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Satoshi Kanazawa (not pictured) wrote a blistering blog post last week entitled British Newspapers Make Things Up. Guess what? British media may not be alone.
Psychological Science recently published a fascinating new study on jealousy. I was interested to read Newsweek's 1300-word article covering the research by their science editor, Sharon Begley. But part-way through the article, I thought, Huh, that's not what I recall the study saying.
Here's the background: Men are more jealous than women about sexual infidelity, and women are more jealous than men about emotional infidelity. Many scientists believe human evolution shaped this behavior. The idea is that men fear cuckoldry--they don't want to get stuck raising other men's genetic offspring--so it's a big deal if their woman sleeps around. Women fear abandonment--if the father of their children leaves, they lose protection and resources--so they don't want their man falling for someone else. This explanation is called the parental-investment model.
The new paper reports a factor that explains some of the sex differences in jealousy: attachment style. People who are dismissive of relationships are more threatened by sexual infidelity than other people are (sex matters more to them than intimacy), and on average men are more dismissive of relationships than women.
Because early childhood experiences often influence attachment style, Begley writes: "Conclusion: Mars-Venus differences in jealousy are the result of attachment style and not of our caveman genes." And: "It has nothing to do with caveman DNA."
But here's what the researchers wrote: "Sex and attachment style were significant predictors of jealousy individually; in addition, each variable was a significant predictor when the effects of the other variable were accounted for, which indicates that the two variables had independent main effects..."
In other words, the aim of Begley's article is to show that, apart from attachment style, gender plays no role in jealousy, and her only source is a study demonstrating that, even apart from attachment style, gender plays a role in jealousy.
Further, Begley writes: "They also found that men and women who are fearful of relationships are more upset by emotional infidelity; again, no sex difference."
But the paper says: "The pattern of sex differences in jealousy was dramatically heightened, however, for the fearful and the dismissing styles, with fearful men being roughly 5 times more likely than fearful women to report greater sexual than emotional jealousy". There's a picture too.
I emailed Begley over the weekend and pointed out what I considered obvious errors, hoping she would correct them. She thanked me on Monday and claimed that she found the statistics in the paper difficult to grasp. I find her excuse unconvincing. 1) Begley is an experienced science reporter. 2) The results are in plain English (see above). 3) Begley has established that she doesn't like evolutionary psychology (see here). 4) The article has not been corrected.
As I wrote to her in a second email, "No doubt, you've picked an interesting and important piece of research to cover, and in the end the parental-investment model may be bunk, but this paper cannot support that conclusion."
Given Begley's much-criticized resistance to the idea that evolution shapes cognition, the evidence in this case points not to journalistic incompetence but to a willful misinterpretation of the science.
What's your take?
