "incorrect" instead of "pncorrect"?


I first thought it was someone trying to be funny, but as I continued reading I realised the article was serious in what it was saying.

Although some points (and I say some just to give the authors the benefit of the doubt on something) may be interesting observations, the idea that any of these is true due to the reasoning used is preposterous.

I mean take the first thing about Men being genetically pre-disposed to liking blue eyed blondes with a small waist, large hips and big breasts. Taking my own preferences out of this discussion for the sake of impartiality, this is just wrong on so many levels. I'll get straight to the point on this one, and say read this (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/3429903.stm) article. Clearly its people's concepts which dictate what kind of things they like in life, not some genetic code.

I won't go on to the other points, as the stupidity in this one was brain damagingly large. The article completely lost credibility with me by the time it got to talking about why men like blue eyed women.

If you ask me, seeing as one of the authors seems to be japanese I would say we got some heavy cultural bias going on here towards blue eyed blondes.As with any scientific study this is based om generalisations. So you can't expect it to apply on every single isolated event.

Have you heard the phrase "attraction is not a choice"? Basically it is hard coded in to you what type of woman you should be looking for. Do you choose to get an erection when you se a hot woman? Of course social conditioning will get in the way of what your really attracted to in some cases.

For example a guy might be extremely attracted to fat chick but thinks that it's wrong. On the other hand som guys might think that blond bombshells har hot just because others think they are hot. Of course there are some guys who deny that they think blond bombshells are hot just because they think that they will never be able to get them and come with excuses like "she's probably a bitch anyway, I'm better off without her".

Do not underestimate the power of our genetic heritage.

[DB_Hunter]

Dude... this isn't scientific! At best its a correlation (and I use the word loosley here) of some observations. There is no control sample, no repeated results, no controlling of surrounding conditions, no varying of one variable whilst controlling others etc etc etc. You can't analyse something like this scientifically.

Besides, even if we were to agree on this being a generalisation, the article is still wrong as it is asserting this the norm worldwide. Thats like saying condition x applies to everyone in the world, except anyone who does not live in a certain town in a certain state in a certain country. Its absurd.

[Carnage]

El_Boss you keep on spelling everything wrong. Its "underestimate" not "inderestimate" :p

[Animeniax]

Fun read. I thought you misspelled "pncorrect" on purpose, kind of like "pwned".

[el_boss]

Dude... this isn't scientific! At best its a correlation (and I use the word loosley here) of some observations. There is no control sample, no repeated results, no controlling of surrounding conditions, no varying of one variable whilst controlling others etc etc etc. You can't analyse something like this scientifically.

Besides, even if we were to agree on this being a generalisation, the article is still wrong as it is asserting this the norm worldwide. Thats like saying condition x applies to everyone in the world, except anyone who does not live in a certain town in a certain state in a certain country. Its absurd.I don't get where you get your reasoning from. The article adresses human as a species, not each individual person. You are still human regardless of what country/town you are from.


El_Boss you keep on spelling everything wrong. Its "underestimate" not "inderestimate" :pDammit... but that can be fixed though. :D


Fun read. I thought you misspelled "pncorrect" on purpose, kind of like "pwned".I shouldn't have said anything :P

[complich8]

Dude... this isn't scientific! At best its a correlation (and I use the word loosley here) of some observations. There is no control sample, no repeated results, no controlling of surrounding conditions, no varying of one variable whilst controlling others etc etc etc. You can't analyse something like this scientifically.

Science is the process of making observations, deriving theories from those observations, and testing those theories. Sometimes it's possible to verify or falsify a theory without experimentation, and sometimes it's functionally impossible or unethical to verify a theory with experiment.

The underlying statements in this article are, in general, observations. Observations don't need to be tested, they simply are. "Most men like blond, blue-eyed women with big breasts" is an observation that's quite valid in the west and in places where the west intersects substantially (personally, I prefer brown or red hair and midsized ...). They follow up the observation with a suggested explanation that's an application of already-tested theory.

So it's not so much "doing science" as "applying science to explain observations".


Besides, even if we were to agree on this being a generalisation, the article is still wrong as it is asserting this the norm worldwide.

Fair enough. Not everyone loves blondes. But how many cultures are there out there that like a flat-chested girl (excluding the lolicon subculture)?

[SK]

Some of the points are dumb but it is still an interesting read. A few are definitely Eurocentric.

[Assertn]

I've taken enough science, psychology, and cultural science courses to notice a lot of controversial points that the article brings up. For one thing, not all cultures share a common preference to female qualities. I still have the book that depicts this more specifically...I can dig some stuff up on it later. When looking at cultures that are isolated from outside influence, you can see drastically different behaviors in relationships between men and women.

[Animeniax]

I can only speak for my yellow brothers, but they tend to "prefer" blondes because they are tired of the same black-haired brown-eyed Asian girls they've seen around them their entire lives, ie they are bored of the samee samee. I still prefer my yellow sisters, but honestly will take whatever as long as she's breathing.

Psychology/sociology or whatever you want to say this article is addressing is a somewhat inexact science anyway. Yes we can draw conclusions from observations, but those conclusions will be biased because people behave based on so many different influences and variables. It's not like true science where the numbers and facts match exactly.

[Y]

Whenever I hear "politically incorrect" I usually just brace myself for someone to go off on a thiny disguised racist/sexist tirade. This article, at the very least, was disguised better than normal, and is presented in a cogent and reasonable way. However (and this is probably a product of being an excerpt from a much longer work) the justifications for including items like "Muslims suicide bomb more than everyone else" as not a cultural, sociopolitical or geographical phenomenon but a fact of human nature are absurd. It also introduces some pretty uncontroversial material - getting attached to a child makes divorce less likely? Guys like to sleep with lots of women? Whod've thought? - and attempts to sex it up in order to meet his quota of "politically incorrect" facts.

[DB_Hunter]

I guess what really got me riled was when it tried to make a link between pupil dilations or something and how blue eyes let you see that best, and how its a sign of fertility hence why men are attracted to blue eyed women. Come on man, forget eastern culture for a second, how many men in Western culture are really eyeing up a girl with the view to have kids? More often than not guys want one thing, and it aint kids. That's why I found the whole 'men look at women from a view to have kids' angle to be bullshit.

Even then you could have a good looking woman who is infertile or has some other problem in having kids.

@complich8: Yeah I agree most men on the planet would prefer a woman who is 'well endowed', but as for who would like a flat chested girl, I propose the fashion designer crew... the guys after the 'size zero' girls for the catwalks.

[complich8]

sure, but designers aren't so much going for broad sexual attractiveness as they are for a certain aesthetic. Or, to put it more bluntly, it's easier to hang your art on a wall than on a pair of tits.

[Yukimura]

You're not thinking like an evolutionary biologist DB_Hunter. From their perspective sex = kids and anything you do to gain sex, you're unconsciously doing to gain reproduction. From all the classes and books I've been exposed to there seems to be a consensus that most of the reproduction based explanations for behavior are unconscious, like the hair thing or the blue eyes. It's a theory that would explain the popularity of the blond hair - blue eyes affinity in the cultures where that combo shows up, but as with any human nature theory coming up with it is much easier than actually 'proving' it. Incidentally it's interesting that the genes for blond hair and blue eyes are tightly linked and thus the tend to be passed on together.

A lot of the stuff presented in this article are theories with some evidence, but most of them don't seem to hit the level of 'truths'. The info about polygamy in 2 & 3 I've seen before in textbooks, and they have done plenty of studies on it in cultures very very isolated from western ones. 10 is something men's rights activists have been saying for a long time. 5& 6 just sound like they're trying to force data to fit a crazy theory that someone made up. 9. makes sense from an evo-bio point of view. 8 from a women are crazy point of view. I'm nto even going to touch 4, and 7 just seems like common sense.

[XanBcoo]

Odd that the parenthetical comment under #6 was not posted in bold caps at the top of the article:

(The biological mechanism by which [any of this] occurs is not yet understood.)

However, this was a good read overall. Some of the correlations seem pretty interesting and sound (especially the male to female size ratio in polygynous societies. That's something you can stand behind), but the rest of it sounds like they just made a bunch of it up on the spot, despite having "references". Clearly, like many of you have said, these are just very interesting observations, some based on common sense, and some unsuccessfully backed by science. I largely disagree with Evolutionary Psychology in the end, so I'm not surprised most of this stuff made me just laugh out loud.

#1 almost made me stop reading the article. Yeah, guys love blue eyes because they watch girls' pupils dilating.

[el_boss]

Yeah, guys love blue eyes because they watch girls' pupils dilating.That's was pretty stupid actually. I mean it's nearly impossible to see the subtle changes even if a person has blue eyes. It is true though, I have seen it myself. That womens pupils dilate when they really like you.

A more believable explanation would be that it's easier to fool yourself that the person likes you if they have blue eyes.

[rockmanj]

Once i read that the article was by evolutionary psychologists, i became a bit skeptical, as Evolutionary Psych tends to claim it has "scientific evidence" for behaviors, when all they really have is speculation. Ive been studying this subject for the past few months, and their methodology is a bit...flawed, to put it lightly. Therefore, i dont really take too many of those "truths" too seriously, since for one, there is no practical way to establish that our ancestors were thinking in their develpmental phases (50,000 years or so ago), and also its absurd to generalize all human behavior, especially since another major claim of Evolutionary Psych is that all people have the same general psychology, regardless of location, ethnicity, etc., and that it has not changed in 50,000 years :o which of course couldnt really be true. The truth is that there is so much variance (6 billion different brains), that there's no way to make truisms about behaviour.