Prerequisite: Evolutionary Psychology

Years ago, before I left my parents' nest, I was standing in front of a refrigerator, looking inside. My mother approached and said, "What are you doing?" I said, "Looking for the ketchup. I don't see it."

My mother reached behind a couple of bottles and took out the ketchup.

She said, "If you don't see the ketchup, why don't you move things around and look behind them, instead of just standing and staring into the refrigerator? Do you think the ketchup is magically going to appear if you stare into the refrigerator long enough?"

And lo, the light went on over my head, and I said: "Men are hunters, so if we can't find our prey, we instinctively freeze motionless and wait for it to wander into our field of vision. Women are gatherers, so they move things around and look behind them."

Now this sort of thing is not scientifically respectable; it is called a "just-so story", after Kipling's "Just-So Stories" like "How the Camel Got His Hump". The implication being that you can make up anything you like for an evolutionary story, but the difficult thing is finding a way to prove it.

Well, fine, but I bet it's still true.

The sexual division of labor in hunter-gatherer societies - "Men hunt, women gather" - is a human universal among hunter-gatherers, like it or not; and it has experimentally tested cognitive consequences: Men are better at throwing spears; women are better at remembering where things are. So that part is pretty much nailed down - the controversial thing is saying, "This is why men stand motionless and stare into the refrigerator."

But even the Refrigerator Hypothesis is not as untestable as one might think. For a start, you have to verify that this is a cross-cultural universal - you have to check to see if men and women in China and South Africa exhibit the same stereotypical behavior as in the US. And you also have to verify that hunters who don't see prey where they expect it, do indeed freeze motionless and wait for the prey to wander across their vision.

But that doesn't prove that the same psychology is at work in a man staring into a refrigerator, does it?

Well, you could install an eye-tracker on a hunter; look for a characteristic pattern of eye movements when they're frozen waiting for prey; and use simulations or game theory to show that...

Sanguinaura

Sanguinaura

Sanguinaura

Sanguinaura