At 09:26 AM 20/05/04 -0500, Dan Minette wrote:
snip
The problem I have with evolutionary psychology is that it is an a posterori general explaination. So, I thought I might deal with this by asking some questions about an area that can be explained by arguements similar to that you have given above: Battered women. My wife has worked years with battered women, and has written her master's thesis in that area. So, I am at least moderately familiar with this area, and have a resource for getting more information.
Excellent!
So, let me ask some general questions:
Are there any factors that predict that a woman is more likely to enter a relationship with someone who batters her?
Are there any factors that predict whether a woman will leave such a relationship?
Is a battered woman more or less likely to be abusive to her children?
I would very much appreciate a discussion that starts with evolutionary psychology and then shows how the predictions can be deduced from the basic premises.
First, EP (and for that matter evolutionary biology generally) states that features of a species (including behaviors) are either the result of direct selection for the feature or a side effect of something that was selected.
Now I can't see *any* logic for battering behavior for either the man or the woman to be selected--any more than susceptibility to addictive drugs is selected. Damaging the mother of your children is not an effective way to pass on genes. Further, battering women is rare in the hunter gatherer societies that have been studied. (Others are almost always within earshot and intervene before damage is done.)
So the default assumption is that battering behavior on both sides is a side effect of other things that were selected. Capture of women in hunter gatherer societies was probably the gene selection filter. Those that reoriented toward their captors often became ancestors, those who did not did not become breakfast.. Perhaps 10% of your ancestors were captives.
The argument for where the abuser side came from is something I only recently figured out:
"If humans respond to capture and abuse by bonding, then the trait to abuse captives is likely to have also been selected. The argument isn't as obvious as the survival link with capture-bonding. But it figures that in a world where 10% of an average tribe's females were captured, those who had the genes for an "instinct" for the brutal behavior needed to capture and turn on the capture-bonding trait in the captives left more descendents than those without it.
"And, like the capture-bonding trait, over a long enough time the trait to induce capture-bonding would become nearly universal. I.e., it would be triggered in response to the conditions needed to turn it on. I suspect that's the evolutionary origin of the trait expressed by the "guards" in Zimbardo's famous Stanford prison experiment. http://www.prisonexp.org/ The trait to be brutal gets automatically switched on by the mere presence of captives.
"I am open to a name for the "trait to induce capture-bonding" (Or we could use the acronym TTICB.)
Of course, battered wife is an arrested or recirculating (trapped) version of the capture-bonding sequence. Capture-bonding in the human "wild state" was a one time event, applied to captives for about the time hazing is today.
There is a bit of a precursor to this trait in chimpanzees. Males are fairly brutal at first to females they take out of the group into remote areas during "consortships." I would not say female chimpanzees bond with males who take them on consortships, but they do quit trying to escape after a few beatings.
Back to your questions:
> Are there any factors that predict that a woman is more likely to enter a > relationship with someone who batters her?
Probably not. Since the ability to respond to capture bonding was so strongly selected for so long, the trait is probably close to universal--and not just in human females, captured males exhibit the same bonding trait to captors. Since the mechanism is in the same class as drug addiction, theory would predict that high intelligence does not protect against being in a battered relationship any more than it protects against drugs.
Theory *does* predict that battered women will rationalize the heck out of their situation, but we already knew that.
> Are there any factors that predict whether a woman will leave such a > relationship?
Unfortunately no.
It is possible that explaining the evolved psychology of what is going on to both parties might help in some case. I remember explaining another psychological mechanism, drug like attention rewards, to an ex-scientologist. He reported later that understanding (or at least having a plausible explanation) for what had screwed up his life and that of his children was a great relief and stopped his nightmares cold.
Humans *can* invoke higher order rational mental mechanisms to change their behaviors and sometimes do. It helps if they understand the reason for "washing hands." (To invoke Dr. Semmelweis.)
> Is a battered woman more or less likely to be abusive to her children?
From first pass theory, neither more or less. There is no particular reason for the psychological mechanisms involved to be conjoined.
To the extent considerable extent that the mechanisms are genetic, children of wife batterers are statistically more likely to be abuse themselves, even if raised away from their biological parents.
As a strange prediction, battered women who were formerly in the military would have strongly bonded in basic training.
As a weird prediction, blood samples of women who present battered at hospitals will be found to be loaded with endorphins and dopamine. At some level the experience of being battered is chemically rewarding. Such a test might be used to sort out the women who really did fall down a flight of stairs from the battered ones.
Keith Henson
PS. 40 years ago I was amused by a story told by the husband of a women who was battered *once.* After her husband went to bed, she knocked him in the head with a cast iron frying pan and then worked him over with the edge of the pan. When he woke up in considerable pain the next morning, she handed him the pan and said: "Here. It's your turn. But remember, you have to sleep." He switched to psychological abuse, but never hit her again.
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